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1894, Lyon.

Louis and Auguste Lumière prepare to create a new utopia:

animated photography.

In 1895, they invent the cinematograph.

March 19, 1895, the first film is shot:

"Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory".

The adventure of cinema begins.

Up to 1905,

they shot and produced 1,422 films, most of them unknown.

Here are 108 of them, fully restored, in the original format:

1.33 aspect ratio with rounded corners.

TO BEGIN

One day in March 1895, at around noon,

the Lumière factory doors open.

A new invention, the cinematograph,

is set up facing them.

What did Lumière say? "Go"? "Action"?

No record remain But it's the founding act.

Women exit, then men. A few glance furtively at the camera.

This was considered the first film.

But audiences at the time recalled a horse and buggy.

No matter. A first film was needed. This was it.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

Until another one was found.

Is this version also the first film?

The light is darker, the frame the same. The two are alike.

When inventing cinema, Lumière also invented the remake.

But the shadow is formed by a sun not at it's zenith.

It really is March. The people are dressed warmer.

And what comes at the end?

A horse and buggy.

This third version

is most likely the one from March 1895.

Same characters, some of the same faces, the dog, the bicycle.

Would be high-brows and would be comics,

proving the film is directed.

The adventure begins.

55 feet of film, 35 mm wide,

50 seconds of an enduring eternity.

Chemin Saint Victor is today Rue du Premier-Film

and the first character was the crowd, the people.

June 1895, Lyon welcomes the Congress of French Photographers.

Obne 1895. Lyon welcomes ngress of French Photographers.

A riverboat takes them to Neuville-sur-Saone.

Lumière is on the dock,

filming the happy inventors.

but not happy for long.

Then next day, they see the film.

From then on,

these men with machines resize the invention of cinema is over.

The Lumière brother's cinematograph is the best apparatus of all.

This is Feeding Baby.

One of their first and most famous.

On the left, August Lumière acts while his brother films.

On the right, his wife Marguerite, and daughter Andrée.

People were thrilled by the wind in the trees.

Cinema, meaning written movement, is not photography.

It is kinetic.

This film is remarkably well-framed.

We notice in the bottom right-hand corner

bottle of cognac, proving it's a French breakfast,

a cinema breakfast.

Is this film a documentary? This idea is simple.

A blacksmith filmed frontally with his assistant.

Lumière was probably inspired by a similar Edison film.

Thanks to exceptional lighting,

we can almost hear the hammer on the glowing iron.

Plunged in cold water, its superb smoke fills the screen.

Documentary? The smith has a white shirt and tie.

At the end, someone brings him a drink.

With Lumière, it's all mise-en-scène.

First fiction, first comedy, first gag.

A celebrated film now known as The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

A prank by young Edouard Lumière

inspired the most famous water jet in cinema.

Look closely. The gardener chases the rascal

not only to pull his ears. but to pull him back to the camera.

He gives him a spanking so the film lasts its 50 seconds,

ending with a furtive glance at the camera.

In 1892 Cézanne painted The Card Players.

4 years later, Lumière directed The Card Game.

composed identically.

A testimony of sorts. On the left, Antoine Lumière,

the brothers' father, playing with Alfonse Winckler,

father of the sisters who married the brothers.

On the right, Félicien Trewey, a family friend

who brought the cinematograph to England.

The film is directed.

Look at the waiter, who was ashed to act.

He doesn't act. He overacts.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. the first film to scare spectators,

who thought the approaching train would burst to the screen.

The film was a sensation

and Lumière saw how film could be spectacular.

We see Lumière's family pass by.

But beyond it's fame, the film must be judged ethically.

Look at the detailed composition,

the way the train crosses diagonally,

cutting the screen in two.

White, Gray on the bottom right.

On the top left: dark, black.

Even the films that begin as documentaries

end otherwise.

Take this one, Demolition of Wall,

shot in Lyon-Monplasir in 1897.

The film was made to impress, and impress it did.

As we said, Auguste acted for Louis, who turned the crank.

Here he is in front of the camera,

giving orders to zealous workers.

The film become famous

when, during a projection, a technical incident altered it.

Instead of rewinding the film with the projector off,

the projectionist left the arc lamp on, lighting the screen.

He inadvertencly projected it backwards to the stunned crowd..

Instead of falling down,

the wall was rebuilt in a ballet of swirling smoke.

Imagine the fascination of the spectators at the time.

Duriing the next day's screening,

the factory workers shouted: "The bosses are wizards!" 

LYON, CITY OF THE LUMIÈRES

Lyon, first city filmed by the Lumières.

Tracking shots back then were called panoramas.

This one's subject could not have been treated better.

With the camera inside a train, we enter Lyon

from the north, cross the river and end up at the station.

Lightweight and sophisticated,

the cinematograph provides total stability without any gimmickry,

showing in the distance the recently built Fourvière Basilica.

Though the most famous, La Ciotat wasn't the first or the last.

There were dozens.

A Train Arrives in Perrache is like the reverse shot of the previous film.

The camera is felt not because people look at it,

but because they busily run about, to show they're working.

Before the train stops, they rush to open the doors.

As usual, one distraction, one miracle

leads to a surprise, a mystery.

Look what arrives on the right: another train's smoke.

It's billowing steam outlines a sublime depth of field.

Our Lyon journey continues.

This was shown at the first screening

Place des Cordeliers

is the quintessence of Lumière's cinema

in it's simple approach to reality.

If a film was appreciated Lumière remade it.

Place Bellecour is in the city's most famous neighborhood.

The busiest too.

Probably from a balcony,

the camera recreates the era's exuberance.

Long lost, this film was found and restored like the others here.

For the people of Lyon,

An early example of newsreel.

It shows Lyon, flooded in 1896,

Quai de l'Archevêché now Quai Romain Rolland.

Besides the information it gives us,

notice the remarkable directing style.

Lumière had 3 thins to show: the flooding,

the horses struggling through and the crowd of onlookers.

As Bertrand Tavernier says, quoting Raoul Walsh:

"There’s one right place for the camera."

Lumière found it to capture the reality of of the scene.

A small forward tracking opens this film.

Lumière soon understood the visual power of camera movement.

With experience, they became more refined.

This camera stops for the horses

then tracks back to frame the approaching streetcar.

This film, Place du Pont,

shows Lumière's desire to capture life and reality.

He instructed his camera operators to shoot in the street

when he sent them the world over.

This film was shot in the Cours de Verdun in 1896.

Lyon-style boules was a popular game, and still is.

The game usually requires concentration.

But because of the camera,

everyone hams it up, overacts, exaggerates their gestures.

Even a man on crutches passes by before a throw.

The men's hustle and bustle,

their canes and hats, give the film a sense of jubilation.

CHILDHOODS

Childhood, Lumière's great theme.

This girl is Louis and Auguste's niece.

She is asked to play with a cat and feed it.

The stubborn animal runs off.

Then bam! Comes back.

This film, shot in Lyon in 1900,

recalls the Impressionism of Auguste Renoir

in inspiration, form and content.

It's nearly a close-up,

which Griffith officially invented 10 years later.

All the while, the cat eats, paws at and scratches the child.

This is cinema's first suspense film, Baby's First Steps,

shot as if the drama were imminent.

As a father, Louis liked to conceive of cinema

as a way to preserve family memories.

This child is every child, learning to walk,

hesitating, falling...

or not.

She finally does fall.

But far from ruinin' film,

her fall is it's raison d'être.

This is film number 69

and was shot at the end of 1895.

We see Andrée Lumière, from Feeding the Baby,

and her father trying to make her play with goldfish.

At first tenderly,

then impatiently, shaking her to solicit the reaction he wants.

At the end, his glance at the camera

shows his helplessness.

Here, in another Renoir-style film,

Madeleine Koehler playing with Marcel Koehler,

niece and nephew of Auguste and Louis.

No, not playing. Dancing.

Two different rhythms, two different directions.

This was shot in the summer by Alexandre Promio,

one of the Lumières' best cameramen.

It takes place on an English beach in 1896.

Barefoot in the water as their mother looks on,

the children carry nets, shrimping.

But the film's real subject is its beauty.

The camera's position defined the frame.

Here it is far from the table to have the children in a wide shot.

The films of the cinematograph lasted only 50 seconds.

We see that the boy knows he has little time.

Hence the speed with which he share the grapes with the girls.

Speed and authority, impatience and agitation.

Agitation is the subject, making it funny.

The See was shot in La Ciotat in July 1895,

at Antoine Lumière's beach house.

The children - brothers, sisters and cousins -

play in the sea on a joyful summer day.

The camera sees it all.

Diving, walking back, running off-screen back to the pier.

The film is splendid.

These Children Playing Marbles are not the LUMIÈRES',

though filmed as tenderly.

They are working-class children.

They play in the street. One of them is barefoot.

A girl is dressed differently from the one with the cat.

The film is lively, a unique testimony of 19th-century France.

Here is an oddity,

Precession of Baby Carriages at the Paris Nursery from 1897.

Why was the cameraman there, and why did he decide to film it?

It recalls A Train Arrives in perspective and diagonal,

but with perfectly aligned carriages

pushed by nurses, straight out of a W.C. Fields film.

And then, a happy end:

a baby walking in the opposite direction,

like Chaplin at the end of Modern Times

Lumière's filmography has a great theme:

FRANCE AT WORK

La Ciotat, with their father's large house,

is the Mediterranean city, revealed by the cinematograph.

This descriptive film is defined by the characters' inaction.

Nothing happens.

Everyone looks off screen, waiting, concerned.

until the arrival of a sheet of metal,

probably the film's initial subject,

along with its admirable framing and impressive imagery.

This is called Loading a Boiler.

The composition is once again perfectly executed.

It was shot at the Messageries Maritimes in La Ciotat.

At the turn of the century,

the city's shipyards employed over 6,000 people.

Louis, Auguste and especially Antoine

stopped by to make unforgettable portraits of the city.

Workers Repairing a Street,

number 833 in the Lumière's catalogue,

shot in 1897 in France by an unidentified camera operator.

The smoke renders the image abstract, part film, part photograph.

The camera grasps the moment with grace,

with the usual sense of spontaneity, of documentary

Almost.

A closer look reveals how well-placed the workers are,

and, in the background. how perfectly aliened the onlookers.

In French labor history, the Carmaux mines hold a special place.

Drawing Out the Coke shows coal being prepared for a blast furnace.

The camera is near the burning block.

It fascinated spectators at the time, and still does.

But the composition is unusual.

like two superimposed with two simultaneous actions.

One below, with busy, bustling workers

and one above in Cinemascope, with men pushing wagons.

1896, somewhere in France.

Washerwomen on the River.

Washerwomen were called "la andières", like in Degas.

This time we have three films in Cinemascope.

The horse above, the men in the middle,

and the women doing laundry at the riverside.

It's not so much "France at work" as "women at work".

Let us not forget fishermen.

This could have been shot by Visconti

during his neorealist stage, when he directed La Terra Trema.

Here we are 50 years earlier in the South of France

for this Sardine Fishing.

The stable camera indicates that the operator is on land.

But the framing makes us think we're at sea.

Cinema today would do the same thing.

Was the operator here by chance?

We know nothing of this film, shot in Paris in 1896.

The effect of the galloping horses is impressive.

The horse-drawn fire engine, used until 1920,

carried ladders and water pumps separately.

Lumière objectively showed an era,

its trades and traditions, without re-enactment.

At the end of the film, life goes on.

Unwitting onlookers pass by the camera.

White. The crank stops. It starts. The film too.

Another example of rigorous directing.

This is a well-shot film of horses hauling stones.

They cross the frame diagonally to fill the space.

The idea is to show all the horses and their heavy lead.

The operator had only 50 seconds.

And the camera had no viewfinder.

The image had to be framed from memory.

Look how stunningly timed it is.

47, 48, 49, 50 seconds.

The film is perfect.

After France at work, FRANCE AT PLAY.

Many of Lumière's 1,500 films show French people having fun.

Like this garrison of cuirassiers in Lyon

with its 3,000 men and 1,600 horses.

Here is cinema's nicest horse.

Most patient too.

These athletes take advantage of its kindness

to try, and often fail, somersaults.

Here is the same group exerting themselves.

Jumping the Blanket is very spectacular.

Doubting the film's comic effect,

Lumière added a spectator.

Look on the right.

The old man is in stitches, enjoying the show.

Lumière uses him to tell the audience: "Look how funny this is."

His overacting makes him the film's subject.

The directorial mise en abyme guides us and makes us laugh.

Swimming in the Saone.

When this was shot at the river,

one of two in Lyon,

swimming there had been forbidden for 15 years.

The ban didn't apply to public baths and swimming classes.

These kids make the most of it,

asking us and the camera to admire their dives.

We admire their swimsuits.

This is film 33 in their catalogue,

shot by Louis himself in 1896 on the road to Ambérieu

at the start of the Lyon-Geneva bike race

organized by a local paper, Le Progrès.

Modern sports and cinema began at the same era.

This film shows the popular sides of both.

In a burst of dust and speed, they pedal with confidence,

except the one who stops by the roadside.

7 years later, Maurice Gaurin will win the first Tour de France.

We began with workers at the Lumière factory.

Here they are in Sack Race a popular game back then.

Here, amid the cheering throng,

our favorite is the last one, because he is so bad.

At the end, you'll see the operator's arm.

The director doesn't miss a thing.

Here we are again in La Ciotat, at Clos des Plages,

one of the many homes Antoine Lumière had built.

He received friends there. Here they are playing boules.

The rules were precise though incomprehensible,

because purely for cinema's sake.

Balls are thrown any which way, from anywhere,

at any time, without any order whatsoever.

The bearded man in the middle tries to throw.

He still can't manage.

Then they pretend to measure.

The bearded man finely throws his ball but cheats by getting to close.

Here they are again at the Clos des Plages. This is film 74.

It was shot by Louis in La Ciotat in 1896.

There is Marguerite, Auguste's wife.

Louis' wife Rose.

Charles-Albert, their father-in-law's brother.

Pierre Bellingard, Antoine Lumière's photographer friend.

If we look closely,

it seems that Rose is cheating

which annoys her opponent,

who violently slams shut the game.

Here are the same friends on vacation and now it's time to part.

This is called Departure by Coach It is gorgeously restored.

Now we understand its value.

Antoine Lumière, on the left, shakes hands,

filmed by Louis' cinematograph, which he himself inspired.

We mentioned sports and cinema.

Mountain climbing as a pastime began at the end of the 19th century.

like the cinematograph.

Here we are at the Sea of Ice, near Chamonix,

with tourists climbing a serac.

30 years before, the two other artist brothers, the Bissons,

took a famous picture at the same place.

As if the Lumières were in their footsteps.

To finish "France at Play",

two films about acrobats, The Kremos, friends of Antoine Lumière's.

They must perform their routine in 50 seconds.

The boy goes wild.

Everyone gets ready for the last jumps,

making the film so spectacular.

One final roll...

and everyone goes wild.

The Kremos were a family of acrobats

founded by a certain Josef Kremo.

This film shows Icarian acrobatics,

performed not with objects but people.

Children, to boot.

One child is used like a bundle,

tossed and rolled around,

almost, in a way, battered.

Your turn.

Another shot.

He lands in a little girl's arms.

Now not one child is tossed around, but two.

That was the Kremos.

PARIS 1900

Lumière also shot the City of Light.

We continue our journey in Paris,

where Lumière had his first paid projection

on December 28, 1895 on Boulevard des Capucines.

Paris of the cinematograph

is undergoing great change.

City of world fairs,

of a future fast approaching.

The camera is in the elevator of the Eiffel Tower,

for a vertical tracking shot.

Below, the old Palais du Trocadero,

built for the World Fair of 1878

and taken down in 1935 to build the Palais de Chaillot.

Here we are in the Tuileries Garden,

formerly occupied by workshops making roof tiles.

The film shows a legendary cityscape,

straight out of a painting, photograph or 19th century novel.

A stranger pushes a child unexpectedly out of frame.

The frontal view

gives another example of cinema's depth of field.

Everything is clear, from the children

to as far as we can see.

In 50 seconds, the operator captures the Sunday calm

in the French capital at the turn of the century.

This film with a Proustian touch,

shot during the Grand Prix de Longchamp

is called Back to the Champs Elysées.

Facing Place de la Concorde on the most beautiful avenue,

the cinematograph leaves a trace that is unique,

definitive and representative of the era.

Not unlike the Champs Elysées of today.

Mostly cars, weaving bicycles

and scared pedestrians

trying to cross with caution and difficulty.

Here we have, from 1897, the fourth tracking shot of the Seine.

It includes the Eiffel Tower.

This gorgeous film was shot

by placing the cinematograph or a boat.

We can again praise it's beauty and purity

which give it a mournful tone.

Stairways at the Alma Bridge, shot at the World Fair,

inaugurated fey President Emile Loubet.

It welcomed 50 million visitors

and left the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais.

A bearded man passes twice in front of the camera, fascinated.

In 50 seconds, Proust's eternal Paris

comes back to life for us.

The cinematograph left some purely descriptive films,

historical, ethnological visions of an immutable world.

Concorde "with obelisk and fountains", says the catalogue.

Flow of traffic, men and women on foot,

carriages coming to and for.

The frame is perfect,

a static shot composed with the obelisk and fountains

in the foreground.

To counter the fixity, for this is cinema,

a parade of bicycles, modernized velocipedes

extolled by Jarry and Zola.

After the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysées,

the cinematograph offers the spectator

Notre Dame Cathedral, or rather, it's esplanade.

We think we are there, in 19th-century Paris

where you would hail-a coach to be transported immediately.

The comings and goings in the foreground

contrast with the cathedral, emphasizing the movement.

After the first projection, Louis made a decision.

A WORLD NEARER To send operators all over

who, as Tavernier says, "offer the world to the world".

This is their work.

The South, for a Lyonnais, was a voyage.

On his way to La Ciotat, Lumière stopped in Marseille.

There he filmed La Canabière.

In one silent black-and-white take,

he illustrated the city's sounds and colours.

The camera is static, the action non-stop.

We see sardine merchants, American bars,

funeral homes and streetcars.

In 1900 Lumière immortalized Marseille

by making it the subject of a photorama.

The new invention was inaugurated at the World Fair.

Felix Mesguich, one of the great operators,

brought back many films.

This shows the beach in Biarritz, jewel of the Atlantic Pyrénées.

Splendid view, admirable framing,

even with, on the top right, a piece of the negative.

The cinematograph fixes passing time, instants of family bliss

when beaches were becoming trendy.

Soon, in the same place,

young Lartigue would start taking pictures.

The Fort-de-France market,

shot with just the right attention

by the operator Alexandre Promio

in Martinique in 1902.

It is number 1304 in the catalogue.

We see busy buyers,

well-dressed saleswomen, hawkers with baskets on their heads.

No men. Yes, him, just passing through.

Geneva, the National Expo

shot in 1896 by Promio.

The film is quaint, picturesque.

A wooden chalet,

and a parade of cows, bells, people in local costumes.

Lavanchy-Clarke, Lumière's Swiss sales agent,

prods the dallying throng that glances at the camera.

Soldiers Dancing is the first film which leaves us perplexed.

We see the Queen of Spain's army. They are dancing.

Then they stop.

Then they start again. They do a jota in total disarray.

The group movement is utterly incomprehensible.

Each does his thing,

some alone, and two on the left do a slow dance.

Lumière also invented abstract cinema.

In Barcelona, we meet longshoremen,

dockworkers who leaded and unleaded ships.

Some work on the gangplank. Not the would-be comic

who waves to camera then gets reprimanded.

Others in the foreground do nothing.

But the film's real subject, and its beauty,

is the smoke.

Lumière's film 295,

Panorama of the Grand Canal from a Boat

is famous for containing the first camera movement,

a tracking shot, then called a panorama.

Alexandre Promio

thought if a static cinematograph could film moving subjects,

the opposite might be true. He was right.

In fact another panorama was shot by Constance Girel

in Cologne on the Rhine on September 21, 1896.

36 days before this one in Venice.

To paraphrase John Ford,

"Print the legend, not the fact."

Across the Channel,

Charles Moisson shot England in 1896.

Lumière had business savvy.

Wasn't Workers Leaving the Factory also the first commercial?

Lumière's cinema in London, The Empire.

On the top left, the marquee reads

"Lumière Cinematograph Every Evening".

The theater belonged to Félicien Trewey, whom we saw drinking a beer.

Alas, we do not have a similar shot of the Grand Café.

In Paris too, people went to the movies in carriages.

London's most famous bridge.

The cinematograph gives a detailed portrait of the people on it.

This shot shows the operators had a precise mission.

Bring back images of cities, people, monuments.

Like here, on Westminster Bridge,

which Big Ben dominates like a bowler hat on an English head.

The composition of the film is flawless.

After London's first cinema, now Germany's.

Berlin's Panoptikum, on Friedrichstrasse.

Once again, far from reducing itself to simply showing,

the film multiplies points of view

and vanishing lines in front of the theater.

It emphasizes the women with parasols and chic outfits.

This film impressed Wim Wenders when he came to Lyon

for his tribute to the German inventors, the Skladanowsky brothers.

Back to Great Britain, but this time Dublin and its firemen.

Promio was so fascinated by them,

that 11 of his 15 films in Dublin are about its firemen.

This film utilizes space in a stunning way.

Something happens every 10 seconds.

Coaches pass by and the joyous yet tense crowd reacts,

rushing off screen to a mysterious incident.

This film was discovered during a visit to Lyon by Elia Kazan,

originally from Istanbul.

He was greatly impressed.

Here we are in Turkey's famed city

On the European side of the Bosphorus. This shot of the Golden Horn

is a veritable sequence shot incomparable for the era

and difficult to pull off nowadays.

It employs a circular movement, keeping the mosque always in frame,

showing the sea, the city, a big boat, a small one,

ending with pedestrians on the bridge.

After European Turkey, here is Asian Turkey, as it was called.

Before World War One, Asian Turkey comprised Anatolia, Eastern Armenia

Western Kurdistan, Syria, Palestine,

Mesopotamia and finally Ottoman Arabia.

Shot near Jerusalem in 1897, this film is called Caravan of Camels

and it is breathtaking.

This film opens with a close-up.

The man stares into the camera.

Two years after its invention, the cinematograph had to give viewers

constantily renewed exoticism.

Jaffa Gate was shot in Jerusalem's Old City.

Two children spot the camera and decide to ham it up.

Imagine how extraordinary these films were

for Asians, Americans, Europeans and Africans.

There is a right place for the camera and this film proves it.

It is the first time the pyramids and Sphinx were filmed.

It's utter grace surpasses the subject.

It is perfectly directed.

Shot slightly from below,

Promio sums up in 50 seconds the essence of Egypt.

Camels, horsemen, local attire.

Not to mention the Giza sphinxes and the pyramid of Khafre.

From the start, cinema was a door to knowledge of the world.

The Bey of Tunis and his Court Walking down the Steps of the Bardo.

Crowned heads the world over soon wanted to te be in Lumière films.

Now it is called being media savvy.

The Bey of Tunis wished to to be filmed by Alexandre Promio.

But the procession is so solemn and dense,

we don't know who or where the Bey is.

His film of Tsar Nicholas' coronation was a huge hit for Charles Moisson.

This one is simpler, but stunning.

Shot in Moscow, Tverskaya Street

it recalls the great Russian novels.

A street, like in Lyon or Berlin, but look at the man by the lamppost

He is intrigued by the operator.

He stares at the lens and forces us to stare back.

He becomes the subject, inciting people to join him.

He gives this film an exceptional sense of drama.

Alexandre Promio, who could have been a model for Tintin,

arrived in America in 1896.

He gave Broadway, already New York's main street,

a depth of field in a sparklingly aesthetic film.

Poor Alexander Promio suffered the wrath of Thomas Edison,

who want him deported after organising in great pomp

projections on American soil.

Before he was put on the boat,

Promio had time to direct some wonderful films.

We head west to Chicago.

Promio filmed 5,000 policemen on Madison Avenue,

the city's main street.

Among the 5,000 4,997 have moustaches.

There's one without.

Note again the depth of field,

the use of the diagonal, and two others without a moustache.

Him.

And him.

In Mexico, Gabriel Veyre shot near Guadalajara

this oddity pitting horses against ducks.

And believe it or not, the ducks win,

reconquering their territory, water,

despite approaching horses, yapping dogs and sombrero-slapping Mexicans.

Framing, rhythm, epic.

Gabriel Veyre shows Europeans

a picturesque faraway land.

Annamite Children Gathering Coins at the Women's Pagoda.

Vietnam, in the old protectorate Annam in French Indochina.

The film is instructive. The governor's wife and daughter

hand out pierced coins.

Women in white, children in black. Women standing, children on all fours.

Today the film is a searing indictment of colonialism.

Gabriel Veyre continually toyed with expectations.

Lumière appreciated his boldness.

Boldness was needed to shoot this in Tonkin.

It is called Loading a Cow on a Ship.

In a first take, the animal fell.

Afraid to keep it, he destroyed the negative.

He shot a second one, which we see here.

Did Lumière also invent artial arts movies?

After crossing the China Sea Constant Girel stopped in Japan,

in Kyoto, its historic capital,

plunging himself in a world enigmatic to the West.

A set bedecked with flags and two kendoka in a gorgeous wide shot.

It is Lumière's style incarnate: a subject, a point of view, a treatment.

The shot anticipates film history.

Kurosawa shot the same scene in The Seven Samurai 60 years later.

This new chapter will show that Lumière is also fiction, COMEDY.

Successful films were shown everywhere.

So many copies were printed that the negatives got worn.

One big hit, The Sprinkler Sprinkled, was remade several times.

This version uses depth of field and mere sophisticated acting.

It ends with a nice look at the camera.

Lumière made many military vaudeville romps.

The Boy's Nanny and the Soldier, has perfect timing.

Again, the viewer has a counterpart inside the action

with a character whose laughter incites the audience's.

It all ends with slaps,

a common occurrence in Lumière's fiction.

Shot in 1897 in England,

the first film about soccer, with it's new, modern rules.

Static camera,

so impossible to follow the ball.

Here it disappears suddenly.

The film becomes funny.

The ball's position

must be guessed by the players' movements.

They perform a random ballet.

948 in the Lumière catalogue: Mattress Makers Fight.

In this curious film, the fighting women

are played by men, as in Shakespeare.

It is hard to imagine the idea.

It seems to escape the characters, subject and director.

The peacemaker becomes the object of their fury.

Then people come from everywhere, in a joyful mess.

feathers suspended in mid-air,

like the film.

This is called Lover in the Bag,

a sort of Romeo and Juliet in one-take.

It was shot in studio like most Lumière comedies.

Atop her balcony, Juliet is played by Eugenie Laurent,

a factory worker from Monplaisir.

The usual outcome, amid general hilarity,

while the viewer is invited to laugh by a look at the camera.

In Lumière films Félicien Trewey,

their agent in England, and friend of their father's.

The characters he plays thanks to his magic hat:

Aristide Bruant, Edward III, a Scotsman, a Chinaman,

fisherman, concierge, Don Basilio, policeman and Salvation Army man.

It helps to be told.

The French army is back. Chasseurs Alpins doing drills

in a comedy that is extraordinarily unintentional.

The main character feels ridiculous.

He looks questioningly at the camera.

The Chasseurs Alpins were mountain infantrymen created in 1888.

They wore blue uniforms and blue berets called "tarts".

Are they doing this for the camera?

Tavernier says when we see this film,

we see why France back then lost every war.

It was Louis aiming in their factory, who made the craziest films,

like this Music-Loving Wood Sawyer

The product of the mind of a jokester.

The mind of a director, too. Props and gags,

slow rhythm like Laurel and Hardy,

and conscientious actors who go all out.

Shot in 1897,

the surprising performance of a ballerina named La Bossi.

She left no mark in dance history, besides this film.

She was told she had 50 seconds to give it her all.

Which she does whit a certain conviction.

Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph and produced hundreds of films,

but also created extravagant comedies.

Like this, shot in La Ciotat in 1896.

When the wheel is spun, tihe animal looked inside,

we understand the film's title, The Mechanical Butcher.

A NEW CENTURY

The oddest vehicle since cinema began.

Near Lyon, where the Jonage Canal was built.

This is an earth packer.

Despite the machine, people still used shovels.

Even while filming complicated public works,

Lumière's composition is perfect.

Everyday events became picturesque and surprising.

We don't know if Lumière read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

But this is like a primitive adaptation of it,

well before Richard Fleisher's in 1954.

Pumping air to the diver, we see on the left

the manual pump, a recurrent comic element

in Red Rackham's Treasure.

The men using it here do so very nonchalantly.

Cinema is movement. Here it is captured in a static shot

that lets the subject move within the frame.

The mobile platform, a moving sidewalk with two speeds.

was the most acclaimed installation at the 1900 World Fair.

People then believed in the future.

Lumière grasped the style, spirit and beauty

of the approaching modern times.

The new century was also the New World.

The bridge connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn

was inaugurated in 1883 after 14 years of construction.

The angle between walkway and stairs

creates a frame in the frame for the streetscar.

These innovations and obstructions were brought by Lumière's operators

from everywhere for everyone.

What do love about this? Its composition?

Or the questions it raises?

In 1897, the Baku oil wells in Azerbaijan caught fire.

The operator placed his camera far from the action.

Only a wide shot could do it justice.

Down below, tiny, a man walks to the left.

The launching of the The Varese was shot fey Francesco Felicetti

in the Orlando Bros navy yard in Livorno,, Italy.

The position of the camera is ideal.

James Cameron chose the same one for launching his Titanic.

The ship invades the screen, the noise, certainly deafening,

calmed by the waves into which it disappears.

"ALREADY CINEMA", or "Lumière's Trace".

These films could have been shot 20 or 30 years later.

This is straight out of Eisenstein. The sailors in Potemkin.

camera in a whaleboat gives the film modernity,

liberty and boldness that not only shows something

but dramatizes it.

Whaleboat Launch is a superb piece of cinema.

Automobile Accident is spectacular. You'll see why.

The accident survivor is the spitting image

of Michel Simon in Boudu Saved from Drowning by Renoir.

We mentioned movement in static shots.

From the start, operators seek points of view that are new,

unusual, abstract, spurring decades of experimental cinema.

This film, titled Goldfish Tank,

allows us to see shapes, shadows, reflections, transparency.

Watching this film, shot: in Italy in 1897,

we could be in a painting by Turner

or a photograph by Gustave Le Gray.

The weather was rough. The operator was there, ready to shoot.

Perfect timing.

The rowboat, rocked by the waves,

is unable to leave the camera's frame.

One day, John Ford told a debutant Spielberg

"Young man, never put the horizon line in the middle."

Here is Lumière showing why.

The film is called Single File on Ice with Snowshoes.

Again we ha the Chasseurs Alpins. some of whom keep falling down.

The Lumières, who had a house in Evian, loved the mountains.

They would go to Chamonix to relax.

This exquisite wide shot leads to a question.

Where did the operator stand to shoot so sublimely

this long row of Chasseurs Alpins.

Earlier we mentioned Kurosawa, now it is Ozu.

The Japanese director, for whom silence was so important,

would have appreciated the low camera angle which he used.

Cinema is not only the art of movement, but of time.

Time is the subject here.

We can't help but admire the arrangement of the opium smokers.

One in a white shirt and black pants, and vice versa.

The cinematograph and Gabriel Veyre even filmed a death in Mexico.

"Cinema is death at work," said Cocteau.

A real death? No.

Shot one morning on a hill near Mexico City,

this was re-enacted with the help of local authorities,

the day after a real duel which left one man dead.

Encouraged by Lumière, who loved oddities in films he was sent,

operators began to place cinematographs everywhere.

Here it is placed in a tethered balloon, drifting away.

The film finds its beauty its trembling, uncertain movements.

This film is like a metaphor for cinema.

Three levels of depth of field, three readings of the film.

Level one, the crowd.

Level two, the boat,

with the chain that breaks. scaring the onlookers.

It is like a movie screen on which things happen.

When it leaves the frame, the same scene reappears,

with viewers from another place.

SEE YOU SOON, LUMIÈRE

We end with some surprising films,

like The Happy Skeleton, the title of this film shot in 1897.

It teaches us this: when they invented cinema,

Louis and Auguste were young men who loved life, jokes and spectacle.

This could have been called French Cancan for Skeletons.

This wasn't shot in color. The colors were added.

They were added by hand. Shot in Italy, it is called Snake Dance.

Loïe Fuller invented modern dance.

This is a tribute to the American dancer.

"Snake Dance" was created by Fuller at the Park Theater in Brooklyn in 1892.

This film is enchanting.

This is one of Lumière's first masterpieces, Snow Fight

was shot near the factory in Lyon on a bright, sunny day.

Lots of things happen. Kids play. A man arrives.

He falls off his bike. He gets pelted.

Tries to leave, forgets his hat.

Shadows on the ground attest once again to the perfection of the cinematograph.

They enjoy themselves to the end,

undoubtedly exceeding indications in the script.

Shot in 1900 by Gabriel Veyre in Namo, Vietnam.

This is perhaps Lumière's most beautiful film.

The camera tracks back,

as it is carried in a chair from the village.

The villagers are fascinated by the contraption.

Lots of children run in front of it.

This little girl wins the race.

The camera fixes her face for eternity.

Her look, her shyness, her joy

give this film it's intensity and emotion.

From the start, cinema was the theater of battles and claims to paternity.

Did Lumière invent the cinematograph?

Was to is machine better than Edison's kinetoscope?

Louis was nobody's fool.

He even made a film about it, Billposters, shot by Promio in 1897.

It describes the success of the cinematograph in Lyon.

Once again. It is directed and acted.

It ends with some slaps, the arrival of a policeman

and glue poured over the agitators.

This is film 42 in the catalogue of Lumière and Sons.

It was shot by Louis.

Despite appearances, there is no trick photography.

Félicien Trewey, whom we saw earlier with his magic hat,

had another speciality: writing backwards.

Proof once again of Lumière's humor and fantasy.

Cinematograph projections often ended with this film.

And it is with its masculine elegance that we end our show.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

EPILOGUE

We have seen 108 films shot by the cinematograph.

In all, Lumière and his operators shot 1422.

That leaves a lot to discover. Many odd machines were invented before,

but none after. When Lumière shot his first films,

it was all there, once and for all.

He was the last inventor and the first director.

From the start, he turned the 7th art into something joyful,

tender and universal.

Cinema amuses and enriches.

What can we do better and what can make us prouder?

A film composed of 108 shorts

shot between 1895 and 1905

by Louis Lumière and his operators.

Directed and commented by Thierry Frémaux

To the memory of the eternal "lumierists"

Camera!

To everyone who visits Rue du Premier-Film, Lyon, France.

Translation: Andrew Litvack

Subtitles by Silverway Media

OCR and timing from the hardcoded subtitles: NaGa