Yes that’s me in the picture above–it was taken back in 2004, back when I was a bottle blonde.  I was standing in front of the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, posing awkwardly as my wife took a photo.  There were no other tourists, just Parisians going about their business as usual.  There were no vendors hawking Grand Café souvenirs.  The place does not appear on the maps of typical destinations.  Later in the day, Max (who was three at the time) got a coloring book of famous Parisian landmarks and French cultural icons (“Je colorie Paris!”); the Grand Café was not among them.

For me, though, it was the most important sightseeing spot in the whole city—not for what it is now, but for what happened here once upon a time.

Now the Grand Café is just a restaurant, and a pricey one at that, on a fairly typical street full of unremarkable shops and offices.  Right next to the Café is a movie theater, a multiplex no different from those that cover the world like ivy.  But on the day in history I came to commemorate, there were no movie theaters.  Not here, not anywhere else.

That fact alone is almost too hard to imagine.  I live a life saturated by movies and filmed entertainment.  Going to the movies has been my preferred leisure time activity for as long as I can remember.

It isn’t just me either: it is impossible to imagine what our culture would be like without moving pictures.  Popular films can generate billions of dollars for the multinational corporations that made them.  Even with declining viewership figures for network programming, some television broadcasts can be seen simultaneously by tens of millions of people across the country—at times, even across the planet.  More people get more of their news from television than from papers.  Hollywood’s stars are celebrities everywhere.

Yet there was a point, not even all that long ago, when this was not true.  A point when popular culture was local in character, when a night out meant a night at the live theater, when stories were told primarily through literature, when advertising meant hanging the name of your business on a shingle above your door, when politicians waged election campaigns in person.  A point when there was no such thing as mass entertainment.

Between then and now was a moment of revolutionary change, when the world we take for granted first came into being.  In many ways, the first shot of that revolution was fired at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895.

Movies had been shown before, in various formats, over the previous decade.  Inventors and investors had been staging their courtship dance with one another in one special event after another, to demonstrate the burgeoning technology of moving pictures.  But these affairs were by invitation only, exclusive happenings designed solely for the benefit of the film pioneers and their backers.  The experience we now think of as “going to the movies”—where a paying audience gathers in a darkened auditorium for the purpose of entertainment—had never happened before December 28, 1895.  And until it did happen, there was no clear signal it ever would.

The prime mover behind motion picture technology had been Thomas Alva Edison, but even he thought so little of its promise that he tasked it to underlings.  Edison envisioned parlors filled with contraptions he called Kinetoscopes.  Individual patrons would stand at these cabinets, plunk a coin into the slot, press their eyes to a peephole and view a brief scene such a woman undressing.  After a minute or less, once the little tableau played to its end, they could either pay and watch it again or move on and let the next customer have his turn.  This was a boardwalk attraction, a minor diversion, and not at all conducive to the evolution of films like Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, or The Matrix.  It was instead destined for obsolescence.

But Mr. Edison made repeated idiotic misjudgments when it came to cinema, and events were soon out of his hands.  A family of inventor-entrepreneurs in France had taken the germ of Edison’s idea and developed from it a mechanism to project movies in a crowded theater.  The Lumière family unveiled their Cinematograph on December 28, 1895—not to a select group of insiders, but to the indiscriminate masses.  The Lumière show at the Grand Café was open to one and all for the trifling admission of a single franc.

Imagine you are walking down the Boulevard des Capucines on that fateful day.  It is cold—of course it’s cold, it’s Paris in the winter!—but today is especially cold and nasty.  As you walk along the sidewalk on your errands, there’s some poor nutter on the corner handing out flyers.  “Movie show,” the shill is saying, or something like that in French.  It doesn’t much matter what words he’s using, you have never heard them before anyway.  Outside of an inner coterie of photographic professionals, scientists, and venture capitalists the words for “film,” “movies,” and “cinema” are unheard of in any language.

Maybe you just want in out of the cold, maybe you are just curious, but you take the bait.  Inside the Grand Café, you descend the stairs to the lavishly decorated Indian Salon in the lower level.  You approach the turnstile to pay your ticket.  The man who takes your franc and welcomes you to the show is no pimply-faced usher earning pocket change after school—this is the famed photographer Clément Maurice, one of the world’s very first cinematographers.  Not that you have any idea who he is, as you step inside the auditorium to take one of the 120 seats arranged in front of the white screen.

Thankfully, the Lumières have also seen fit to invite a few specially selected guests (mostly members of the press) or the room would seem sadly empty.  By attending the show, you are something of an anomaly.  Only thirty-two other of your countrymen have chosen to join you today.  At a franc a seat, that’s a take of just 33 francs.  Since the Indian Salon cost thirty francs to rent, things are not shaping up very profitably for the Lumières.

They had asked the proprietor, a Mr. Volpini, if he would accept 20% of the receipts in lieu of the standard 30 franc rent.  Mr. Volpini furrowed his brow as his tenants explained what they had in mind.  “Moving pictures, you say? No, I think I’ll stick to the flat rental fee, thank you very much.”  In the weeks to come, as the box office take will rise to 2,000 francs a day, Mr. Volpini will come to rue that decision.

The lights dim, and the first film that the Lumières have threaded up is a little something called Leaving the Factory.  It is literally a “little something,” just a minute in duration.  There will be a total of ten of these movies on the bill, so the evening’s entertainment will not account for more than ten minutes or so of the spectators’ time.  Over time, the Lumière program will change to accommodate new films as they were shot.  Various shorts will be added or subtracted from the package, but one portion of the show will remain invariant.  Leaving the Factory will always be there, and always be first.

The reason why is simple.  It begins, you see, with an image of the door of the Lumière factory in Lyons, shut.  A moving picture that begins with a picture that does not move.  There is an impish perversion at work here, a conscious manipulation of audience expectations designed to create the maximum impact.

This opening image of the opening reel is designed to momentarily fool the viewer into thinking they are watching a magic lantern show.  We know such things today as “slide shows,” but the old time magic lantern shows not only had a more romantic name, they were an altogether more elaborate creation.  A good magic lantern show might involve such an enormous number of movable lenses and slides operated by a manic presenter that the result would be vastly more sophisticated, intricately narrative, and dramatic than most of the early films could ever hope to be.  Magic lantern shows were in color, with sound, and could tell complex stories.  The one thing they could not do, was move.  And it is this one feature that primitive cinema boasted, at a loss of color, sound, and complexity.  To sell movies to an audience well familiar with the magic lantern meant playing up film’s assets, and thus Leaving the Factory.

No sooner has the crowd had a chance to feel a twinge of disappointment, a sense that the Indian Salon is simply playing host to a disguised magic lantern program, than the room suddenly goes deathly quiet.  At this point, no one in the room is breathing.

On the screen, the door of the factory has… opened.

It is not a real door, it’s a photograph.  And the people coming out of it—women, men, a dog, now there’s a guy on a bicycle—they aren’t real, either.  They are ghosts, shadows.  They are the residue of real people, who in some other place at some other time did these things.  The image of that event has been preserved, severed from its cause, and transported elsewhere to be replayed, the reflection of something that is no longer true.

LEAVING-THE-FACTORY

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The crowd is stunned.  Without exaggeration, they have literally never seen anything like this.

Soon Leaving the Factory is over and the next clip has taken its place.  Over the next ten minutes, a variety of scenes are shown.  The crowd will smile warmly at a baby being fed his lunch, laugh at a practical joke played on a gardener, marvel at a horse jumping.  One of the later additions to the cycle was a film called Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

Some sources claim it was shown on that first day December 28, but the film wasn’t even shot until the following year.  The legend has it that when the Lumières first screened Arrival of a Train, the audience cringed in mortal terror that the train was going to mow them down.  It is hard to verify whether this was indeed the reaction; what I know is that Arrival of a Train cannot have that effect today.  I just watched it myself while writing this and it never once crossed my mind that the train might leave the flat surface of the screen and keep on coming into my living room.  It is simply no longer possible to replicate in the modern day the experience of seeing these films in 1895.  At best I can imperfectly simulate fragments—I can go to the Grand Café but I can’t see a movie there.  I could see a movie next door, but watching Eddie Murphy goon through a French-subtitled Haunted Mansion isn’t quite the same thing (yes, that’s what was playing next door to the birthplace of the movie theater, when I visited in 2004).

If you want to, it is fairly easy to see Leaving the Factory today.  It is readily available, and you are welcome to enjoy it in the comfort of your own home, to watch it again and again, to invite over your friends and make them marvel at the fact that—lookit!  Those people are moving!  Which, of course, is not the reaction you would get.

Leaving the Factory, Arrival of a Train, and their contemporaries from the late 1890s are in black and white, they are silent, they flicker unsteadily—but moreover they are relics of that critical moment of transformation, when audiences were still innocent.  Watching someone walk through a door will never again have the jaw-dropping ohmigod-didja-see-that effect it did in the very beginning.

I dislike the term “primitive cinema,” the accepted term for movies made before 1910.  To my mind, the phrase implies a lack of skill on the part of the early filmmakers, which is grossly unfair.  A film like Leaving the Factory fails to enthrall modern audiences not because of some inherent defect of the film itself but because of a change in context.  The earliest filmmakers—the Lumière brothers, Thomas Edison’s team, Birt Acres and others—were extraordinarily creative people whose dedication and ingenuity bequeathed to the rest of us the technology responsible for the greatest art form of the 20^th century.  These people, however, were inventors and scientists, not storytellers.  Their creativity was expressed in the act of invention, but they were unsure to what use that invention would be put.

Eventually the novelty of seeing things move would wear off, though, so the future of cinema as a form of mass entertainment depended on someone figuring out a way to use this fabulous tool to craft a moving picture whose appeal depended on something more than just the mere fact of being a moving picture.

There was in the audience at the Indian Salon on December 28, 1895 one man who was not an inventor, not a photographer, not a venture capitalist, not a reporter, and not a paying customer.  He was a professional entertainer, a magician, owner of the famed Robert-Houdin Theater in Paris. His name was George Méliès.

The movie culture we enjoy today traces itself back to that night in part because the Lumière brothers conceived of the right kind of exhibition format, but moreover because Méliès was there.  But that’s a story for another day.