Regarded as the first publicly screened film in the history of cinema, Workers Leaving the Factory was projected by the Lumière brothers on March 22, 1895, in Paris. Capturing workers leaving the Lumière family’s Montplaisir factory during a midday break, the film, as Georges Didi-Huberman writes, marked the entrance of everyday people onto the cinematic stage. The Lumière brothers decided to reshoot the scene multiple times, creating different versions of the same event. This staging illustrates the inherent tension in cinema between the director’s control, the world recorded, and the audience’s freedom to interpret it. The reshoots not only complicate our understanding of the film as documenting a single historical event; they also underscore the manipulative nature of filmmaking by transforming the workers into actors to be directed.
In Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (British Film Institute, 1990).
André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (University of California Press, 2005), 166.
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?