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Rating: The first film in the history of cinema.
Forget everything. Forget you are in front of a monitor, in an office, at home, in a car. Isolate yourself from the rest of the world: do as if you were in a karate lesson, before the fight meditation is required. Now, try to travel with your mind, back, back to December 28, 1895, in Paris. Would you like to be there, together with other people, all a bit incredulous, astonished, to witness a very short thing, a little something of 50 seconds, are you ready? Nothing special, just a fixed frontal shot, some workers (men, women, boys) who, some tired, some skipping, are leaving the Societé Anonyme des Plaques et Papiers Photographiques A. Lumière et Ses Fils, in Montplaisir, the industrial and popular area of Lyon. It takes less time to run the 50 seconds of images than to pronounce the whole name of the factory. There you are, maybe those brief 50 seconds don’t say anything to you, but for those who were really there, it was an experience at the edge of reality, a mix between dream and reality.
This is where cinema was born, from these famous 50 seconds, from that March 113 years ago. Here starts everything that for years has excited and made us dream. Without those 50 seconds, we would never have had Chaplin, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Welles, Ford (to name just the most famous...), and there would have been no cinemas, and we could not even have taken refuge in the back row of a cinema to flirt with a girlfriend as teenagers (Well, I know, it’s not romantic, but it has a kernel of truth), and we would have missed so many other beautiful things, that today we take for granted, like DVDs or videotapes. So, praise and honor to the Lumière brothers.
The entire world set in motion to realize those 50 seconds, the success of the historic enterprise was contributed by the generosity of the French, the flexibility of the Germans, the usual north American businessmen, and the British. In essence, the rudimentary camera was formed by multiple technologies developed in different parts of the globe (the kinetoscope, the vitascope, the bioskop, the phantascope) which, put together, formed a primitive camera capable of framing a single objective. Naturally, as always happens when talking about 'pioneering', everyone has their say. And truths get confused with legend. Some scholars, in fact, think that in reality, the Lumière brothers were much cleverer than commonly thought, and it is very likely, indeed certain, that the people captured on film were not common workers, but extras taken from the street and then paid. Intriguing hypothesis. There is also someone who puts forward an even more intriguing hypothesis, that the Lumière may have plagiarized the idea of the camera from Thomas Alva Edison (the inventor of quite a few things, including the light bulb and the gramophone), who, indeed, conducted some similar experiments, although it is not clear how it ended.
There are also different versions of the same "Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory". The one that reached us (thought to be the most successful) would actually be the third copy, of the same shot. Hence the strong suspicion that the French factory workers were never captured on film, thus making room for actors and/or extras. Mereghetti recalls: "The second version (found in 1988 by the Institute Lumière in Lyon) differs from the other two because a carriage pulled by a single horse is seen leaving and the people are less lightly dressed, which suggests it was shot in April 1895". Suppositions, indeed.
The first public screening took place, as already mentioned at the beginning, on December 28, 1895, in Paris, almost clandestinely, in the cellars of a café on Boulevard des Capucines, for the modest sum of 1 franc. But beware, this is the first public screening, and I emphasize public, because in reality, the Lumière had also made projections previously (there are reports of a more than unauthorized screening restricted to some friends and acquaintances in Paris in July, the 11th to be precise, of 1895). Let’s say that the cinema as it has come to us (i.e., with the show viewed only after paying) was born three days after Christmas 1895.
The audience of the time, naturally, was amazed. The invention was indeed sensational. To a world accustomed to leaf through, even if not for long, photographs, the Lumière gave moving photographs. So much so, that it has become famous, the screening of the second Lumière film (and therefore the second ever), "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" (screened publicly for a fee in January 1896), in which, for about 50 seconds, a track is framed and in perspective (excellent perspective, the first real direction operation in history) a train rushing towards the station. At the train's arrival, the audience, believing that the train would come out of the screen, left the room and ran away in panic. Today it makes us laugh, but at the time very few started to laugh (the scene will later be mentioned in the "Slapstick" by Villaggio and Pozzetto, but it is a negligible episode).
"Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory" cannot be judged through the sterile game of star ratings. It is impossible to give it a score. Because it is the beginning of everything, of a world that still today, despite more or less equally scattered absurdities in the entire world cinema market, does not want to die. Cinema. Giving a score to these immortal 50 seconds is like wanting to give a score to Marconi's first radio contact, Leonardo Da Vinci's first flight patents, Archimedes' Eureka, Galileo's theories on space. What score would you give to these four things?
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