Lumière
and Company
by Sarah Moon, Director
Fox/Lorber Home Video, NY, NY, 1995
DVD, 88 mins. Col., b/w
English, and French with English subtitles
Sales price, $24.98
Distributors Website: http://www.lorbermedia.com/.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, USA
ballast@netins.net
The Latin
for "light" is lumen.
What a wonderful verbal coincidence then
that the Lumière brothers, Auguste
and Louis, were the first to patent in
1895 a motion picture camera, which they
called a "cinematograph." Housed
inside a wooden box and operated by a
hand crank, their camera not only took
pictures, it also projected them. Using
it, they made their first now-famous films,
each lasting about 52 seconds, including
a view of the workers leaving the Lumière
Factory at the end of the day (said to
be the first motion picture), the arrival
of a locomotive at a French railroad station
(both reproduced and parodied in this
production), and a water spraying prank
played on a gardener (which greatly delighted
the audience then).
This current film, which was released
initially in 1995 as a 100-year tribute
to the Lumière brothers, is an
annotated series of forty brief films
(some far more interesting than others)
that were made, in response to a challenge,
by an equal number of todays most
famous film directors (among them David
Lynch, Arthur Penn, Wim Winders, Spike
Lee, Ishmael Merchant and James Ivory,
Liv Ullman, Peter Greenaway, Zhang Yimou,
and John Boorman), in which they agreed
to photograph with a restored version
of the original Lumière camera,
to limit themselves to three takes, no
synchronous sound (although added tracks
were used), and to stay within a total
time of 52 seconds. Judging from the results
(described by one critic as "cinematic
haiku"), as well as from the comments
by the participating directors, this must
have been enormously difficult, and presumably
lots of directors declined. As a consequence,
each film is more or less unique, making
it very difficult to compare one result
with another, or to rank them in terms
of their final success.
In retrospect, I recall that I was particularly
moved by Romanian director Lucian Pintilies
film of the departure of a military-looking
helicopter, in which the oddest assortment
of beings (both human and non-) appear
to be trying to scramble aboard. In that
brief sequence, I was reminded emotionally
of some of the most unforgettable moments
from the films of Federico Fellini, and,
on the other hand, of that forever ghoulish
farce, at the end of the Vietnam War,
when the last American helicopter departed
hurriedly from the roof of the American
Embassy in Saigon (with clinging people
falling off), denying life and safety
to loyal Vietnamese embassy workers, who
had assisted the Americans, thus putting
their fate in the hands of the invading
army.
One final point: I found that much of
my interest in this production had less
to do with cinematography or film history
than with my own fascination (as a teacher)
with the idea of provoking uncommon responses
from students by insisting that they work
within an unfamiliar set of limitations
(an unpopular idea at the moment, since
some would consider it contrary to a more
self-centered use of the word "creativity").
I am not sure if necessity is the mother
of invention, but I do know that novel
ideas result (reliably) from working within
limitations. As a graphic design teacher,
nearly all the problems I present in my
classroom are set up in a form that resembles
the set of constraints that were given
to these extraordinary film directors.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 2,
Winter 2005.)