Lumière et compagnie

This film was made to celebrate one-hundred years of the first camera used by the Lumiere Brothers. Forty directors from around the world were asked to make a short film with the original camera. The rules being it lasts no longer than fifty-two seconds, only three takes allowed, and no synchronous sound. The directors are predominately French, with a few notable exceptions like David Lynch, Peter Greenaway and John Boorman. Lynch's segment is far and away the most creative and satisfactory effort. Most of the others are mainly static and ordinary. But it's a fascinating documentary with insights and comments from the all the directors, and worth seeing for Lynch's film alone. That was the prime reason I watched it.

1995. The 100 year anniversary of the Lumiere Brothers first motion picture. What better way to celebrate this historical event than to gather 40 directors from around the world for a little game. The game? Each director is given access to the original Lumiere motion picture camera and about one minute of film time. Just the idea of these directors, who are used to making two hour films, throwing all their creativity into one minute is worth seeing. The rest is cinematic history. The directors are also asked to comment on why they film and if they think cinema is mortal or not. It would have helped though if they gave each director's film credits because half of them I never even heard of. This documentary gives us film in its purest art form. It's a must for film students and film lovers alike. Some of the best ones I would recommend to check out are John Boorman's, Peter Greenaway's, and of course, David Lynch's. I would have liked to see more American directors showcased like Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, or Francis Ford Coppola. But all in all, it is an engrossing, thoroughly amazing little slice of history. SEE IT!!!

This video was given to me by a friend who knows that I look at film not merely as entertainment, but art as well. This project with its 40-odd 50 second vignettes done by a mix of directors of varying talents and celebrity, using an antiquated camera, gives an opportunity to see snapshots of their work as pure art. All of them are at least passable, with over half being very, very good. A few of them are truly outstanding, the most notable being Andre Konchalovsky's gem on life, death, temporality and nature. David Lynch's segment is a close second. I highly recommend this to any serious student of film as art.

I think this was a great idea. It works three fold: as a fun game, a slice of world cinema, and ultimately as a celebration of cinema. You get to see some more well known directors while some lesser known though not necessarily less important ones get exposure. I agree that David Lynch's film is probably the standout of the lot for its creativity within 50 seconds and the other rules of the game. But there are also many other interesting things going on throughout the whole exercise;weather the film is particularly entertaining or more personal, the whole project remains interesting. Other films I personally found memorable included the ones by Greenaway (also very creative, particularly his use of light), Zhang Yi Mou (sleight of hand with no special effects), Idrissa Ouedraogo and Gaston Kabore from Burkina Faso, Egypt's Youseff Chahine, to mention a few. Finally, after reading the other comments I wanted to say, instead of complaining that most of these directors showed no creativity why not think about and discuss what you yourself might film if given the chance.

The idea of 41 of the world's leading film-makers attempting to create a short film lasting no longer than 52 seconds and using the original Lumiere Brothers' hand-cranked cameras to celebrate cinema's centenary is a mouth-watering prospect. So why didn't the finished film overwhelm us with this potentially staggering ode to cinema? Well, perhaps because the majority of the directors asked to take part in the project are hardly indicative of the very best of contemporary world cinema. Of course, this is an entirely subjective criticism on my part - I mean, who has the authority to say that one filmmaker is greater than another? Certainly not me - but for the purposes of personal critique I can say quite comfortably that many of the filmmakers included here are lesser talents, comfortable making decent enough films with the occasional greater work thrown in, but certainly not representative of the magnitude and imagination that contemporary world cinema has to offer.

The films collected here are symptomatic of this lack of quality, featuring obvious odes to the Lumiere's with a combination of visual homage and sketches devoid of imagination, or abstract pieces that seem like unfinished ideas. The most obvious of these is Lasse Hellstrom's film depicting a woman waiting for a train and Patrice Leconte's project, which is essentially a shot-for-shot recreation of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896). Some directors attempt symbolism; Greenaway for example, who I admire, turns in a tedious film more befitting of the man who gave us 8 and a ½ Women (1999) as opposed to the ornate majesty of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) or The Pillow Book (1996), whilst Bigas Luna gives us breast feeding and frontal nudity in an empty field. Arthur Penn's symbolic piece - seemingly juxtaposing the birth of cinema with the notions of child birth - is not too bad and has an interesting use of shot-structure and composition, although even here, it must be said that Penn isn't a filmmaker that I would normally consider worthy of such an endeavour, despite the greatness of films like Bonnie & Clyde (1968) and Night Moves (1975).

Other director's squander their chance with worthy experiments that don't pay off. Theo Angelopoulos for examples gives us Greek myth that doesn't really work on such a limited canvas; John Boorman turns his camera on the filming of Neil Jordan's historical biographical film Michael Collins (1997) but lacks the intellect and the depth to actually say anything of interest; whilst Spike Lee attempts to capture the first words of his daughter on film (which is certainly a noble cause, but one that doesn't necessarily lend itself to captivating cinema), etc, etc. Other interesting projects include Hugh Hudson's attempt to document the Hiroshima incident, Claude Miller's delightfully Chaplinesque sketch, Francis Girod's imaginative metaphor, the entertaining and wonderfully composed sketch of Jacques Rivette, and the films by Claude Lelouch and Nadine Trintignant (although they do nothing radical with the format, they are at least beautiful to look at).

It is interesting that many of the director's remain true to form, with their work, for better or worse, managing to tie in with the themes and ideas present in their feature-length work; with Spike Lee placing the emphasis on family; Jerry Schatzberg documenting real life, lower-class struggles; Luna and his adolescent obsessions with sex and women; Costa-Gavras and Michael Haneke offering up clinical, political polemic; Greenaway indulging in essay; and then David Lynch going wild with B-movie homage, shock and imagination. Without question, Lynch's segment is the best of the bunch; the only film that has seemingly had more than a day's worth of planning go into it, with costumes, movable sets, lighting and special effects presenting a mini-surrealist parable about police investigations, the atomic age and extraterrestrials in a single moving dolly shot lasting 52 seconds in total. It's a stunning work; one that reinforces his current-standing as the greatest living American filmmaker and one that captures the pure creative spirit and sense of free-form expression that cinema is supposed to be about.

The other filmmakers on board could learn a lot from this, and probably should have lowered their heads in shame when faced with Lynch's wild imagination and boundless passion for pure, cinematic expression. Many of the other segments are forgettable, even those from talented filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Wim Wenders, not to mention many of the other filmmakers mentioned above. Some of the director's included here were new to me, and judging from the interviews and the standard of their work as it is presented, it would seem that they're probably not worthy of any further investigation (but I suppose only time will tell). Overall, it's not a bad film; the talking heads offer some interesting insights, the cause is worthy enough and the films, for better or worse, reveal something rather interesting about the people who made them.

However, when watching the film, it struck me that many of the greatest filmmakers currently at work (or at least, circa 1995) are curiously absent from the proceedings. Given that this is supposed to be a celebration of film at its very best, it seems strange that highly acclaimed, original and award winning filmmakers - like, for example, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Mike Leigh, Jean Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Shinya Tsukamoto, Shohei Imamura, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Terry Gilliam, Aki Kaurismäki, etc, etc - weren't given the opportunity to create their own short film is truly criminal (or perhaps they were but didn't want to). Either way, it's a great shame, and results in a film that is only of passing interest as opposed to be a completely enveloping, life-changing experience.