La pêche aux poissons rouges

La Peche aux poissons (1895)

This early film from the Lumiere Brothers has a little girl standing over a fish bowl where she's fishing for goldfish (which is also the American title). If you're a fan of these early actuality movies then you'll probably enjoy this one. The child is certainly cute and charming enough to keep your interest through the one minute running time. It's also fairly fascinating getting to see what her clothing looked like. Those 1895 styles were certainly something! Obviously you're either a fan of these films or not. I personally really enjoy watching them and this was an entertaining one.

This is a pleasantly set-up Lumiere subject in which a toddler pothers around a bowl filled with goldfish. Its composition will please the viewer.

That sounds like the sort of thing you might read in a catalogue of Lumiere films issued about the time, hoping to make the exhibitors buy copies and show them often enough to wear them out and buy new copies. However, while it certainly has good composition, the lack of motion makes this a bad motion picture. Motion pictures were too new to have their own aesthetics and the Lumieres, coming out of photography, were learning them as they went along. Sometimes they nailed that combination of a frame in which things moved around constantly while remaining in composition. Sometimes, as here, they wound up with little more than a pleasant photograph.

This film, along with nine other films, was shown at a Paris, mini-film festival, by pioneering filmmakers, the Lumiere brothers, in December of 1895. This fifth movie, ever shown to a paying audience, is actually a really great ine to see. You immediately start trying to figure out what is going on in the scene. All I could think of is, "dude, don't put that 130 year old baby in that vase". This is totally the 1895 version of a TikTok video. It features Auguste Lumiere having fun with his baby, as they play with a vase full of goldfish. It is a fitting abstract with an infant being showcased in a film, during the infancy of motion pictures. It does deserve an A+, since it was one of the first.

9.9 (A+ MyGrade) = 10 IMDB.