In Celebration of the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematic Universe

Long before Godzilla squared off against King Kong, Thanos snapped his fingers, and Annabel came home, there were two French filmmaking brothers pioneering what we now think of as modern cinema. Their body of work, boasting such beloved classics as Baby’s Breakfast and that train video you watched freshman year of college, helped to define a generation, laying the groundwork for the next century of the medium. And while we celebrate Auguste and Louis Lumière for their innovation and creation of an art form, few, if any, recognize them for what they are: the fathers of the cinematic universe.

The origins of the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematic Universe date back to the 1895 crowd pleaser Le Saut à la couverture (“Jumping Onto the Blanket”). A hilarious comment on masculinity of the era, the film features four men holding a blanket, and another man in a hat standing nearby, watching as a sixth man repeatedly tries, and fails, to jump into the very blanket the men are holding. Merriment ensues as the man fails to jump high enough to get into the blanket, falls out of the blanket, and eventually becomes fully ensnared within the blanket. It’s a bonafide romp of the highest variety, a true comedic masterpiece, that helped put the Lumières on the map as serious Directors and paved the way for what would become the LBCU.