The Lumiere Brothers

Our sense of cinema as a site of commercial entertainment can be traced back to the Lumiere brothers. In December 1895 they 1 a fee-paying public in Paris to sit and watch flickering images on an illuminated screen. The commercial Pandora's Box they opened was to 2 in a few years into a world cinema 3 and, at its peak, the fantastical Hollywood. Yet in the 30 years in which this miraculous construction was accomplished, audiences rarely 4 to films, only watch them. Hence, the early decades of cinema were characterised by the title 'silent'. 5, there was a lot of noise, machinery, audiences, musicians and commentators. Even so, the absence of the human voice and 6 make the films seem rather strange when viewed by a modem audience.