The Record

December 28, 1895, in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. The first audience held its breath at a factory gate and a train pulling into a station, projected onto a white sheet. The Lumière brothers' Cinématographe was a light machine that doubled as camera and projector, and it pointed outward — toward reality. From here, the 'record' runs in one continuous line down to today's documentary. As it happens, the films at this spring have a slightly odd present. The Lumière company's 1,405 films have been restored and catalogued, but around 74% of them have never once been shown to the public. The world's most famous 'first films' are, in practice, still mostly unseen. Rather than show footage here, this map points instead to the Lumière Institute's official catalogue — the river of film still has an unexplored stretch at its own source. In its place, I've put here the one film that shows most clearly what this river does. April 14, 1906, San Francisco. A camera mounted on the front of a cable car recorded eight minutes riding down Market Street for 1.5 miles, past carriages, cars, and people. Four days later, on April 18, an earthquake and fire burned nearly the entire city center. The film negative had already left for New York by train the day before, on the 17th — spared by one day, as the Library of Congress's own notes record. This is what recording meant. No one filming it knew this was the last time the street would look like that.