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).

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.

During 1895, Louis Lumiere made a number of home movies starring his family and friends. In this film, Louis' father Antoine is playing a game of cards with a family friend, Felicien Trewey (a vaudeville performer). Another unidentified man is involved in the game as a waiter serves drinks and seems grotesquely intrusive. That's about it for this film. It can be noted that Trewey acted in: "The Transformation of Hats"(1895) where he does a comedy sketch; and "The Photograph"(1895)- where he appears with Lois' brother Auguste. These films were probably made at the same time as "Partie d'ecarte". Trewey also helped establish a Lumiere Theatre in Lyon during 1896 and set up a presentation of the Cinematograph at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London during February 1896.

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.