Lumière! A Aventura Começa

L´Institut Lumière, presided by Bertrand Tavernier et avec Thierry Frémaux as narrator, has issued for exhibition in cinemas this renewed session of some of the first moving images. Preceded in 2015 by the DVD "Lumière ! Le cinématographe 1895-1905" and intended to be followed by "L´aventure continue", it shows 114 selected subjects shooted by Auguste et Louis Lumière and the cameramen they sent around the world, like Alexandre Promio and others. By the way, they would encounter some problems in America with the Edison company.

The films, from 35 mm original negatives and each one of them 50 seconds long, assembled in chapters by subject, have been carefully restored in 4K technology to their best. And it is their best! The image quality is often stunning for these first pieces of glorious cinema from late 1890s until 1905. So much that when the film was shown in cinemas around France it largely surpassed Frémaux´s expectations, as he himself explains in the DVD extras. The screen ratio with rounded corners has been preserved so that watching them resembles the way in which the first public did. A Saint-Saëns soft contemporary soundtrack has been chosen, successfuly accompanying the images without overcoming them. And if the image quality of the short pieces is wonderful enough for their age, wait to see some autochromes as a surprise, unbelievably fresh and colourful as they had just been reenacted. There is also a guest appearance by Martin Scorsese hommaging the factory exit first film.

If the subjects themselves can be a bit boring for today´s audiences (mainly single plane location views, yet sometimes travellings and shots from a boat or train, even special effects), they are so brief and there are so varied that hardly become irrelevant. And as it is also noticed, they have an added quality : many of them distillate amusement, as the Lumière brothers and their friends as actors testify. It makes one but smile to see how their factory workers enjoyed a snow battle at Monplaisir. And although many of us have seen some time or another La sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon or L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (the first and one of the earliest footages from 1895), here we are presented with three diferent versions of the first and an excellent restoration of the second.

The only issues to be raised against this wonderfully fresh compilation are how nice it would have been to include a sample of the restoration process (comparing some fragments before and after) and the fact that, being all of them so brief, listening to the commentaries and/or reading subtitles takes time from watching the films themselves. There´s always the DVD option of watching them silent, as they originally were. Let´s wait that more of these careful compilations will follow in 4K.

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.

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!!

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).