Partie d'écarté

This is a Lumiere short featuring a popular element in early documentaries: a card game. If you've seen tons of these early actualities like I have then no doubt you may have seen several other shorts featuring this topic. The other film I've seen with this subject is "Partie de Cartes" a Georges Melies film (his first actually) and the set-up is the same. There are differences to the films though: Melies's version features a waitress, this one has a comical waiter; a joke in a newspaper is involved in Melies's film, here we've just got the waiter laughing to end the short

The movement in this one is limited making it less of a motion picture, but the subject is a comical one and must have amused people at the time. Today it is still pleasant to watch and is a lot less documentary-like than the Brothers' other work. In fact, I bet you it was staged due to everyone in the film being either family members or friends (and that includes the waiter).

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.

With this film we have the usual action that is summed up in the title. In essence watching this action is quite dull because there is not a "pay-off" or a reason to watch it but here I actually found myself held by the film. What it was I realised was that the camera had a very small area within its view but it had four characters within this small area. With this small area we have two men playing one another, another pouring drinks and a waiter looking on and laughing. Dramatically it offers nothing but I was surprised by the amount of stuff happening and how many focal points we had. Do I look at the game, the man pouring or try and see what the waiter finds so funny? It was the first time one of these films on the DVD had done this to me and the first one that engaged.

Of course I'm not saying this is an attempt at a Short Cuts multi-layered film but it was nice to find this much movement all working together in such a tight short from Lumière.

On December 28, 1985, the Lumière brothers showed a new invention to the world, able to project motion pictures in a screen, in the same way as slide-show photographs were done. Lumière's movies showed the common events of real life as they were captured by their camera and brought to life by the Cinématographe; the thirty-three people who saw their movies for the first time watched in awe as people walked through streets or played cards as if the photograph projected on the screen was alive. It is often said that photographs are captured memories of the past, that allow us to revisit moments long gone and to witness events from a distant time and place. Well, if cinema is basically moving photographs, the same thing can be said about it, as when Louis and August Lumière decided to experiment with moving pictures, their principal motivation was to capture real life as they knew it. And they more than succeeded in their attempt.

On that first screening, the brothers showed 10 movies, but many more moves were done for future screenings. "Partie De Cartes" (literally, "Card Game") was one of those made to follow that initial success. What made "Partie De Cartes" different to most of the Lumière's actuality films, is that in this movie, the focus is not in showing movement, but on the capture on film of the characters and their actions. While many of the early films by the pioneers were done focusing on moving elements (trains, traffic, etc), this movie was about capturing a relaxed family scene, like a vignette or a modern family vacation film. "Partie De Cartes" is about a game of cards played between Antoine Lumière (the brothers' father), Félicien Trewey and Alphonse Winckler, while a waiter (Antoine Féraud) brings them drinks and comments on their game. While it has not really a plot, it is a charming scene that reflects the filmmakers' life and times.

Like "Repas De Bébé" ("Baby's Meal"), "Card Game" is a movie that contrasts sharply with the Lumière's style of film-making, but at the same time it complements it. Considering that both were photographers besides being inventors, it seems natural that this kind of vignettes were among the first movies done by the duo, as they perfectly understood the potential of cinema as an innovative form to capture memories with a higher realism than photographs. On a strictly technical level, "Partie De Cartes" is one of the best looking movies among their early films, and one could say that while no artists, the brothers had a pretty good idea of what would later be called "Mise-en-scène" (the overall visual composition), as they really set the camera in the best place to capture the action. While lacking the strong initial impact of their first movie ("La Sortie Des Usines Lumière") or the creativity of "L' Arroseur Arrosé", this Lumière movie is really interesting as one of the very first family movies ever made. 6/10

Among the films in the "Saved from the Flames" DVD collection that have been preserved is this hand-colored item that's little more than a minute and just depicts some men playing cards with a waiter serving them some drinks. What makes this historical is that this was from what was considered cinema's first year-1895-and was made by pioneers August and Louis Lumiere. Like many of their films, this was just a candid look at people doing everyday things and nothing else. So what fascinated me was how natural the people doing their thing looked and no one seemed to realized they were being photographed. There were a couple of other Lumiere works on the DVD that were of similar naturalness. So on that note, Partie de cartes is worth a look for historical reasons.

This footage of a card game in progress features an amusing scene that is captured with rather efficient photography. All of the characters in the movie seem to be having a good time, giving it a carefree feel that makes it among the more light-hearted of the early Lumière features.

The scene contains four characters, two of them playing cards, a third man watching, plus a waiter who brings them some drinks. The three men at the table are all quite at ease, but it is the waiter who is the most energetic of them all. He seems very eager to please, and he has very broad reactions to everything, so that eventually he gets to be a bit disconcerting. But he works as the comic figure that he was meant to be.

Aside from the waiter's entry, there are only small movements, but everything is captured within a camera field that seems to have been carefully chosen. The composition puts the cards and the table in the center, with the characters around the sides. Only a couple of the waiter's actions seem to have been forced into the camera field just a bit (which possibly accounts in part for the goofiness of the character). Overall, it works pretty well.