What is it ?
In Paris in 1895, two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière exhibited their latest invention – the cinematograph. Throughout the following years they sent specially trained operators across the four corners of the world to film human life, in all its great diversity. The footage that the operators brought back astonished all that saw it.
The camera was sat upon a tripod and, when the moment was right, the operator would crank a handle, moving the film through the machine, recording all it saw in front of it. With the apparatus sitting static on a tripod all of the shots were from a fixed perspective, that was unless the camera, tripod and operator themselves were already on a moving vehicle. As the reels of film were rather short, the shots, or Lumière views, didn’t last more than a minute.
Today we recall the work of the Lumière Brothers by filming the world in a single, 60 second shot with the added addition of colour, sound and more, echoing those first cinematic gestures.
Shots from the Lumière cameramen, circa 1900 © Institut Lumière