Today cinema is 126 years old. The birth of the seventh art can be traced back by convention to December 28, 1895, when the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière organized in Paris the first public paid cinema screening.
There is often confusion about the events of that day. Many believe that the first film to be screened in front of an audience was "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station", but that's not the case. The best known and most iconic of the Lumière films was shown to Parisians only nine days after the debut of the new art, on January 6, 1896.
The real first work was “The exit from the Lumière workshops"(La Sortie de l'usine Lumière), which 126 years ago was projected to the Indian Salon of the Grand Café of Boulevard des Capucines, in the French capital. In reality it was not an exclusive screening: 10 films were shown that day, all lasting a few seconds. But "The exit from the Lumière workshops" was the first and for this reason it is considered the starting point of the history of cinema.
Those expecting a plot will be disappointed. The film shows 45 seconds of life of a group of workers, mostly women, as they leave the Lumière factory in Montplaisir, on the outskirts of Lyon. However, this is not a documentary: the shooting was organized at the table and repeated several times, probably to adapt the scene to the length of the reel.
A curiosity: the building seen in the film was demolished in 1970, but the shed represented in the scene was spared; today it is known as thePremier Film Hangar and houses the cinema hall of the Lumière Institute.
