The Lumiere brothers held the first projected film screening
On this day · 22 March 1895
On a March evening in Paris, a 46-second clip of factory workers leaving for the day quietly invented the experience of going to the movies.
On March 22, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiere unspooled a strip of film for roughly 200 members of the Societe d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale in Paris. The picture, La Sortie de l’usine Lumiere a Lyon — “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory” — ran a mere 46 seconds and showed exactly what its title promised: employees streaming out of the brothers’ photographic-plate works at the end of a shift.
It was, as historians cautiously put it, probably the first presentation of projected film to an audience. The device behind it, the Cinematographe, was a clever three-in-one: camera, printer, and projector in a single hand-cranked box light enough to carry anywhere.
Cinema began not with a chase or a kiss, but with people clocking off work.
The brothers held back the showman’s debut until December 28, 1895, when a paying crowd at the Grand Cafe watched ten short films — the moment usually crowned as the birth of the movies.
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