Le débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon

Considering that the Photographical Congress arriving in Lyon was a major event, I suppose you could call this one more important than the Lumiere Brothers' previous efforts because the event is something that most people wouldn't see a lot of the time. This film captures simply what the title suggests: a whole crowd of photographers coming off a ferry. Indeed quite a few of the photographers notice the camera and while some tip their hats in greeting, others notice the camera and refuse to be part of the film by dashing off the screen quickly.

At only a minute watching, this short documentary isn't a waste of time. It will probably only be interesting to people like me who, believe it or not, somehow find entertainment in watching these things. Audiences nowadays will find it pretty uninteresting--except for if you're a historian. In that case it's a must-see.

This interesting footage is particularly worth seeing as a companion piece to, and as a comparison with, the Lumière classic, "La Sortie des usines Lumière". The two features have much in common, and they are interesting for many of the same reasons.

In both movies, there is a rather sizable crowd moving towards the camera, knowing that they are being filmed. The main difference is that this movie features professional photographers, as they arrive to attend a congress of a photographic society. Their reactions are largely the same as were those of the factory workers, but many of the "professionals" seem more determined to hide their curiosity. On the other hand, a number of them show their interest even more eagerly, tipping their hats in a particularly jaunty fashion, demonstrating a bit of showmanship of their own.

As with the footage of the factory workers, the motion towards the camera is effective, and here the background scenery also has some interesting details. This film is also self-referential in one interesting respect, since the subjects of the film were also its initial audience. It's all rather interesting to take in.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

Anyway onto this film which is as the title suggests, lots of people getting off a boat. This is essentially a rerun of the Lumière film that saw lots of people leaving a factory and it is as exciting. The only thing that did make it interesting to me was the people in question react differently from those leaving the works in the other film. Maybe it is to do with their class, or maybe they are more savvy about cameras or maybe they are just told to do this but some wave, smile etc – a reaction you would get today but interesting to see it then when such a thing was very much a novelty.

Other than this point of interest though, I found the film to be what it now is – a historical novelty that can only be seen as such.

From a boat descend the photographers who must participate in the congress of Lyone dividing in two diagonals to the right and left. After, someone greets the film operator. So the illusion of the dimension of the cinema is broken.

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.