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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
Distributor’s 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 today’s 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 Pintilie’s 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.)

 

 

 




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