Review by jhaugh

Louis Lumiere was a businessman. Since he was in the photographic business (his families factory in Lyon, France produced what many considered to be the best treated glass plates used in photography at that time - the mid 1890s), he was also a photographer. But, I am sure, he considered himself first-and-foremost a scientist. He considered his new invention, the Cinematopgraph, to be a scientific instrument. That is why during 1894 and 1895, he spent quite a bit of effort to gain approbation from various scientific groups. He wanted to keep the photographic community, in which he was well known, appraised of his endeavors. One method of doing this was to attend, in June 1895, a congress of photographers that was gathering at Neuville-Sur-Soane - a town just a short distance north of Lyon.

Louis positioned his camera at the base of a gangplank down which delegates to the conference descended from a Soane river ferry. Certainly, all of the descending men and women knew, by that time, of Louis' invention - although it had not yet been made public. Later that evening the Lumiere brothers showed the congress attendees eight of their less-than-one-minute films. And in one of these films the members saw themselves descending from the boat.