Lumière et compagnie

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.

The idea to gather 40 recognized film directors to shoot a mini film of less than a minute, or what would have been the format the Lumiere brothers used in their revolutionary camera, seems a great idea in paper. Unfortunately, what comes out is an uneven film where some of the short films hold our interest and some others that don't go anywhere.

What must have been an interesting idea doesn't translate to brilliant film making in the finished product. This documentary is for fans of the medium, but will not be of any interest to a casual viewer. Some of the most enjoyable ones are the ones by David Lynch, Helma Sanders, Claude Lelouch, Jaco Van Dormael, and Bigas Luna, just to mention a few. The rest, hold some interest, but don't quite add anything new to the idea behind the project.

This DVD is a collection of the interesting, although scattered, results of an inspired project. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere Brothers' first motion picture, 40 directors from around the world are each allowed to shoot a short film using their original hand-cranked model. The participants have to follow three rules: 1. The film is 52 seconds. 2. No synchronous sound (most use musical scoring or dub in foley sound, and many are silent) and 3. They have to get it within three takes. Unfortunately for the viewer, several of the filmmakers opt to merely capture trite snapshots of everyday life. While this keeps in tradition with the Lumiere Brothers' original films, which wowed audiences unfamiliar with moving images a century ago, it makes for a pretty unremarkable experience today. Patrice Leconte pays tribute to their film of a train arriving in La Ciotat, France in 1895 by documenting the arrival of a modern day streamliner at the same location. Alain Corneau applies the technique of color tints to footage of a dancer twirling about. Some of them set up elaborate sequences (Gabriel Axel, Jerry Schatzberg, Peter Greenaway), some are intentionally minimal (Wim Wenders, Regis Wargnier, Andrei Konchalovsky) or simple and symbolic (Arthur Penn, Abbas Kiarostami, Francis Girod, Cedric Klapisch) and a large number turn the camera on itself (Liv Ullmann, John Boorman, Claude Lelouch, Gaston Kabore, Youseel Chahine, Helma Sanders). David Lynch is one of the few directors who rises to the challenge with an exceptionally creative effort, and his is easily the most impressive of the bunch. I'm sure it was an honor for them to be approached for the project, but the entries of Spike Lee, Nadine Trintignant, Lasse Hallstrom, and Merchant Ivory are quite unimaginative and forgettable. The menu screen lists the directors alphabetically, allowing you to jump directly to your favorite ones. Each short is designated by a chapter stop, accompanied by brief behind-the-scenes moments and interviews in which the directors awkwardly answer questions such as "Why do you film?" and "Is cinema mortal?" These unsuccessful attempts at insight are best summed up by Michael Haneke's reply: "Never ask a centipede why it walks or it'll stumble." As a tribute to film history, it's a novel and occasionally successful idea, but much of the work is too inconsistent to earn repeat viewings.

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.

Lumière et Compagnie is a very interesting documentary, giving the audience different perspectives on the meaning of cinema within the concept of its birth a century ago. Heavily centered on directors from France and other countries with strong historical or linguistic bonds to France (Romania, Algeria, Burkina Faso etc.), the movie nevertheless tries to adopt a universal discourse on cinema through evaluating it as a global language of art. Among the movies of the 40 directors and a couple of Lumière examples shown in the film there are certain approaches and themes I find interesting and very much related to the questions asked to the participant directors about the meaning of cinema and its future. Peter Greenaway's segment with the passing calendar years starting from the symbolic date of 1895 with a constant sitting naked man was in that sense very much reminding me the novelty of cinema when compared to the life of humanity and civilization, just like the 52 seconds passing in the life of that man, who is young and promising. The parts combining the whole film together with interviews and shots showing the audience how these individual movies were made was also a theme itself in the movies of Sanders-Brahms, Chahine, Lelouch and Axel, all emphasizing on the making of the movie more than the movie itself as Lumière et Compagnie was about. The concept of realizing the presence of a camera and trying to be on the screen was elaborately used by Booman and Allouache, whereby the latter strikingly combined it with his country's patriarchal social structure. I really enjoy Costa-Gavras' segment, which delicately reminds me of my status of audience after 50 seconds of eye contact with the audience on the screen, for which cinema is produced at the end of the day. Haneke is again outstanding with filming an already prepared television shot, maybe challenging the three rules of the game in an original fashion but I prefer such rule violations when done more sincerely like in the case of Ouedraogo when he was caught by the camera saying "in Burkina Faso we can make four takes with the soldiers". Most of the directors are optimistic and even emotional when commenting on cinema and its future, but somehow many of them sound to me as clichés; maybe they are not so good in speech that's why they chose to make movies. However I think the strongest statement was uttered by Yoshida that cinema cannot capture every moment and the director shooting his movie at the real time of the nuclear bomb attack would be dead. Very reminiscent of Chacun Son Cinéma (2007) prepared for the Cannes Film Festival by 33 directors, it is always fun to watch samples from great directors and the use of the so-called first movie camera as the basic concept is a very challenging and as much as a successful idea.