Original subtitles

BASED ON A CINEMATOGRAPHER Thierry Frémaux

ROLLED BY LOUIS LUMIÈRE AND IT'S OPERATORS

BETWEEN 1895 AND 1905

Midday, March 1895,

the doors of the Lumière factory open.

In front of them there is a new invention: the cinematographer.

It's on the sidewalk opposite.

What would Lumière say? ''Come on''? ''Action''?

There is no testimony or file, but it is the inaugural gesture.

The women come out and then the men. Almost nobody looks at the camera.

It was considered the first movie in history,

although the people who saw it I missed a horse carriage.

It did not matter. It was needed a first movie and there it was.

Output of the workers of the Lumière factory.

Until another one was found.

Is this also the first movie?

It's darker, but the framing is the same. They are equal.

When they invented cinema, They also invented the remake .

With the shadow it is observed that the sun is not at its zenith.

It will be March. The people wear warm clothes.

And what appears at the end of the movie?

A horse carriage!

This third version

it is, surely, which was shot in March 1895.

We see the same characters, to the dog and the bicycles.

Those who boast or play the fool For call the atention

they show that it is a staging.

The adventure of cinema begins

with 17 meters of film, 35 millimeters wide,

and 50 seconds of an eternity that still lingers.

Now that street is called Street of the First Movie

and the first protagonist of the story of the cinema was the people, the people.

In June 1895, Lyon welcomed the French Congress of Photography.

A boat takes them to Neuville-sur-Saône.

Lumière awaits you at the dock

and shoot the happy scientists.

Happy, but not for long.

The next day the movie is projected.

From that day,

all these inventors comprise that the cinema has just been invented ..

The cinematographer of the Lumière It is the best device of all.

This is Baby food ,

one of the first and best known movies.

On the left is Auguste Lumière, who acts while his brother films.

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

What impressed people it was the movement of the leaves,

because cinema means movement, I do not like photography.

The image moves.

This movie It is framed to perfection.

We can see below on the right

a bottle of cognac, which proves which is a French lunch,

a movie lunch.

Is this movie a documentary? The idea is simple.

A blacksmith and his assistant engravings from opposite.

Lumière surely he was inspired by some images of Edison.

Here, thanks to its sharpness,

the scene is so realistic that we seem to hear the hammer blows.

The red hot iron in the water produces a superb smoke that fills the screen.

It's a documental? The blacksmith He is dressed in a shirt and tie.

Also, in the end someone brings him a glass of alcohol.

With Lumière everything is staged ..

Here is the first work of fiction, the first comedy.

One of the most famous movies, known as The irrigated irrigator .

A joke by the young Edouard Lumière

it became the water jet most famous in the history of cinema ..

Look good. The gardener chases the rogue

not only to pull you by the ears, but to bring it to the camera.

Add some slaps so that the movie lasts 50 seconds,

and in the end the boy Looks fleetingly at the camera.

In 1892, Cézanne painted The card players .

Four years later, Lumière rueda Game of cards

following that composition.

A movie that shows us on the left to Antoine Lumière,

father of the Lumière brothers, playing with Alphonse Winckler,

father of the sisters married to the Lumière brothers.

On the right is Félicien Trewey, Family's friend,

what do I bring the cinematograph to England.

The movie is a staging.

Watch the waiter whom they asked to act.

It does not act, it overreacts.

The arrival of a train to La Ciotat station

it was the first movie that scared to the spectators

because they believed that the train would go through the screen.

The movie caused a great sensation

and Lumière understood that the cinema should be spectacular.

We see the Lumière family go by.

Beyond its fame, this film It must be judged by its aesthetics.

Observe its composition,

how Lumière did that the train entered diagonally,

thus splitting the screen in two.

White and light tones, Bottom right

and top left, the black and the dark tones.

Although some movies they looked like documentaries,

They were not.

Look at this, Demolition of a wall ,

shot in Lyon-Monplaisir in 1897.

A wall falls. The movie He wanted to impress and he succeeded.

Auguste Lumière acted for Louis, who was the one who filmed.

There he is in front of the camera

giving orders to some workers.

The movie became famous

because during a screening There was an incident that altered it.

Instead of rewinding the movie with the projector off,

they did it with the lamp on and projecting to the screen.

Unintentionally it was projected backwards, before the astonished eyes of the public.

Instead of a demolition,

they saw how a wall was rebuilt after a great dust.

It is easy to imagine the impact in the viewer of the time.

The next day, when they saw the projection

the workers of the Lumière factory, They shouted: '' Bosses are sorcerers! ''.

Lyon was the first city filmed by Lumière.

In those days, traveling they were called panoramas.

This is not the first panorama, but it is the one that is best done.

The camera was placed on a train to enter Lyon

from the north, crossing the river and finish at the station.

Being light and sophisticated,

the cinematographer allowed to obtain a very stable image.

So we see in perspective the newly built basilica of Fourvière.

Although The arrival of the train to La Ciotat It is the most famous, it is not the only one.

There are dozens more.

The arrival of a train to Perrache It's the opposite of the previous one.

People know it's being recorded, not because he looks at the camera,

but because it moves faster to show that you are working.

The train has not stopped yet and the people He rushes to open the doors.

As usual with Lumière, a distraction appears, a miracle,

that fills us with surprise and mystery.

Look to the right. It is the smoke of another train.

Its appearance gives the image a great depth of field.

Our trip through Lyon continues.

This movie was the first that was screened at the Grand Café.

Immortalize the Place des Cordeliers

and it shows the quintessence of the Lumière cinema,

where life is shaped with great simplicity.

If a movie liked, Lumière repeated it.

This is Place Bellecour, located in one of the most famous neighborhoods

and more crowded.

Placed, surely, on a balcony,

the camera allows us to see the boiling of the place and the time.

After years lost, this movie It was found and restored.

For the Lyonns It has an incalculable value.

We see here one of the first news.

It shows Lyon when it was flooded in 1896

from the Quai de l'Archevêché, today Quai Romain Rolland.

In addition to the information,

we must observe the work of direction.

Lumière had to show three things: the flood,

the horses that pass with difficulty and the crowd that watches what happens.

As Bertrand Tavernier said quoting the filmmaker Raoul Walsh:

''There is only a place to put the camera. ''

Lumière found it and captured the reality of the scene.

This movie starts with a traveling forward.

Lumière saw the visual force of the movement of the camera.

With the experience they became more sophisticated.

Here it stops when the horses pass

and the traveling is now going back to follow the tram.

This is called La Place du Pont

and shows the desire of Louis Lumière to capture life and reality.

Rolling in the street is a slogan that is repeated and that will continue

when you send your operators worldwide.

This movie was filmed in the Cours de Verdun in 1896.

This game of lion balls It was very popular and still is.

The game normally it requires concentration.

But, in the presence of the camera,

everyone overreacts a little and exaggerates his gestures.

We even see a man on crutches which crosses just before I throw another one.

With so much pose and gesticulation,

these men with hat and cane They give the movie a popular joy.

Childhood is the big issue in the Lumière cinema.

This girl is the niece of Louis and Auguste.

You have been asked to play with the cat and feed him.

A cat that resists and flees.

Then it jumps and comes back.

This movie, shot in Lyon in 1900,

it remind us the impressionism of Auguste Renoir

for inspiration, the shape and the theme.

And it's almost a close-up,

plane that will officially invent Griffith ten years later.

And while, the cat eats, Ask for more and scratch the girl.

Watch the first thriller of the history of cinema,

shot as if it were going to produce a drama.

Louis was a father and saw the cinema as an instrument

to conserve family memories.

This girl represents all the children. He is learning to walk.

Hesitate It falls

or do not fall

And in the end it falls.

Far from spoiling the movie, that fall

supposes its reason for being.

This is the movie number 69

and it was shot during the second half of the year 1895.

We see Andrée Lumière, the same as before,

and his father, Auguste, who tries Let him play with goldfish.

At the beginning with humor and tenderness,

then with some impatience, He even shakes her to play.

At the end of the movie, the accomplice look at the camera

he expresses his impotence.

Here, in another Renoir style movie,

Madeleine Koehler plays with his brother Marcel,

both nephews of Auguste and Louis.

Actually, they do not play. They dance.

They get excited Each one carries a rhythm and an address.

This movie was shot in summer by Alexandre Promio,

one of the best operators of Lumière.

The scene takes place on a beach in England in 1896.

Barefoot in the water and under the eyes of mothers,

children They fish shrimps with salabres.

However, the main theme It is the beauty of the scene.

The position of the camera delimit the frame.

Here it is located far to show to the three children in a general plan.

As has already been said, the movies they lasted only 50 seconds.

We observe how the child he knows he has little time,

since it tries to distribute the grapes as fast as possible.

We see speed and authority, even impatience and nervousness.

A nervousness that becomes in main theme and makes us laugh.

Bathing in the sea was filmed in La Ciotat in July 1895,

on the beach of the house by Antoine Lumière.

Again, the children, brothers and cousins,

They play in the Mediterranean at sunset.

The camera collects everything.

The jumps, the return to the shore, what is out of plane

and the races by the jetty.

The movie is wonderful.

These children who play marbles they are not of the Lumière family,

although they have filmed them with the same affection

These children are of the so-called working class.

They are boys and girls who play on the street. One goes barefoot.

We see a girl you saw different from the one I played with the cat.

The movie is full of life and it's a portrait of nineteenth century France.

This is mysterious.

It's a parade of baby strollers to the nursery in Paris in 1897.

It is not known what the camera was doing there

nor why he thought that would make a great movie.

Remember the train movie by the diagonal perspective,

but here the locomotive are the strollers perfectly aligned

and the nurses who look like out from a movie by W.C. Fields.

And it ends with a happy ending.

A baby appears walking in the opposite direction,

how Chaplin does at the end of Modern Times .

Filmography Lumière It has a prominent theme:

The working France.

La Ciotat, where the father of the Lumière I had a big house,

It is the city of the Mediterranean whose image will take the cinematograph.

This is a descriptive movie that shines through inactivity.

Nothing happens.

Everyone looks far away, expectant, somewhat uneasy,

until finally it arrives a metal plate,

surely the initial theme of the film,

next to the admirable framing and the wealth of elements it shows.

This is called La caldera .

The composition, once again, it is perfect.

It was shot in La Ciotat in the Messageries Maritimes shipyards.

At the beginning of the century,

the shipyards of the city They gave work to more than 6000 people.

Louis, Auguste and especially Antoine Lumière

they came to record what would be An unforgettable portrait of the city.

Workers repairing an asphalt sidewalk

is the title of the movie 833 of the Lumière catalog.

It was shot by an anonymous operator in 1897 in France.

The smoke gives it an abstract look, between painting and photography.

The camera capture the moment with delicacy,

with that feeling of spontaneity and of documentary tone.

Or almost.

By looking more closely, we see the workers in the foreground

while the background appears some curious perfectly aligned.

The Carmaux mines occupy a place highlighted in French workers' history.

Here we see how they get the coke that will feed the blast furnaces.

The camera is located near the scorching material.

Fascinated viewers of the time and continues to fascinate today.

But the composition is surprising ..

Two films overlap with two simultaneous actions.

The main one is below, where the workers are busy,

and the other one is up, in cinemascope, where others push wagons.

We are in 1896, somewhere in France.

This movie is titled Laundresses in the river.

Women were called washerwomen as in Degas paintings.

This time we have three movies in cinemascope.

We have the horse up, the men in the middle

and women who wash clothes in the river.

When talking about working France, they were mostly working women.

Among the workers There are the fishermen.

This movie it could have been shot by Visconti

during his neorealist stage when he led The earth trembles .

This happened 50 years earlier In the south of france.

This movie is titled Sardine fishing.

The stability of the image indicates that the camera was on the ground,

but the frame makes us believe that we are in the sea

Nowadays the cinema would do the same.

Was the operator here by chance?

We do not know anything about this movie which was shot in Paris in 1896.

The effect provoked is impressive for the horses that gallop by.

Until 1920, fire engines they were pulled by horses

and they carried stairs and water pumps separately.

Lumière showed objectively A time,

their trades, places and traditions without any reconstruction.

At the end of the movie We see how life goes on.

The curious They pass in front of the camera.

White. The crank has stopped and now it continues, as well as the movie.

Another example of care that was given to the staging.

Shows the parade masterfully of the horses of the stonemason Vautier.

They cross the image diagonally to occupy the whole

and show so there were many horses and that they were pulling something heavy.

The operator only had 50 seconds to translate it.

Also, the camera did not have a viewfinder.

It had to be framed the memory image.

Look how well adjusted of time what is

We count: 47, 48, 49, 50 seconds.

The movie is perfect.

After work, comes FRANCE THAT HAVE FUN.

Many of the 1500 films of the Lumière

they show the French having fun,

like this lining of cuirassiers in Lyon

that housed to 3000 men and 1600 horses.

This may be the most sympathetic horse of the history of cinema.

And the most patient.

These athletes they take advantage of that kindness

to chain unsuccessful leaps and cartwheels.

Here is the same group working hard.

It's called The Jump to the Blanket and it's spectacular.

Lumière perhaps doubted of the comic effect,

for what he added to a viewer.

Look to the right.

That older man does not stop laughing. It seems that he loves the show.

It serves Lumière so that people see how much fun it is.

Your overacting makes it the protagonist.

A staging within another It will guide the viewer and make him laugh.

Bathroom in the Saona.

When filmed this movie in the Saona,

one of the two rivers of Lyon,

swim in both rivers It was forbidden for 15 years.

Although it did not affect the public toilets nor to swimming lessons.

That's why these guys take advantage

and act before the camera so we can admire his jumps.

We admire, above all, their swimsuits.

This is the 33rd film from the Lumière catalog,

filmed by Louis himself in 1896 on the road to Ambérieu

at the start of the Lyon-Geneva race and return

organized by the local newspaper Le Progrès .

Modern sports and cinema They were born at the same time.

This movie shows the popular character of both.

Between dust and speed, cyclists pedal with confidence,

except one that stands aside.

Seven years later, Maurice Gaurin will win the first Tour of France.

At the beginning we saw to the workers of the Lumière factory.

Here they are playing a popular game, the sack race.

In this test with a very lively audience,

our favorite character is the last because he does not get it ..

And in the end, stay tuned, We will see the camera arm.

The one of the director who does not miss one.

We are back in La Ciotat, in the house Clos des Plages,

one of the many houses by Antoine Lumière.

He used to invite his friends and here we see them playing ball.

This game had some precise rules, but here they do not understand

because it's about of a representation for the cinema.

Everyone throws as and when they want, from anywhere.

They do not follow an order nor do they maintain a place to throw.

The man with a beard in the middle try to throw.

He can not do it.

They make like they measure distances.

The bearded man finally throws,

but cheats and it gets too close.

Here they are again in the same house. It's movie 74.

It was shot by Louis in La Ciotat in 1896.

We see Marguerite, the woman of Auguste Lumière,

to Rose, Louis's wife,

to Charles-Albert, the brother-in-law of both brothers

and Pierre Bellingard, a photographer friend of Antoine Lumière.

If you look closely,

we watch how Rose cheats,

what bothers your opponent,

that snaps the game box.

This shows back to those friends, but in the farewell.

It's called Departure by car

and its restoration shows all its beauty.

Now we can appreciate its enormous value.

We see Antoine Lumière, on the left, shaking hands,

filmed with the cinematographer of his son Louis,

that he himself inspired ..

We have mentioned sport and cinema.

Mountaineering was a leisure activity that also began in the late nineteenth century,

at the same time as the cinematograph.

We are in the Mer de Glace, a glacier near Chamonix,

with tourists who climb it.

Thirty years before, two artists, the Bisson brothers,

they had done there a photograph that became famous.

It was as if the Lumière follow in his footsteps.

To end this chapter on fun,

we will see two movies of acrobats, the Kremo, friends of Antoine Lumière.

They have to do your number in 50 seconds.

The child goes crazy.

Then everyone is prepared for the last jump,

that will give great spectacular to the movie.

A final flip

and the whole world goes wild.

The Kremo they were a family of acrobats

with the name of the founder, Josef Kremo

This movie shows some icarian acrobatics

That are running with people and not with objects.

Even with children.

A child will pack

and it will be passed, rotated

and martyred too.

For you.

One round.

And it lands on a girl.

Now it's not about throwing one, but two children.

Those were the Kremo.

The city of Lumière It was also the city of light.

We continue like this our trip through Paris,

where the Lumière they made the first payment projection

on December 28, 1895 on the Boulevard des Capucines.

The portrait they make

It is from a city in full change.

With its universal exhibitions,

sees the future arrive by leaps and bounds.

The operator has placed the camera in the elevator of the Eiffel Tower

and it offers us a vertical traveling .

Below we see the old Palace of Trocadero,

built for the Universal Exhibition of 1878

and that was destroyed in 1935 to raise the Palace of Chaillot.

We are near the Louvre, in the Tuileries garden,

that owes its name to that there, Formerly, tiles were manufactured.

The image shows a fabulous print,

that seems to come out of a painting, a photograph or a novel.

Unexpectedly, someone pushes to a child to come out of the frame.

The front position of the camera

shows, again, the depth of field of the apparatus.

Everything looks sharp, from the kids

to the furthest point.

In 50 seconds the camera captures the tranquility of a Sunday

in the French capital at the end of the 19th century.

This movie with a Proustian touch

it was filmed during the Grand Prix de Longchamp.

It's called Return to the Champs Elysees .

In the background the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde.

We are on the avenue most beautiful in the world.

Again the cinematographer immortalize a unique footprint,

definitive and representative of the time.

It does not differ much of the Champs Elysees of today,

since cars predominate, the bikes are cast as they can

and the scared pedestrians

they try to cross with the greatest caution and difficulty.

This movie, shot in 1897, It is the fourth panorama of the Seine.

The Eiffel Tower also appears.

This beautiful movie was filmed

with the mounted camera on a boat from Bateaux-Parisiens.

We appreciate the perfect filming and the exquisite treatment of the subject,

what makes it in an elegiac work.

The stairs of the bridge of Alma , dates from the Universal Exposition of 1900,

inaugurated by President Emile Loubet.

It welcomed 50 million visitors

and left buildings like the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais.

A man with a beard passes twice in front of the camera, which fascinates him.

In 50 seconds, the eternal Paris of Proust

It seems to come back to life.

The cinematographer left us purely descriptive films,

historical and ethnological glances of an unalterable world.

Here is the Concordia, with obelisk and sources, as the catalog requires.

Here is with your traffic, its pedestrians

and his carriages that come and go.

The framing is perfect.

It is a fixed plane that shows the obelisk and the fountains

in front of the buildings.

To give life to the image, because this is cinema,

you see a parade of modern and fast bicycles,

of those that presumed Jarry and Zola.

After the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees,

the cinematograph offers the viewer

the cathedral of Notre-Dame and its square.

We believe in nineteenth-century Paris, where it was enough to call

a coachman to go to any place immediately.

Here we see the contrast between those who come and go

and the imposing cathedral, that emphasizes that movement.

Days after the first screening, Louis makes a decision.

Decide to send the operators all over the world,

for, as Tavernier said: '' Offer the world to the world ''.

Let's see his work.

For a Lyon, going to the south of France was already traveling.

On the way to La Ciotat, Louis Lumière stops in Marseille.

There La Cannebière rolls.

A silent take on black and white

that illustrates wonderfully the colors and sounds of the city.

The camera does not move, but nothing remains still.

We see sardine sellers, American bars

Funerals and trams.

In 1900 Lumière immortalizes Marseille

when shaping the city in an unforgettable photorama,

a new invention that saw the light in the Universal Exhibition.

Felix Mesguich, one of the big operators,

He came back with many movies.

This shows the beach of Biarritz, the jewel of the Atlantic Pyrenees.

The view is splendid and the admirable framing,

although top right There is a piece of negative.

The cinematographer immortalizes the passage of time and the happiness in family

when the beaches They start to get fashionable.

Very soon, in that same place,

the young Lartigue He will make his first photographs.

This is the Fort-de-France market,

Filmed with the necessary attention

for the camera Alexandre Promio

in Martinique in the year 1902.

This is the movie 1304.

We see hiring buyers,

well-dressed saleswomen and others with baskets in the head.

There are no men. Yes, there is the one who passes.

We see here Geneva during the National Exhibition.

It was shot in 1896 for the same Promio.

It shows the typical and the picturesque.

There is a wooden house,

a parade of cows, bells and people with traditional clothes.

There's also Lavanchy-Clarke, the Lumière agent in Switzerland,

that urges people and do not hesitate to look at the camera.

The first film that confuses us is Dancing in the bivouac.

It is the army of the Queen of Spain. The military dance.

They stop.

Then they start again. They dance a jota and it's all chaos.

We see how a group It moves incomprehensibly.

Each one dances at will.

Some dance alone and others, Like those two, they do it.

Lumière also invented the abstract cinema.

In Barcelona we find stevedores,

sailors on land that unload the goods of the ships.

Some work and go through the catwalk, except that funny guy who greets

and to the one who scolds his partner.

Others, in the foreground, they do nothing.

Anyway, the main and beautiful of this movie

It's the smoke.

The movie number 295,

Panorama of the Grand Canal taken from a ship,

is famous for having the first movement of the camera,

a traveling lateral which then called panorama.

Alexandre Promio

he thought that if the fixed cinematograph I could shoot things in motion,

otherwise It was also possible. So it was.

Actually, Constance Girel he made another panorama

in Cologne on the river Rhine on September 21, 1896.

That is to say, 36 days before this of Venice.

Lumière, like John Ford,

print the legend more than reality.

On the other side of the Channel,

Charles Moisson films England in 1896.

Lumière made commercial sense.

Was not it the exit from the factory the first advertising movie?

This is The Empire, the Lumière cinema in London.

Top left reads:

'' The Lumière cinematographer. Every afternoon''.

The theater was by Félicien Trewey, whom we have seen drinking beer.

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

In Paris, people also I went to the movies in a buggy.

We see here The most famous bridge in London.

The cinematographer portrays faithfully the world that surrounds it.

This shot shows that the operators they met a list of conditions:

bring distinctive images of the cities, of its people and monuments.

This is an example. We see the Westminster Bridge,

where the Big Ben stands out, like the bowlers in the English ..

Everything is framed in a perfect composition.

After the first cinema in London, This is the first room in Germany.

It's the Panoptikum in Berlin in Friedrichstrasse.

Once again, far from filming a mere descriptive plane,

the movie presents different points of view

and vanishing lines that cross in front of the building.

Emphasizes elegant women They carry umbrellas.

This movie impressed Wim Wenders when he traveled to Lyon

to be documented for your tribute to Skladanowsky inventors.

In the United Kingdom, this time in Dublin, we see the firemen,

a trade that fascinated Promio so much

that appear in 11 of the 15 movies that rolled in Dublin.

This movie uses space surprisingly.

Every ten seconds something happens.

Some cars pass by and it emerges a cheerful and restless crowd

that goes out of field When something happens that is not seen.

This movie was discovered in the visit to Lyon by Elia Kazan,

originally from Istanbul.

He was very impressed.

We see the most famous city in Turkey

from the European shore of the Bosphorus. This panorama of the Golden Horn

it's a true sequence plane, something without equal for the time

and that even today It would be hard to get.

Describe a circular movement so you can always see the mosque

and let the sea, the city, also go out, a big boat, another small

and, in the background, pedestrians crossing the bridge.

After the Turkey of Europe, we see that of Asia, as it was said then.

Before the First World War, it included Anatolia, eastern Armenia,

Western Kurdistan, Syria, Palestine,

Mesopotamia and Ottoman Arabia.

This movie, Camel caravan, It was shot near Jerusalem in 1897

and it is, simply, majestic.

This movie starts with a close-up, or almost.

The man stares at the camera.

Two years after his invention,

the cinematographer had to fill the curiosity of the public

Worldwide

with a new and constant exoticism.

Jaffa Gate was filmed in the old city of Jerusalem.

Two children repair in the camera and decide to be seen.

Imagine the extraordinary what must these movies be

for an Asian, American audience, European or African.

There is a precise place for the camera and this movie is proof of that.

It is the first time that they are filmed the pyramids and the sphinx.

However, it is a prodigy, more than the subject portrayed,

for the perfect staging ..

With a soft contrapicado

I promise plasma in 50 seconds the essence of Egypt.

We see camels, riders, his way of dressing,

as well as the Great Sphinx of Giza and the pyramid of Khafre.

From its beginnings, cinema will be an instrument to know the world.

This movie shows the bey of Tunisia and his court

going down the Bard's staircase.

All the powerful ones wanted to appear in the Lumière movies.

Nowadays it would speak of media diffusion.

The Tunisian bey wanted me to film him Alexandre Promio.

But the parade It is so solemn and numerous

that we can not distinguish who the bey is.

The coronation of Tsar Nicholas II supposed a great success for Charles Moisson.

This movie is simpler, but magnificent.

It was shot in Moscow, on Tverskaya Street,

in the Russia of the great novelists.

A street, like Lyon or Berlin, but watch the man in the streetlight.

It intrigues the type that moves the crank.

Look directly at the objective and it forces us to look at it.

He becomes the protagonist and people are crowded together.

Give the movie of an exceptional dramatic tension.

Alexandre Promio, who could have served of model for Tintin,

arrives in the United States in 1896.

It gives Broadway, the most important avenue in New York,

a great depth of field in a dazzling movie.

Poor Alexandre Promio, who suffered the wrath of Thomas Edison,

determined to deport those Frenchmen that they had successfully organized

projections on American soil.

Before his expulsion,

Promio had time to shoot a series of splendid films.

We travel west, to Chicago.

Promio filmed 5000 policemen on Madison Avenue,

the main artery of the city.

Of those 5000 policemen, 4997 had a mustache.

There is one that does not carry.

Look again the depth of field,

the use of the diagonal and two other men without a mustache.

East.

And this.

In Mexico, Gabriel Veyre rolls close to Guadalajara

this strange work where horses and ducks meet.

In this battle that seems uneven the ducks win,

who recover its natural territory: water.

They get it despite the horses, the dogs and the Mexicans.

With great sense of framing, of rhythm and epic,

Gabriel Veyre Plasma for Europeans

the picturesque of a distant country.

Anamite children picking sapeques before the pagoda of the ladies.

It's Vietnam, then protectorate of Annam in French Indochina.

This movie is very instructive. The daughter and the wife of the governor

They throw coins to children.

They go white and they are black. They are standing and they are bending over.

Today this movie attests to what colonialism was.

To Gabriel Veyre He liked to break the rules.

To Louis Lumière he liked his daring.

It took courage to film this in Tonkin.

Its titled Embarking of an ox on a ship .

He rolled a first version where the animal falls.

He did not dare to keep it and destroyed the negative.

Afterwards, he shot this second shot.

Did Lumière invent? the cinema of martial arts?

After crossing the China Sea, Constant Girel arrives in Japan,

to Kyoto, its historical capital,

and plunges into an enigmatic world for western society.

Film a place with Japanese flags and two kendoka in a general plane.

The Lumière style is palpable: a theme, a point of view and a treatment.

This shot is ahead of the history of cinema

Kurosawa will shoot this same scene 60 years later in The Seven Samurai .

This chapter shows that the Lumières They also made fiction, comedy.

The success films They were projected everywhere.

With so many copies, the negatives they broke down and had to be repeated.

One of the great successes, The irrigated irrigator , had many versions.

This one uses the depth of field and a more sophisticated comic game.

Finish with a look at the camera.

Lumière did many comedies with military.

This movie, The nanny and the soldier , is millimeter.

Again, to introduce the public into the action,

there is a character that laughs and it encourages the spectator to laugh.

It ends with slaps,

a recurring action in the works of the Lumière.

This take, shot in England in 1897,

It's the first football movie, whose rules had just been set.

The camera does not move,

so it is impossible to follow the ball.

Now it disappears suddenly.

And the movie becomes fun.

The position of the ball

guess by the movement of the players,

That move as dancers of ballet .

The movie 948 is titled Mattress fight .

In this crazy movie, mattresses that fight

resemble mattresses of Shakespeare's theater.

It is difficult to imagine The theme of the movie.

He goes out of his way and seems to escape to the characters and even the director.

The mediator becomes in the target of the anger of both.

Then people come everywhere, it becomes a nonsense,

feathers they are suspended in the air,

just like the movie.

This movie is called The trapped lover.

It's a kind of Romeo and Juliet in the cinematograph style.

It was shot in a studio, like many Lumière comedies.

In the balcony, makes Juliet Eugenie Laurent,

a worker from Monplaisir.

The end is the expected and, while people laugh,

one of the characters looks at camera so that the spectators laugh more.

In 1896, Louis Lumière films Félicien Trewey,

your agent in England and friend of his father Antoine.

It becomes other characters Thanks to the hat:

Aristide Bruant, Eduardo III, a Scottish, a Chinese,

a sardine fisherman, a porter, Don Basilio, a policeman and a soldier.

It helps to know.

The French army returns. The Alpine hunters training,

they create an involuntary comic effect.

A main character it feels ridiculous

and look at the camera, inquisitive, to make sure.

The alpine hunters were an army corps created in 1888.

They wore blue and wore a beret which they called cake.

Do you do these exercises Why is the camera?

Tavernier said that watching this movie

we understand why France I lost all wars.

Maybe in the Lumière factory,

Louis made the most absurd movies,

how is it titled Music-loving woodworker from 1897.

It is the product of a teasing mind.

Of a filmmaker mind too. Had accessories and fixings,

a slow pace as the Fat and the Skinny

and some comedians They played their part conscientiously.

This movie It was shot in Paris in 1897

and shows the performance of the dancer La Bossi.

He left no trace in the history of dance, except for this movie.

He was told he had 50 seconds to demonstrate what he knew

and she did it with some conviction.

Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph and produced hundreds of movies,

but he also did extravagant comedies.

Like this movie, shot in La Ciotat in 1896.

When the animal is inside and the wheel of the machine is activated,

we understand why the take is called Mechanical delicatessen.

We see here the rarest vehicle in the cinema.

Near Lyon is being built the Jonage channel.

The vehicle is a steamroller.

Mechanization does not exclude the use of the shovel.

It is striking that even in large public works,

Lumière will achieve a perfect composition

and take out the picturesque and surprising of the most banal scene.

We do not know if Louis Lumière had read Twenty thousand leagues of submarine travel ,

but this movie seems a primitive adaptation

previous to the one made by Richard Fleischer in 1954.

On the left we see a manual air pump,

that will be a recurring comic element

in The Treasure of Rackham the Red of Hergé

and that here they trigger Two men with a certain laziness.

Cinema is movement. Lumière leaves the camera fixed

and move the characters inside the frame.

The mobile platform, a sidewalk that moves at two speeds,

it was the most acclaimed installation at the Universal Exposition of 1900.

In this France that believed in the future,

Lumière was able to capture the style, the spirit

and the beauty of the new times.

The new century too It was the New World.

In New York, the bridge that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn

It was inaugurated in 1883, after 14 years of works.

The angle formed by the catwalk and the stairs

create another frame where the tram passes.

These novelties and constructions were those that Lumière operators

They offered the world to the world.

What do we like more about this movie? The plastic composition?

Or the question that it raises?

In 1897, Baku's oil wells in Azerbaijan they catch fire ..

There is a Lumière operator and place the goal away from the action

to translate everything into a general plan.

Down and very small, A man walks to the left.

The launch of the boat La Varese It was shot by Francesco Felicetti

in the Orlando brothers shipyards in Livorno, Italy.

The location of the camera is perfect.

James Cameron will choose the same for the launch of the Titanic.

The boat enters on the left with an imaginary deafening noise,

appeased by the foam that causes the boat to move away.

This chapter could be titled '' The footprints of the Lumière '',

because these movies could be 20 or 30 years later.

Look, it looks like Eisenstein and the sailors of the Potemkin .

The camera is in a whaler and that gives it a modernity,

a freedom and audacity that not only allows you to show something,

but also dramatize it.

Shot from a running whaler It is a magnificent work of cinema.

Car accident is spectacular. Now you will see why.

The protagonist survives to the accident and it looks a lot like

Michel Simon in Renoir's work Boudu saved from the waters .

We mentioned the movement with the fixed camera.

From the beginning, operators they looked for new points of view,

unpublished and abstract, promoting experimental cinema.

This fish tank with goldfish

it allows us to see shapes, shadows, reflections and transparencies.

When we see this movie, shot in Italy in 1897,

We are wondering if we are facing a painting by Turner

or a photograph of Gustave Le Gray.

It's bad weather. The operator is there and can turn on the cinematograph.

It could not be more opportune.

The boat, hit by the waves,

moves away and returns without leaving the frame.

One day, John Ford He told a young Spielberg:

'' Boy, never put the horizon line in the middle ''.

Lumière shows here why.

This movie is In single file in glaciers with snowshoes.

We see the alpine hunters. Some do not stand up.

To the Lumière, with house in Evian, They loved the mountains.

Chamonix was a place to relax.

This beautiful general plan It poses a doubt.

Where will the operator be located to film with such a prodigy

the procession of alpine hunters?

If before we evoke Kurosawa, Now it's Ozu's turn.

The Japanese director who gave So much importance to silences

I would have appreciated that the camera was so low.

If cinema is the art of movement, It is also the art of time.

Time is the theme here.

We admire the provision of the two opium smokers.

One goes with a white shirt and black pants and the other, the other way around.

Both Louis Lumière and Gabriel Veyr They filmed the death in Mexico.

'' Cinema is death at work '', said Cocteau.

A real death? Do not.

Shot one morning, near Mexico City,

it's a recreation that took place with the authorization of the authorities

the day after a real duel in which a man died.

Hailed by Louis Lumière, who loved eccentric movies,

the operators began to place the cinematograph everywhere.

Here it is inside a captive balloon that moves away from the ground.

The shaky and uncertain image It gives you all its strength and beauty.

This shot It seems like a metaphor for cinema.

Three levels of depth of field They offer three readings.

The first level is the crowd.

The second level is the ship,

and the chain that is going to break and scare the spectators.

It's like a movie screen where things happen.

When it comes out of the image, the same scene appears

with other people as new spectators.

We will finish with some amazing movies

like this Joyful Skeleton , shot in 1897.

It reminds us something: when they invent cinema,

Louis and Auguste are young and love life, jokes and the show.

This is how they could have called this movie: The cancan of the skeleton.

It's not a movie in color, but it was added later.

It was colored by hand. It was filmed in Italy and it is called Serpentine Dance.

At that time, Loïe Fuller he invented modern dance.

This is a tribute to this North American dancer.

Serpentine Dance is a choreography created by Fuller in New York in 1892.

The movie is wonderful.

Battle of snow is one of his first masterpieces.

It was shot near the Lumière factory in Lyon a sunny day.

Many things happen. People have fun and a man arrives.

He falls off the bicycle and it becomes the target.

Try to leave and forget your hat.

The shadows on the white floor

show the perfect picture of the cinematograph.

People enjoy until the end,

surely exceeding the indications of the script.

Gabriel Veyre shot this movie in Namo, Vietnam, in 1900.

This may be the most beautiful film of Lumière.

With a backward traveling,

the camera, in a sedan chair, leaves the town.

The habitants They are fascinated with the device.

Many children run in front of the camera.

A girl wins the race.

The camera fixes its face for eternity.

His look, his shyness and his joy

they give this movie all its intensity and emotion.

From the beginning, the cinema supposed arduous battles

and paternity suits.

Did they invent the Lumière the cinematographer?

Your machine was better that Edison's Kinetoscope or not?

Louis was not fooled

and he made Poster Punchers , shot by Promio in 1897.

An astute script tells the success of the Lyon cinema.

It is a directed film and with actors, once again.

Everything ends with some slaps, the arrival of the police

and with the glue cube in the head of the agitators.

This is the 42nd film from the Lumière catalog.

It was shot by Louis himself.

Despite appearances, It is not a trick.

Félicien Trewey, which was transformed before with a hat,

I had another specialty: write backwards.

It is one more proof of humor and the fantasy of the Lumière cinema.

The projections They used to end this movie

and with her and her masculine elegance we finish this program.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

We have seen 108 movies shot with the cinematograph.

In total, Louis Lumière and its operators They filmed 1422 movies.

There is still much to discover.

There were many quirky gadgets before the cinematograph,

but none later. When Louis rolls his first films,

everything is there and forever.

He was the last inventor and the first filmmaker.

From the beginning he made that the seventh art was something fun,

tender and universal.

A film composed of 108 pieces

that were shot between 1895 and 1905

by Louis Lumière and its operators.

Directed and commented by Thierry Frémaux.

In Memory of all the '' lumieristas ''.

Camera! Action!

For those who visit in Lyon, France, the street of the First Movie.