Auguste & Louis Lumière: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (le Premier Film)

Date: 1895
Material/Technique: 35mm, B/w
Copyright: © Association frères Lumière
Sortie d'usine (I) (Cat. Lumière N°91)
Louis Lumière, Lyon, [26 mai 1895]

In the historical context of industrialization and developing free-market economy in Europe, the motif of the factory worker leaving his place of work assumes a key role. What is striking is that more than just a few women are among the workers – filmic proof that the industrial revolution acknowledged the female labor force, and that new professions outside the domestic sphere were opening up.

In their project »Labour In A Single Shot« Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki take up the present-day significance of work as a means of production, and have produced numerous contemporary versions of the motif . One these works, the gaze of a female worker at a textiles factory in Bangalore, is shown here alongside its historical original.

Auguste & Louis Lumière

The brothers Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumière invented the cinématographe at the end of the nineteenth century – one of the first devices capable of recording and projecting moving pictures. As the first ever recordings were of the workers of their own factory in Lyon, which had until then produced photographic plates, these experiments are among the oldest preserved witnesses of film technology.

http://www.institut-lumiere.org/

Text and Biography: Sophie Leschik