Lumière! Inventing Cinema Directed by Thierry Frémaux

Lumière! Inventing Cinema

Director: Thierry Frémaux

Starring: Thierry Frémaux

Country: France

Year: 2016

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

"Intelligence position of the camera."

Thierry Frémaux is artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival since 2001.

He has great culture, and has a capacity to read exactly but also with simplicity, a film scene. He demonstrated at the 13th Dubai International Film Festival analyzing the movie Lumière! Inventing Cinema.

After being introduced, he sat on the side of the stage, back to the audience, microphone in hand and explained the images of 114 films of 50 seconds each, shot by Lumière brothers between 1895-1905.

The result is a masterful lesson in cinema.

Thierry Frémaux: "Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly 1,500 films of 50 seconds. Apart from in the first five years, they've Never Been shown in theaters. The aim with Lumière! was to make one single movie out of all the films, so that audiences could rediscover them. " (i)

Despite in the classical picture the brothers appear in mature age, their first shots were filmed when they were young. Louis Lumière was born in 1864 and he shot the first film in 1895 when he was 31years.

The Lumière lived in Lyon and they had a factory. The first film La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon they shot workers in the exit of the factory.

The camera in front of the gate, the workers arrive in mass and shortly they divided to the right and to the left. They walk fast, no one stops. It is a noisy and hectic scene, also without sound.

There are two versions: "They do not invent the cinema. They invented the remake. "

There are group scenes, horses, family meetings.

Their first movie shown in a theater was: L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. A modern scene, the train arrives diagonally and cut the picture in half. Because Lumière were the photographers and had understood the question inside every director: "Where can I put my camera?"

Many scenes are shooting soldiers. Soldiers play with a horse and beside them a man is laughing like a possessed: "I think he is die after the movie".

Or in a very contemporary scene group of the Spanish soldiers dance between them.

There are series of videos were shot in distant cities: Berlin, London, Dublin, Istanbul, Egypt, Venice, Mexico, Baku.

Considering the period and the great misery, many movies regarding poor people but the film Children Gathering Rice shot in Vietnam is so disturbing and sad.

A woman and a little girl dressed elegantly launch in the air or bread or rice or coins and in front crowd of poor kids pick up the food. The typical scene when we throw crumbs to the pigeons.

At the end of the vision, the message was clear: the Lumière are "real filmmaker."

Their movies are not documentaries, they are real directors, because they study the position, the shots, the light.

Coppola, Leone, Eisenstein, Ford, Spielberg, Ozu, Kurosawa, Scorsese are some authors cited by Thierry Frémaux.