Castle & Elephant

The history of documentary

The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited with the world’s first public film screening on December 28, 1895. The showing time of approximately twenty minutes in total was held in the nasement lounge of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and would be the first public device they called the CINEMATOGRAPH which effectively functioned as camera, projector and printer all in one.

Their work consisted mainly of moving images from scenes of everyday life. Ironically as we look back in retrospect in comparison to what film has developed into today, the Lumiere brothers believed it to be a medium without a future as they suspected that people would become bored by such images. However, their film sequence of a train pulling into the station reportedly had audiences ducking for cover as they believed that the train itself was about to plow into the theatre.