The Lumiere Brothers debuted their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, on March 22, 1895, in a private screening for a small group. Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory would go on to become the first Lumiere film on their program of subjects shown before a paying audience at the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines, later that year on December 28, 1895.
Although not the first film, nor the first film publicly exhibited, nor even the first film publicly exhibited on a screen, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory has become seen as the symbolic moment that "the movies" -- as we think of them today -- were born.
In his book Flickers, Gilbert Adair writes of Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory:
"La Sortie des usines Lumiere is, after all, a work of art. It demonstrates, no less than the Lascaux cave drawings of which it may be said to be the exact filmic equivalent, the axiomatic truth that art is, ultimately, whatever lasts."
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