MOVIES : Vive le Cinema! : The first moving pictures were shown 100 years ago this week. Hollywood may be ignoring the anniversary, but the French are toasting it in haute style.

On that cold, historic December evening, the Parisians gathered in anticipation in a basement room of the Grand Cafe. The house lights were dimmed and that spellbound audience watched the images flicker on a screen.

They see a factory front, quiet and imposing. Suddenly, the doors open and a few workers leave. A man, dressed in suit and straw hat and riding a motorcycle, passes through the scene. Then, many are leaving, on foot and on bikes. Finally, they all disappear and the doors close.

“La Sortie des Usines Lumiere” (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory) ran just 17 minutes, 38 seconds. But the little documentary marked the premiere of commercial cinema. Ten short films by Louis Lumiere were screened for the paying audience that evening, a century ago this Thursday. And the world has been paying to see movies ever since.

The 100-year anniversary of cinema, or the “first century of cinema,” as it is being called here, has been celebrated all across France this year, from displays of movie memorabilia in tiny village libraries to gala evenings in the largest cities. While Hollywood has largely ignored the centennial, the French have saluted it with a passion; last summer, the French Consulate in Los Angeles even sponsored an outdoor screening of movies in the Southland.

In Chantilly, the home of whipped cream, the anniversary was celebrated with fireworks and a laser and music show. In Marseilles, on the Mediterranean, crowds gathered to see memorable scenes from early American westerns on a giant, outdoor screen. The town of Metz turned its annual blueberry festival into a film commemoration, crowning the Blueberry Queen and paying homage to her with an outdoor showing of the French film “Queen Margot,” starring Isabelle Adjani.

On a Sunday early in the year, 4,000 theaters handed out 1.2 million free tickets to moviegoers. Twice a day throughout the year, France 2 television has been showing one of the many short documentary films made by Louis Lumiere and his brother, Auguste. And a color version of “Jour de Fe^te,” the 1947 film by Jacques Tati, was discovered by his daughter and put into release.

“We’ve been really surprised by the interest in small towns all over France,” said Serge Toubiana, director of the famed monthly journal of film criticism Le Cahiers du Cinema and secretary general of the centennial committee. “This has been our biggest success.”

The celebrations have included loving looks back, as well as soul-searching debates over the future of cinema.

At the Elysee Palace earlier this year, outgoing President Francois Mitterrand hosted a star-studded reception and chose the occasion to crow over the French “victory” in defending its film industry subsidies during the GATT trade talks with the United States. He scorned those “who would consider this major art part of small commerce. France will not give up its cultural exception. We will never do it. Our richness is transmittable, but it is not replaceable.”

In the pages of Le Monde, the respected Paris daily, noted filmmakers weighed in with assessments of the first 100 years and no two were further apart than Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard.

“One could quarrel with the cinema,” Allen wrote. “It glorified war, gave gangsters a romantic image, offered simplistic solutions and pious homilies. But if the cinema is guilty of that, it did it with charm and emotion. And it grew up in modest theaters where, for a few cents, one could suddenly, and willingly, escape from reality.”

Godard, France’s iconoclastic New Wave director, took a dimmer view: “From the beginning, the cinema was a question of money. That is what the authorities in all these countries have decided to celebrate 100 years later, remembering the honors instead of honoring the memories.”

Later, Godard expounded on that theme. “The child [cinema] is suffocating under the sweets,” he told another Paris paper. “I don’t see what we are celebrating. Cinema is ultra-celebrated. It is an idea that has died in those who celebrate it. They want to believe, but they are the dead ones.”

Godard’s dour view, though, was shared by few in this film-loving country. The centennial gave them an excuse to celebrate the rich history of film, with showings of all-but-forgotten films from France and abroad. Retrospectives spiced the annual international film festival at Cannes and the American festival at Deauville.

Cinematheque Francaise, the Paris-based institute for the study of film, is sponsoring a three-month exhibition of films from Gaumont in France, from 20th Century Fox in the United States and from India. Other retrospectives have focused on the development of special effects and of the human form on film.

The origins of cinema are debated, though most historians agree that both France and the United States had a hand in its birth. France traces cinema, which it calls “the seventh art,” to Louis and Auguste Lumiere, the brothers who took over their father’s photographic supply factory in Lyons in 1893.

Louis developed the Cinematographe, which worked as both camera and projector, and, for the first time, used a system of claws to move the film mechanically. It was first demonstrated before that paying audience in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895.

Before the Lumiere brothers’ exhibition, though, Thomas Edison had already invented a motion picture camera that created many short films. But Edison believed that motion pictures would have little mass appeal, so he developed the Kinetoscope, which displayed films to one viewer at a time. Edison didn’t bother to extend his patent rights to Europe, which allowed the Lumieres to make their portable camera and projector based on his machine.

“No one really knows who invented it,” said Dominic Paini, director of Cinematheque Francaise. “But France, like America, is one of the places of first origin. And France has made a big effort this year to celebrate the cinema of the United States too. We truly respect American films. And we don’t believe you can mix politics and economics with questions of culture.”

The Lumieres have a special place in the hearts of the French, who now use the word lumiere to mean “light.” Film dignitaries from around the world gathered with director Bertrand Tavernier, president of the Lumiere Institute, at the site of the old Lumiere brothers’ factory in Lyon.

At noon on March 17, they stood where Louis Lumiere had planted his camera to capture his first 50-second film, exactly 100 years before, to officially declare the factory a historic monument and launch construction of the institute building, which will include a 280-seat theater. The street in front is now named Rue de Premier Film, and it was here that Louis Lumiere, as he later recalled, realized that the motion picture camera could “represent simple movements in the streets and public places with a truly striking truth.”

For two days this week, a “film feast” will officially open the second century of cinema in Paris. On a 90-foot outdoor screen in Paris, the Lumieres’ films will be shown along with short films created by 40 world-renowned filmmakers with the Lumiere camera. Among them will be films by American directors David Lynch and Spike Lee.

Throughout the celebrations, French moviegoers and movie-makers have pondered the future of the medium in symposiums and round-table discussions.

“Cinema was the greatest artistic invention of this century,” Le Cahiers du Cinema’s Toubiana said. “And now the question is: How are we going to continue? We have the same hopes and doubts that the Lumiere brothers did.”

“Lumiere said film was a fantasy invention, that it wouldn’t last,” said Paini of Cinematheque Francaise, which has 45,000 prints from around the world in its vaults. “But can you ask if music has a future? Does literature have a future? Of course cinema has a future.”

Cinema can’t be replaced, Toubiana said.

“It will survive because it is primordial,” he said. “Like the theater, it is an experience where people gather in a dark place and live something together.”

But Toubiana and other film critics in France see tough times ahead. Television, which shows 1,200 films a year in France, “has killed and broken the cinema’s big public. Now the public only goes to the cinema to see something special.”

So, for the next century, filmmakers must do better to attract more viewers.

“The French influence will remain, and the American influence, which is tremendous, will continue,” Toubiana said. “But people now believe that cinema is what is done in the United States. That is taking over people’s minds. We in France must, in the next century, try and do more exceptional cinema.”