What it is
It was here, in the Monplaisir quarter, that the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière built their Cinématographe and in 1895 shot their first film — Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory — on the street now called the rue du Premier-Film.
The Institut Lumière, founded in 1982, occupies the family's villa: a museum over two floors, and cinemas that still show films.
Getting it right
It is out of the centre, a short metro ride east. Combine the museum with a film in the hangar cinema built on the site of the first shot.
The brothers
Auguste Lumière was born in Besançon in 1862 and Louis in 1864, sons of Antoine Lumière, an industrialist, painter and photographer. Each brother worked on his own projects, but until 1918 everything was signed with both their names, more than 170 patents in all, mostly in photography. They married two sisters and lived in mirror-image apartments in the same villa. The family fortune came from Louis's invention, in 1881, of a ready-to-use instant dry photographic plate, sold as the Blue Label. In 1903 they patented the Autochrome, a color photographic plate, which Louis, who paradoxically did not much like cinema, considered his greatest invention.
What happened here in 1895
It is here in Monplaisir, at their factory, that the brothers developed their Cinématographe, a camera that could also project, and shot their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The shed from which the workers stream out of the gates still stands and can be visited. Contrary to a stubborn myth, the Lumières did not make the first films ever; what they achieved was the first collective projection of photographic films on a large screen, on March 22, 1895, before a small group of scientists in Paris, followed by the first public screening for a paying audience on December 28, 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines. Each of the ten films shown lasted about fifty seconds. With The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Louis also made the first photographic fiction film.
Others were working on the same problem. Émile Reynaud had been projecting films painted directly onto the strip, the first cartoons, to paying audiences since October 1892, and in 1895 Woodville Latham in New York and Max Skladanowsky in Berlin projected photographic films, but their technique was far from ready and those shows made no impact. The brothers first called their machine the Kinétographe Lumière; the Paris engineer Jules Carpentier, to whom Louis sent each improvement, finished the mechanism, enclosing it in a box from which little more than the crank and the lens emerged. Before the Paris premiere, the films were shown to invited audiences in La Ciotat on September 21 and October 14, 1895.
From a lost factory to an institute
The city decided as early as 1966 to create a cinema museum, built around the collection of Dr. Paul Génard, a major collector of films and equipment. The Lumière heirs instead sold the premises to the Ilford photo group, which finally sold them to the city in 1976. Almost all of the old factory was then demolished; only part of the shed survived and was restored over two years. The Institut Lumière, founded in 1982 as a nonprofit association, moved in at once. In 1998 the shed became a cinema, the Hangar du Premier-Film, with a screen thirteen meters wide; every seat carries a plaque with the name of a famous director. Outside, a filmmakers' wall, Lyon's answer to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, records with name plates the visits of several hundred film personalities.
The villa and the institute today
The museum is in the Villa Lumière, the mansion Antoine Lumière had built from 1899 to 1902 on what is now Place Ambroise-Courtois, near the company's buildings. It shows the brothers' inventions, the Cinématographe, the Photorama and the Autochrome among them, and the documentation center occupies Antoine's former painting studio on the top floors. The Lumière film collection of 1,425 original films was restored in 1998 and added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2005.
Since 2014 a selection of 130 Lumière films has been restored in 4K. After work completed in October 2023, the villa has two small cinemas in its basement, of 70 and 64 seats, alongside the 269-seat Hangar du Premier-Film, and the institute also runs a photo gallery and three art-house cinemas elsewhere in the city.
The institute is directed by Thierry Frémaux, who is also general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, and chaired since 2021 by the actress Irène Jacob, succeeding the director Bertrand Tavernier. Since 2009 it has run the Festival Lumière each October, showing more than 200 films across Lyon and awarding the Lumière prize to a filmmaker for a lifetime's work.
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