Looking Back on a Lost World : The Lumiere Brother’s historic short films from 1890s are being released on home video.

Kino on Video’s latest release, “The Lumiere Brothers’ First Films” ($50) is a breathtaking and exhilarating excursion back to cinema’s infancy.

Narrated by acclaimed director Betrand Tavernier (“ ‘Round Midnight”), the anthology features 85 of the “actualities”--short films--Louis Lumiere made with his brother Auguste between 1895 and 1897.

A few of the 50-second flicks are familiar to cineastes, including the famous “The Arrival of a Train a La Ciotat,” “Demolition of a Wall” and “A Sprinkle Sprinkled.”

The majority, though, have rarely been seen and are a revelation to those who considered Lumiere and his cameramen strictly documentarians.

The actualities feature beautifully shot black-and-white snapshots of Moscow, Paris, Berlin, New York, Istanbul and Jerusalem of the late 19th century, several comedy capers and vignettes of the French middle class at play. Included in the collection are the first known tracking shot--filmed on a boat in Venice--and what Tavernier wryly describes as the first cat food commercial.

“First Films” was edited and compiled by Thierry Fremaux, director of the Institut Lumiere in Lyons, France.

Lumiere, Fremaux explains, made more than 1,500 shorts during his five-year career as a director and producer. Though 80% of the films from the silent era have been lost, nearly all of the Lumiere movies survived because Lumiere, who died in 1948, kept all of his films. The Institut has 1,417 in its collection. All the films featured in the video have been restored by the Archives du Film du Centre National de la Cinematographie.

Fremaux chose these 85 films because, he says, “I know them very well. I think they are not the best, but they are, I think, something very exemplary of the work of Lumiere. I hope that we will make in the future two or three or five programs more.”

At 17, Lumiere, the son of a photographer and manufacturer of photographic processes, invented a dry-plate process that had turned the family’s factory in Lyons into a flourishing business. He was inspired to create a motion picture camera after seeing a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in Paris in 1894. Because the machine could record images but not project them, Edison’s films had to be presented in a peep-show format.

In February 1895, the Lumieres patented their Cinematographe. Unlike the Kinetoscope, the invention was a lightweight camera that could record, print and project images.

The brothers made their first film with the Cinematographe on March 19, 1895--shooting the workers leaving their factory for the day. The first public screening of the films took place in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895, and within months, Lumiere dispatched cameramen around the world to capture images for the screen.

Tavernier’s educational and funny comments help bring these fascinating films to life. “We wanted to make a living program,” Fremaux says. “You know how it is with people. [They say,] ‘It’s old movies. It’s silent movies. It’s boring.’ I would enjoy listening to someone making the same commentary about D.W. Griffith.”

Despite Louis Lumiere’s enormous contribution to the world of cinema, Fremaux says, he was all but forgotten until recently in France.

“Forty years ago, except for [directors] Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, no one wanted to speak about Lumiere as a filmmaker. There is this legend that Lumiere is just only a documentarian. But Lumiere was totally conscious of what he was doing with his camera. All the realistic cinema is the son of Lumiere. All the magic cinema like the Hollywood cinema, the musical and [the films of] Fellini are sons of [French filmmaker] Georges Melies.”

After quitting films, Lumiere went on to invent everything from color photography to a 3-D film process.

“He was a strange man,” Fremaux says. “He thought what he had made was enough. He said later, ‘I quit because I saw the artist coming into the industry. Georges Melies was a genius. I was not an artist. I was not a filmmaker.’ All the historians said the same thing because Lumiere said that. We know now that’s a mistake. He was totally an artist.”

To order, call (800) 562-3330.