I originally wrote the text below on December 28, 2020, and posted it to Twitter and Instagram. Since LinkedIn has a limit on how much you can write, I posted an abbreviated version there. All three versions came with the seven pictures included below. (There were seven pictures because the text got chopped up in seven tweets.)

Happy 125th birthday, cinema! December 28, 1895. Paris, the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on 14 Boulevard des Capucines. Two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, have organised the first paid screening of their short films, using the Cinématographe Lumière, their invention.

Were they the first to create something that is close to what we now call film? No. There were many competitors working on similar techniques, including Edison. What we do know fairly certainly is that the Lumières were the first to organise a commercial viewing that allowed a group of people to watch a film at the same time. Before, using Edison’s invention for example, only one person could see a film being played. The Lumières started cinema as we know it.

On the bill that night was not just one film. 125 Years ago, in the Salon Indien, viewers saw ten (very) short films. These films did not have sound. There was no colour. Most of the films were more similar to modern-day TikToks, showing ‘actualités’, snapshots of reality.

Ah yes, you say, that’s the night when the audience ran away screaming, afraid the train on the screen would hit them! Well… Not quite. The Lumière brothers did eventually show a film of a train coming towards the camera, but that was months after December 28. It’s up for debate whether people actually ran out of the venues, even in 1896. However, a train broke through the front of Gare Montparnasse on October 22, 1895. So perhaps Parisians really were more jumpy than usual when it came to trains around that time.

Today, on December 28, 2020, I would like to raise a glass to Auguste and Louis Lumière, and to the many people from all over the world, who have made the past 125 years of film history so fascinating. Merci!