Défilé de voitures de bébés à la pouponnière de Paris

Défilé de voitures de bébés à la pouponnière de Paris (1899)

Louis Lumiere directed this film, which shows a couple dozen nurses walking through a fence with carriages. I'm going to guess that there are babies in these carriages but we never actually see them. That really doesn't matter too much as this is another simple but interesting film from the Lumiere brothers. There's certainly nothing ground-breaking here but I've always enjoyed the work of the Lumieres because they simply took their camera out and captured a part of life that was going on. I bet you these nurses never could have imagined that someone like me (and a few others) would be watching this 116 years after it was made!

This is one of the last films that Louis Lumiere would be credited as directing, although the Lumieres would continue to produce pictures for another half dozen years. Was it the press of business that caused his retreat from the field? The fact that others could now be relied upon to shoot films with good composition throughout, mixed with good movement? Or was Lumiere becoming a back number and had the good sense to retire? Perhaps it was a little bit of all three. Certainly story films were becoming popular. Méliès had produced a first version of Cinderella at an incredible running time of six minutes, and a serial version of the Dreifus affair. Over in England, George Smith was beginning to put together a real film grammar. The Lumieres' 44-second actualities of domestic commonplaces were not enough and their later productions would be shot in Morrocco, Egypt and the Far East.

In the meantime, this is simply a parade of nurses wheeling baby carriages. It has good composition, movement and even a snapper joke at the end. It just wasn't enough anymore.