Is this a movie? Or a course? “Lumière: The Adventure Continues”, by Thierry Frémaux, is a film and a lesson. If you prefer, let’s call it a film course.
Following on from “Light: The Adventure Begins”, from 2016, this second adventure presents 120 short films, called “views”, made between 1895 and 1905 and recently restored. Beautiful musical pieces by Gabriel Fauré were chosen to accompany the films, in addition to comments by Frémaux.
Many of these photos are little known. Some can be seen for the first time with this image quality. Others are emblematic of what is called “early cinema” and will likely be recognized during the screening.
Of the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, Louis was the one who took the most risks in directing, opening, with a group of trusted operators, many paths that cinema would follow in the following years.
The views, in this sense, have formal options that have always been sought after: depth of field, large-scale composition, different angles for large or small groups of people, a certain continuity of painting, a visual art that dominated the 19th century.
Even camera movements, which dominated cinema in the second half of the 20th century, are experimented with by placing the camera on top of vehicles such as trains or boats. Discover the countryside the same way you discover Venice and other cities, with photography tours.
Seeing these images from the birth of cinema is moving not only because of their historical importance, but also because of the beauty of the compositions. As Frémaux rightly says at one point: “Lumière’s frames are magnificent, and his films announce that cinema is an aesthetic promise.”
The filmmaker is associated with other geniuses in the history of cinema. Besides Griffith, Frémaux cites Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Murnau, Abbas Kiarostami, Yasujiro Ozu and a few others. We notice that everything is already there, in an embryonic state, without colors and without artifice, in Lumière’s little films: the miracle of cinema.
It would be important for today’s filmmakers to see and study these films. Most of them do not place much value on composition which, as Frémaux points out, has been a very important quality of cinema since the 19th century.
Returning to Lumière also serves to cleanse our gaze of the images of what we conventionally call audiovisual, which belongs as much to cinema as to the disposable absurdities of TikTok.
Lumière’s association with documentary is simplistic, whereas Georges Méliès would have laid the foundations of cinematic fiction. Both are pioneers in both registers, but Lumière prefers realism while Méliès likes tricks.
Basically, Lumière is a filmmaker of the shot, that is to say of the continuity of the action, of what happens between two montages, even if most of his films have no montage, that is to say they have only one shot. Méliès is a filmmaker of editing and cutting. For him, a conjurer, cinema opens up new possibilities for playing with illusion.
Once we have overcome this issue that Frémaux highlights in a few comments, we can be dazzled by the images that Lumière creates by observing the life of the world’s major cities, the small family scenes or the dancers and athletes in their activities.
It is impossible to remain indifferent to these films where the quality of artistic expression is perceptible. Returning there today, the excellence of the views stands out.
So it is easy to choose the theme. Any mediocre director can obtain a good collection of images by searching for the films of Louis Lumière. Something more is needed.
Frémaux, controversial director of the Cannes Film Festival since 2007, knows this and seeks to accompany these images with a good dose of analysis and historical contextualization, creating an intriguing structure that opens up space for cinematic thinking.
It is in this sense that this film, like the first, is akin to a lesson. And this course could only be taught by this director, with the arrangement chosen by him of the images of another.
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