Lumière Brothers – the serpentine dance (c.1899)

The lumiere brothers filmed this in black and white, and then hand colored (probably with little paint brushes) each frame of the film. you can see the full movie here .

Auguste and Louis Lumière

“The first moving pictures ever captured were done so in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers (Lerner). These men made short “movies” of normal, every-day things such as crowds of people or moving trains. Soon after the excitement of being able to simply capture film died off, plots started to develop in movies and silent films started to become popular.”

– Jacy Quint: Pop Culture and the Evolution of Music in Film

Ironically, these two brothers believed there was no future in film.

Born in Besançon, France (Auguste in 1862, Louis in 1864) they patented features of the movie camera they invented, holding their first screening in 1895. Imagine if they could see into the future and know the tremendous industry film has become.

References and extras:

The Lumière Brothers’ First Films: IMDB

The London Telegraph: Article

Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: The Lumière Brothers:

” After seeing an Edison Kinetoscope, Antoine suggested that they work on developing a motion picture system. Louis’s brother Auguste attempted to design a camera but with little success, until Louis suggested a mechanism like that used in a sewing machine to advance the cloth step by step. Although Auguste gave credit to Louis, the successful machine was patented in France on 13 February 1895 in the name of both brothers, in common with their other inventions. The first model was made by their engineer Charles Moisson. The machine was a combined camera, projector and printer and the perforated film was moved intermittently by a form of claw pulldown – a pair of pins which, inserted into the perforations on either side of the film then moved down, carrying the film with them. The cam motion mechanism (improved in a supplement to the patent dated 30 March 1895) formed the basis not only of the Lumières’s instrument but of a large number of later mechanisms, some still in use today. ”