Lumière!

I saw this film (it is more a documentary than a film, really) during a commercial flight, of all places, on a tiny seat screen. but I was mesmerized and enchanted. What pleasure it is to see these very short clips the Lumiere bothers produced between 1895 and 1905. Historically and visually, this compilation -presented with a smart running commentary for each chosen mini films- is a treasure. I am sure I had a smile on my face during the whole thing, and now I wish I could see it on a big screen, to see the details beyond the frame composition.

This movie was a great learning experience. The most I ever learned about the Lumiere brothers' filmmaking was their two shorts of "Workers Leaving the Factory" and "Train Entering the Station." This documentary provides 100+ surviving short films by the brothers and their camera operators. The narration is a perfect inclusion for giving context to each short. But one could also watch this movie on mute and gain a more authentic viewing, while still having the documentary structured in a meaningful way.

I cannot recommend the movie enough. If you are thinking about watching Lumiere!, watch it now!!

It is a wonderful documentary, that everyone who love cinema must watch. Lumière brothers and crew were real artists and their importance goes much beyong the already essenfial role in the machne development. While the film design is simple, just showing original short films with narration, two elements make it an amazing achievement: 1) narrated text is brilliant, it is a well humored and deeply informed lecture on the history of cinema, the role played by Lumière in it, and how the world and society they showed in movement was; 2) many awesome short films produced or made by Lumière were, for artistic or historical reasons (often for both), extraordinary, anticipating what other important moviemakers would developped and being credited for later. Well done and moving documentary.

This is available to watch on Youtube. The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon was fascinating as it showed the British duo making actuality films about real life in the early 1900s. It was very interesting to see how at the same time the Lumiere brothers were crossing their own frontier with the new film technology in France (and also they travelled to other countries for exotic footage to bring home). The Lumiere in a sense were making films as we know them today - scenes of spectacle impressively staged with close attention paid to the mise-en-scene. For this reason I find them less relatable than the films of Mitchell and Kenyon who are capturing real people going about their normal lives at this late Victorian / Edwardian age. But the work of the Lumiere's is historically interesting nevertheless and this documentary accumulates 108 of their short films into an insightful history of their work 1895-1905.

Others have explained the details so let's just say this : 1/ this is a collection of some of the first movies ever seen on a big screen, cinema being invented right in front of your eyes (first film that's been projected in a movie theater (or what would pass for a movie theater at the time), first travelling camera, first special effects, first everything !

And 2/ what you can see right in front of your eyes is the real 19th century (even when it's shot in 1905. The first years of the 20th century were not very different from the last ones of the 19th). Not a recreation. It's the real thing. People, clothes, technology, transportation, everything. And just for that, it's priceless. And a bit unsettling when you realize that people at the time were not that different from people of today (Like that woman in London waving at the camera or those kids in Jerusalem making fools of themselves because they know they are filmed. Cinema is just a few months old and they already behave like it's been in their life forever).

And don't miss the reel with the vietnamese kids running after the camera, it's lovely.

(Some say that you can see these reels on youtube. It's true, but the image quality on the bluray is much, much better).