Baignade en mer

Swimming in the Sea (aka Lumiere No. 11) is an approximately 50-second long actuality of four boys and a woman running down a small, makeshift pier and diving in the ocean. They circle around to jump in again before the short loops.

The Edison Company's early short films for the kinetoscope were often "flatly" shot, even when layered with rows of motion. The effect is similar to sitting in an audience and watching a play from a straight-on angle, with the action in a rectangular box. To a large extent, this style was probably a result of shooting inside the Black Maria, Edison's "film studio" in New Jersey, which was basically just a large cubic space.

Louis and August Lumiere, two other extremely important figures in the early history of cinema who invented the cinématographe, a machine to compete with Edison's kinetoscope, had a very different approach. They focused on actualities, or motion picture records of "real life", documentary style, in contradistinction to Edison's more artificially constructed scenarios. They also had more of a modern photographic eye, as exemplified in Swimming in the Sea, and tended to shoot at unusual, often oblique angles.

The pier in Swimming in the Sea juts out at a sharp angle from the center of the right hand side of the frame and cuts more than two-thirds of the way across. It's a dramatic visual composition, creating an intriguingly exaggerated perspectival depth, made even more dramatic and dynamic by both the rolling ocean and the quickly cycling bathers/divers. The energetic fun of the bathers is easily conveyed, and you can easily imagine their laughter.

This is well worth watching and easily available now on a number of DVD compilations of early shorts.

Note: I've been reviewing a lot of these early short silent films recently (and I plan to continue to review interesting films from throughout the history of cinema), and some readers feel that my rating a film like Swimming in the Sea a 9 is out of whack with giving a film like Constantine (2005) a 7. Some have asked questions like, "Do you really think that Swimming in the Sea is that much more rewarding/entertaining than Constantine?"

I rate using a rough translation of the 1 – 10 scale as something like the U.S. letter grading scale, so a 9 is a "90%", or an "A". I see films as self-defining the "project" they're attempting, and I take historical, budgetary and other cultural considerations into account to determine that. So the question becomes, "Does this film do a good job achieving what it sets for itself as its task, given its historical/cultural context?" I can answer a pretty strong "yes" for a film like Swimming in the Sea, and not as strong of a "yes" for a film like Constantine. Using the same scale for each doesn't imply that they're quantitatively/qualitatively comparable. The idea is that for attempting an actuality that is aesthetically interesting in an era where only 50-second long or so silent, black & white shorts were possible, Swimming in the Sea is very competent. For attempting an epic-scaled comic book film in the high-technology era of the early 21st Century, Constantine is not as competent.

Baignade en mer (1897)

Here's another entertaining film from the Lumiere Brothers. This one here has the camera placed on the shore of a beach where a bunch of children and adults are playing in the water. We see them splashing around and then getting out, running back on the dock and jumping into the water. This film really benefits from some great images and especially of the beach. Just take a look at the darkness of the picture. Obviously I'm going to guess that they weren't overly concerned with lighting at this point in cinema but the look is really beautiful here. At less than a minute the film really captures a moment in time that is quite priceless.

Back in the days of early cinema many filmmakers would film a choppy sea in order to show audiences how effective a motion picture could be. Audiences, according to some, would freak out at seeing the waves splashing toward them, thinking they'd be soaked. This Lumiere film is one of those, except it has more to it. Besides the sea itself, there is also a pier with several people jumping off into the water. (Nearly all are boys with striped bathing suits, but one appears to be an older female woman). The scene is well photographed, and the Lumieres sure knew were to place the camera to get a good view. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an early use of the film camera.

It's pleasant and rather nostalgic to watch this simple, but lively, footage of a group of swimmers as they dive and splash in the sea. It almost feels as if you are at the seashore, and it also can bring to mind one's own memories of swimming as a youth.

The photography is nicely done in catching the length of the pier and most of the action of the swimmers, and also in catching the rolling motion of the waves as they come towards the camera. Whether by design or by a fortunate coincidence, it makes the movie work even better that it was filmed on a day with such noticeable motion in the sea itself.

The swimmers themselves seem to be having a good time, and it creates an innocent sense of energy and life that accounts for the movie's simple but pleasing nature.

La Mer (1895)

The American title of this Lumiere Brothers short translates to The Sea and that's basically what we watch for thirty-seconds. We see a small number of people splashing around in the water and jumping into it from a dock. There's obviously nothing ground-breaking about this actuality film but at the same time I always enjoy watching these simply because it captures a moment in time and I just think it's rather cool that someone is watching this footage 120+ years after it was shot. Certainly those playing in the water while it was filmed never could have imagined that the movie would still be viewed so many years later.