Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed by Auguste and Louis Lumière
Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (French: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon), also known as Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory and Exiting the Factory, is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Louis Lumière. It is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by six and a half years.
Content
Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways- the clothing style changes demonstrating the different seasons in which they were filmed. They are often referred to as the "one horse", "two horses", and "no horse" versions, in reference to a horse-drawn carriage that appears in the first two versions (pulled by one horse in the original and two horses in the first remake). The collection of Institute Lumière contains a fourth film with the same theme, but very different architecture, and has been estimated to date from February 1897.
Another film with the same theme, presumably made in 1896, features another factory (or another entrance to the same factory) with different people. Unlike the people in most of Lumière's films, many of the subjects look at the camera.
Production
This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.
The place where the "Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory" was filmed is located 8th arrondissement of Lyon in Monplaisir, the street has since been renamed "rue du Premier-Film" and the factory is now known as the Institut Lumière, a museum dedicated to cinema history and the headquarters of the institute created in 1982 by Bernard Chardère and Maurice Trarieux-Lumière, the grandson of Louis Lumière.
The public source identifies “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” as 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed by Auguste and Louis Lumière. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Workers, Leaving and Lumière.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8665. Authority coordinates are 45.745, 4.870. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1888, 1897 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.