Author(s): Jacques Aumont and Ben Brewster Source: Film …lisahistory.net/hist106/pw/articles/Lumiere.pdf · 418 Jacques Aumont Fig. 1. By 1930, Lumiere's invention of the Cin6matographe

Lumière RevisitedAuthor(s): Jacques Aumont and Ben BrewsterSource: Film History, Vol. 8, No. 4, International Trends in Film Studies (1996), pp. 416-430Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815391 .

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Film History, Volume 8, pp. 416-430, 1996. Copyright ?John Libbey & Company ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in Australia

Lumibre revisited

Jacques Aumont Fr rance has chosen to celebrate 1995 as the

Centennial of the cinema. In other words, for the majority of the French, against all the evidence, 'the' cinema was invented

by Lumiere.1 Moreover, the French have a well- known tendency to ignore things coming from elsewhere; and how could one deny the glory of being the inventor of the art of moving light to someone with such a portentous name?

On 22 March 1895, ata meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, Louis Lumiere delivered a lecture to an invited audience illustrated with projected photographic plates and a single moving view showing the workers leaving his factory at lunchtime. Only this 'view' was re- marked upon, and the projections that followed (on 17 April at the Sorbonne, on 10 and 12 June at Lyon and on 17 November in Brussels) confirmed this success, which its author had not expected. On Saturday, 28 December 1895, at about six in the afternoon, in the basement of the Grand Cafe, 14 boulevard des Capucines, took place the first public screening, with an admission charge. It consisted of ten films,2 lasted less than a quarter of an hour, and was such a stunning success that it was to be repeated in January 1896 every day continuously from 10 in the morning to 1 1 in the evening, to full houses.

The Cinematographe had been born. But the cinema?

The byways of invention

Invention or intervention?

Lumiere has often been denied the invention of anything whatsoever. Indeed, when he took out his first patent3 for an as yet unnamed 'chrono-photographic apparatus' on 13 February 1895, he had

many predecessors. The cinematograph presup- poses that four basic techniques have been

mastered: photography (including a flexible base), projection, the analysis of motion (and therefore the

principle of intermittent exposure), the synthesis of motion (and therefore the problems of film travel). In none of these domains did Lumiere really contrib- ute a truly new solution, at least if they are taken in isolation:

(1) Flexible film, the crucial base, was marketed by George Eastman, in August 1889; in the same year, Edison suggested perforating this film along the edges in a pattern that has survived in all essentials to this day. Anyway, the perforation of the imagestrip was already fundamental to Emile Reynaud's Theatre Op- tique of December 1888.

(2) Projection was anything buta novelty, since magic lanterns had been in use for centuries.

(3) Without going back to the Phenakistos- cope, the Phasmatrope, and soon, the analysis of motion had been carried out according to principles close to those of the variable shutter in apparatuses such as the astronomer Janssen's photographic revolver (1874) and in particular, Marey's Chronophotographe (patented in October 1890).

(4) Finally, synthesis had been spectacularly achieved by Edison and his Kinetoscope (demonstrated in May 1 891, marketed from April 1894).

What did Lumiere add that might make him an inventor? By his own admission, no new principle. On the contrary, he insisted to his biographer

Jacques Aumont teaches aesthetics and film ana-

lysis at EHESS, Paris. His recent publications include books on colour in film, the relationship of film to

painting, and theoretical questions of representation. Correspondence c/o 77, rue du Faub- ourg Saint-Denis, F-75010 Paris, France.



Lumi6re revisited 417

Georges Sadoul that his only moment of invention (to which he liked to attribute the dramatic circum- stances of a sleepless night) had been to adapt for the intermittent advance of the film in his apparatus the principle of the 'Hornblower eccentric', used, for example, in sewing machines. In the Cinemato- graphe, this eccentric moved a framework bearing two prongs which engaged with the perforations in the film, reduced to one pair per frame (as opposed to Edison's four). Thus each frame was carried in front of the aperture, where it was immobilised for the time of the exposure or projection, since the apparatus was reversible.

It is clear straightaway what was decisive for the invention: its practicability. The key to the machine's commercial and practical success (all that initially concerned Lumiere) was its simplicity and adaptability. A single relatively light and portable machine performed the taking of the pictures, their projection and even the printing of the positives. An unrivalled flexibility of exhibition was the result: with the exception of the chemicals that they would need to obtain on the spot, operators were completely autonomous. In addition, the reduction of the perforations to two per frame and the transport bya simplified mechanism produced sufficient regularity to guarantee the equidistance of the frames and evenness in their exposure. No doubt the machine was notwithout its faults. It had no viewfinder, so it was necessary to frame views before they were shot by means of a piece of ground glass inserted in the gate, also used for focusing. Its maximum capacity was seventeen metres, about fifty seconds, whereas changing the magazine took several minutes. Worstof all, the prongs that moved the film were harsh, eventually distorting the holes and producing an unpleasant vibration. But these failings, visibly due to the haste of a commercial entrepreneur needing to forestall competitors (as Jacques Deslandes has noted),4 were to be partially cor- rected, and anyway did not effect what mattered most.

It has recently been suggested that, where Lu- miere is concerned, we should speak of an 'intervention' rather than an 'invention'. I endorse this formulation, which stresses that Lumiere's most note- worthy contribution was not in the technological domain, still less in the scientific. What he saw, no doubt unconsciously, was that priority should be

given not to the travel mechanism over the film, but to the film over the mechanism. It was the film, its perfect regularity of movement, its stability, that counted - and it was to ensure these that he made his only innovation.5

The priority disputes Given this, disputes about priority become rather idle. Lumiere did not invent anything except a radi- cal conceptual shift, which he was unaware of himself, and a perfect adaptation of the machine to its exploitation, whose ultimate consequences he was also unaware. Is this to have invented the cinema? We hardly care any more. But this was to provide the occasion for interminable and innumerable polemics, starting very early.

At the time, polemical claims were standard issue, they were part of the normal strategy of inventions, and it comes as no surprise to read Albert Londe stating that there is 'nothing new' in the Cine- matographe.6 During the commercial life of the Cinematographe (up to about 1900), Lumiere himself used every possible argument against his competitors and challengers. Georges Demeny, for example, found it very hard to accept that he was not the inventor; but if by October he had discovered the basis for a camera, he did not manage projection until June 1 896; Lumiere had no trouble refuting him, unhesitatingly citing their private correspondence for the purpose.7 Etienne-Jules Marey, who, at the end of 1 894 had constructed a machine enabling ten to twelve pictures to be taken per second, recognised in 1 899 (in a pamphlet entitled La Chronophotographie) that Lumiere had preceded him in the solution of the remaining problems. That left Edison, obviously, whom Lumiere found more difficult to dismiss, since it was the appearance of the Kinetoscope on the market in France that had inspired the whole affair;8 so he always insisted that 'I never saw the inside of a Kinetoscope ... I never laid my hands on a single Kinetoscope film ... I was not inspired by any existing machine when I produced the Cin6mato- graphe'.9 It is hard to be confident of his good faith or his memory, so easy is it today to reconstruct the chronology.10

But the priority disputes were to break out anew on manyother occasions. In 1902, someof Marey's

Lumiere revisited 417



418 Jacques Aumont

Fig. 1. By 1930, Lumiere's invention of the Cin6matographe was seen as the official starting point in the evolution of the cinema, as in this advertisement for an American home-movie camera. [George Eastman House.]

disciples tried to prove that he had invented everything, producing to this end specious distinctions between 'the inspirers, the precursors, the initiators, the inventor, the improvers, the perfecters, the fin- ishers and the commercialisers' (!). In 1924, the placing of a commemorative plaque at the Grand Cafe led to a new round of arguments, and the 1 920s were to see a series of pro- and anti-Lumierist statements, a division into two camps each as excessive as the other which was only to dissolve very gradually and never completely.11

Why these really quite violent disputes for such an ill-defined prize? In the beginning, the motives were probably simply commercial - the patent, and its priority, granting an exclusive right of exploitation. But it is well known that even the best protected patents are eventually imitated and evaded. The problem, in France at any rate, quickly became one of honours, and Coissac thought he had given Marey his due by noting that he 'died a member of the Institute and Commander of the Legion of

Honour' (p. 208). Louis Lumi6re, who died possess- ing the same titles, still thought it necessary, when a candidate for the Academy of Sciences in 191 8, to stress that he was the sole inventor of the Cine- matographe, obtaining a written declaration to this effect from his brother Auguste.12

Only a little later, at any rate by the time of the commemorations of the 1920s, the motivation changed again: the thirst for honours became a concern for glory (posthumous glory, already, or nearly so) and for securing one's place in history - and at the same time, in this period of exacerbated anti-Germanism and ill-considered patriotism, for trumpeting that the cinema was and would remain French. Reading Lumiere's speeches of 1935, the year of his 'jubilee', is enough to realise how tartly he responds to those who cast doubt on his heroic status (he was over seventy, to be sure). As for chauvinism, it is to the Lumierists that we have to look, from Coissac suggesting that not just the cinema, but also the phonograph owe nothing to

418 Jacques Aumont

::

I::




Edison,13 to a plethora of works published just before the War, one by M. Boutaric, a professor at the University of Dijon, in the series 'The Great French Inventions', or one by Charles Hertrich, in a 'series of pamphlets that illuminate the intelligence and the reason, and fortify the will'.

In an 1899 pamphlet of Demeny's we read: 'What is an invention? It is an idea made a reality. To be patentable, the law itself requires that the invention should lead to a new industrial product. The initial idea is not an invention so long as it remains an idea; itmustenter intothe practical field, the mechanical device must be novel, precise and work surely and lastingly for those who have to use it.' That is, there are three basic characteristics (which, be it said in passing, rule out Demeny as an 'inventor'): novelty, practicability and 'industriali- sability'. According to whether one or another of these terms is stressed, different inventors will be indicated. For Lumiere, it is clear that the functional aspect and mass production, were assured at the expense of originality and pure novelty.

Images of an inventor in science

Lumiere himself always cultivated his image as an inventor, by hook or by crook. He deliberately played the part of the absent-minded 'scientist' and handyman, pulling a screwdriver out of his pocket instead of a handkerchief at a party, for example. In addition, he never tired of the tale of the 'stroke of genius' in his invention (the sewing machine that came to his mind on a sleepless night, as a sudden illumination).

Of course, this image was not without roots in reality. In 1881, at the age of seventeen, he produced his first'dry' photographic plate, superior to any previously existing, and in 1882 he improved on it to perfect the 'Blue Label' plates that laid the foundation for the fortunes of the Lumieres. Nor did his inventive fever slacken much after 1 895; among many other patents, he took out ones for a moving picture stereoscope (1900), for making projection safer by means of a ball cooler (1897), for big- screen film (1900), for the Photorama (1900),14 and, of course, for colour: his 'Autochromes' were the first system of colour photography to have a lasting industrial exploitation (patented in 1903, the process was first marketed in 1907). Finally, to

speak only of moving pictures, Lumiere spent his later years working on stereoscopic pictures (the 'Anaglyphs'); on 27 February 1935, he presented a three-dimensional 'Train Entering a Station' to the Academy of Sciences.

So how are we to reconcile these two pictures of Lumiere: the scientist, inventor and engineer on the one hand, and the experienced and pragmatic entrepreneur on the other? Perhaps just by noting that there is not such an absolute separation between these two domains. The first presentations by Lumiere of his invention and of his first films took

place exclusively in scientific or technical contexts: a lecture on the photographic industry, a con- ference of the French Photographic Society, then one of the Belgian Photographic Association. The

opposition between science and spectacle was not so great, given that, from the outset, it was the

curiosity of the public about a laboratory demon- stration that ensured the success of the Cinemato- graphe (until a more strictly spectacular dimension intensified that curiosity). The first audience for the new invention was the audience for applied science, an audience that read Leon Figuier and his Merveilles de la science rather than Jules Verne, the audience that attended scientific lectures. In reviews, these lectures themselves were praised in spectacular terms, as is demonstrated by the adjec- tives that greeted Lumiere's presentations: 'a bril- liant performance', 'a great show' ...15

An experienced entrepreneur

So there is only one Lumiere, both an engineer and an entrepreneur (and also, as will be suggested later, a bit of a filmmaker in his own right). Despite the criticisms, he really did invent something, perhaps just a certain ease in the handling of the moving view. Despite the laudatory superlatives, he was never the first - not even in public projections. He was preceded in America by Latham's Eidoloscope (a machine deriving from the Panoptikon of Lauste and Dickson; public opening, New York, 20 May 1895) and in Europe by Max Skladanowsky and his Bioskop (Berlin, 1 November 1895).16

An audacious businessman

This is in no way to deny his merits or diminish his




420 Jacques Aumont

LYON 96 AW#e*S C $t / LYON

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p.^^^?X-'t A<^?<^ 2tll ine^i/ / @fJf^tw zut.

/to/ - A<y l kf ?r -tn f. tti/.f Jt<yJ ^^

Fig. 2. Lumiere's patent application of 1895, illustrating the revolutionary harmonic cam movement and the characteristic Lumiere film performations. [George Eastman House.]

image. Besides, in discussing the businessman, one should stop individualising and consider the Lumierefamily as a whole. The biography of the father, Antoine, is that of a 'self-made man'. An orphan without means at fourteen, twenty years later he was sufficiently successful as a portrait photographer to have built a masonry house to replace his wooden cabin. But it was his sons who laid the permanent basis forthe family'sfortune, by becoming manu- facturers of dry plates, the great novelty of the 1 880s; not very well managed by the whimsical Antoine, the business was constantly in jeopardy, but his sons were always able to come up with a new product to keep it going. As we have said, the first of these miraculous products was the 'Blue Label' plate of 1882, which brought in 500,000 gold francs in the very first year. In 1894, what was now the Autonomous Company Lumiere and Sons, with a capital of 3 million francs, produced fifteen million

plates and, with three-hundred employees, had become the largest European manu- facturer.

All the elements are in place. In the

mythical department: the 'poor young man's tale' of the father, 'artistic', gifted but unreliable; and the ascesis of the two sons, coming constantly to the family's res- cue. In the industrial: the rapid accumula- tion, thanks to the immediate com- mercialisation of a single product, which was not really an original invention, but matched a commercial 'loophole'. Thusthe Cin6matographe mustat first have seemed to be another commercial 'coup' which might prove as profitable as the dry plates (but no more exciting): the 'Edison is selling it at a fabulous price' should be taken seriously.

The rapidity of decision and realisa- tion is absolutely remarkable - even discounting the anecdote of the sleepless night. The Lumieres began to consider the problem around the autumn of 1 894, and by January 1 895, in all probability, they had a working machine. At any rate, the

`I

420 Jacques Aumont



Lu mire revisited 421

22 March screening, and even more its repetitions, are testimony to the fact that, alone in the world, they had solved the problem of the projection of 'chronophotographic' films. There followed several months of hesitation, after which, in October, urged on by the imminence of competitors (Pathe with Joly's machine, Gaumont with Demeny's), Lumiere ordered twenty-five machines from Jules Carpen- tier, an engineer who had attended the rue de Rennes screening and had created a 6x9 camera, the Photo-Jumelle. The first prototype of the Cinema- tographe was ready by 15 October and after cor- recting some minor faults, the whole series was delivered on 20 December. On 31 December 1 895 - after the triumph at the Grand Cafe - a new order was made, for two-hundred machines, this time: the Lumieres hesitated no longer, they had even de- cided toexploittheir invention themselves, retaining exclusive rights to it.

It should also be noted that their hesitation in the spring and summer did not prevent the cautious Lumieres from beginning to promote their invention nonetheless. The reviews in specialised journals, often linked to scientific institutions (hence the inter- est of the latter), made advertising easy. The Lu- mieres pretty skilfully deployed a certain suspense, announcing their invention without fully revealing its nature. As a result, as early as October 1895, they had received some hundred orders or in- quiries. As for the launch in the strict sense, the entertainment world was more pertinent than business circles, and it was therefore acquaintances of Antoine's who were recruited, especially the photographer Clement-Maurice, who found the room in the Grand Cafe. Much has been made of the famous contract with the proprietor of the latter, who preferred a rent of 30 francs a day to the 20 per cent share of the receipts he was offered - and rued the day, given the thousands of francs taken each day (up to 4,000). It may also have been Antoine who made sure that the program at the first screenings was attractive, including, notably, a comic film. At any rate, the films shown undoubtedly had an audience.

A global strategy On 25 January 1 896, the firstscreening siteopened in Lyon. It was followed by houses in London (20

February), Brussels (29 February), three houses in Paris (April) and beforeJuly, houses in a dozen cities throughout the world, opened quite simply thanks to the network of correspondents established for the sale of Lumiere plates. The remarkable concession system was set up with the very first house outside Lyon: for half the receipts, equipmentand filmswere provided free to the concessionaire, who was almost always an existing employee or representative of the Lumiere company. In parallel, operators were hired and then delegated to various countries. Paid by the concessionaire (!), the operator then shot 'views' which went to enrich the general catalogue, while gaining free local publicity for the Cinemato- graphe (many anecdotes tell of deliberately spectacular shooting sessions, if necessary without film in the camera, designed to attract public attention). Finally, as a last ingenuity of the system, the operator and the concessionaire, separately responsible to Lumiere alone, supervised each other. With this system Lumiere had 'taken over the whole world' by the summer of 1896.

The economics of the system were no less ad- mirable. Outside France, the premises found by the concessionaires were often non-specialised locales (for example, the rather notorious cafe of a certain Aumont in St. Petersburg).17 This saved any furnish- ing costs. Production costs of the rapidly replaced 'views' were very low; the film stock was provided by the mother firm. The repertory - on various pre- texts, including educational ones - was thoroughly saleable, the genres those that had been foreshad- owed at the first screenings at the Grand Cafe: city views, views of tourist sites and, very soon, 'panoramic views' (views taken from a moving vehicle), typical scenes (huge numbers of military scenes, many exotic scenes), newsworthy events (the inevit- able crowned heads) and finally playlets (usually comic). Thus, in the Empire Hall in London, Trewey (a conjuror and a friend of the family, who appears in several views) went for months showing subjects like 'Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace' [Londres, garde montante au palais de Bucking- ham, 257] or 'The Coronation of the Czar' [Fetes du couronnement de S.M. le tsar Nicolas 11, 300- 306], shot in St, Petersburg by Doublier and Mois- son, or quite simply 'Outside the Empire' [Entree du Cinematographe, 250], showing the comings and goings of cars in front of the Empire ...




422 Jacques Aumont

COOK OPERA HOUSE.

Nov. 2-3-4. - - Matinee Dail;

A PAIR OF JACK Special Election Returs received by? d

wire in full viet6 of the audienee and from stage at both performnances, .or., 8.15 and 11.30.

Nov, 5, 6, 7-Carl Haswen in A LION'S HEAl

WONDERLAND THEATEI

LUMIERE'S CINEMATOCRAPH

The Wonderful Animated Pictures

And a Strong Vaudevtlle Compan CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCES.

1.30 to 5.30 and 7.00 to 10.45.

Admission, I Oc, 1 5c, 2

AT FITZHUGH HALL.

Fig. 3. Handbill announcing a Lumiere Cin6matograF presentation as part of the vaudeville bill at the Wonderland Theater, unknown American city, Nover 1896. [George Eastman House.]

Beyond self-advertising (scenes filmed the same day, in which the audience tried to spot themselves, were especially effective), the system was reinforced by links cultivated with the local powers that be, much evidence of which is to be found in their archives. To take a typical case, the congratu- latory telegram addressed to Lumiere by Porfirio Diaz on 28 August; that of HRH the Infanta Isabella of Spain on 8 December 1896 ('Daughters visited Cinematographe this evening, left enchanted, con-

vey congratulations') or on 9 July (21 st) 1 896, the letter accompanied by a cheque for 300 francs (no profit is too small) 'as a reward for the royal plea- sure' sent to MM. Lumiere by the King of Serbia. The

operators, too, cultivated the royal courts, at the risk of going too far, like Felix Mesguich, who was expelled from Russia for filming an officer dancing

the waltz. These operators were, moreover, real soldiers of fortune and the lives of Gabriel Veyre, Francis Doublier, Ma-

Y. rius Chapuis, Andre Carre and their fel- lows, are true adventure serials.18

An invention without a future

fireet However, this was not to last, and Lu- read .3d, miere's dismissive phrase has often been

quoted (it is written on the wall of the RT. theatre in which Fritz Lang is showing his

rushes to his producer in Jean-Luc Go- R. dard's Le Mepris) - usually as a blunder.

But how can we fail to see that it is in fact a perfect description of the 'view' ex-

E ploited by Lumiere? If this invention was 'without a future', it was because it was

incapable of going beyond the stage of the short 'view' to that of the film. No

l'J doubt Lumiere was clever enough to keep mining for what became a fairly long time-lode like that of the exotic view, flat-

Oc tering colonialist ideology and the fasci- nation with exploration, linked to the

rapid growth of industry and communica- tions in the nineteenth century (70 per cent of the world's current railway network had already been laid by 1900).

nber But it could not last indefinitely. And the first setback did not have

solely aesthetic or ideological causes: contrary to the hopes raised by his initial successes, Lumiere was rapidly forced out of North America. Established on American soil in March 1896 through Mesguich and Alexandre Promio, the Cine- matographe was exhibited publicly for the first time on 29 June and was immediately a considerable success. Edison and his Vitascope found this com- petitor hard to beat. But after McKinley's election ('America forAmericans') as President of the United States, hostilities began.19 As early as January 1897 there was an incident, perhaps deliberately provoked, in Central Park; more decisively, imports of raw stock were declared illegal in June, and the Dingley Bill (24 July 1 897) raised the protectionist barriers even higher. The playing field was by no means a level one, and on 28 July, Lafont, the Lumiere representative, re-embarked for France. By

422 Jacques Aumont




the end of the year, Lumiere had given up, no doubt because he feared a legal battle from what was, to

say the least, a weak position; but more fundamen-

tally because, in the absence of a long-term strategy, he was not equipped for a lasting exten- sion to his territory.

Towards the end of 1898, Lumiere suddenly abandoned the concession system, and substan-

tially reduced the rate at which films were produced (from four hundred a year to less than fifty). In 1897 and 1 898, he had tried to keep it going by develo- ping staged films (made in Paris, probably to a commission of Clement-Maurice's): comic views, tableaux vivants, reconstructed historical scenes. But it was to be no more than a flash in the pan, and after 1899, Lumiere kept on only two operators. From then on, he exploited his catalogue (more than a thousand titles by 1900) and entrenched himself in the sale of machines. But this proved not very successful: in the meantime, competing machines incorporating significant improvements (notably the Gaumont-Demeny machine) had entered the market. In 1 902, fewer than one per cent of moving picture houses were equipped by Lumiere.

Lumiere did not believe in the future of the cinema as a film industry. This is what, much later, he told Georges Sadoul: 'By 1900, the applications [my emphasis] of the Cinematographe being more and more directed towards the theatre and consist- ing principally in staged scenes, we were forced to abandon this form of exhibition, for which we were not prepared.' Lumiere had only been able to con- ceive of the development of the cinema industry as one of technical innovation: hence the profusion of new patents already mentioned, none of which, unfortunately, was accompanied by the commercial strategy which alone would have permitted it an industrial existence. For Lumiere, the Cinemato- graphe remained basically an instrument, and it is clear that for him film in the sense we understand it today was just one of its 'applications'. The industry of the imaginary was not for him. Nevertheless, he did make films.

The first filmmaker The first homages to Lumiere, those of the 1920s and 1930s and even those of the immediate post- war period (more discreet - after all, in his old age

Lumiere had backed the Vichy regime), had, as I have noted, set out to celebrate the inventor, the scientist and through him, 'French genius'. A quite different homage was to be offered from the 1960s on, even if it too was to provide an opportunity to honour French genius in its own way.

There can be no doubt that it was the powerful personality of Henri Langlois, founder and then di- rector of the Cinematheque francaise, who origin- ated this second and definitive rediscovery. Already in the 1950s, Langlois had been sensitive to the charm, even the beauty of the Lumiere views, and he had gone so far as to have new prints struck from the original negatives and with the processing of the period. In January 1966 he organised a first retrospective in the auditorium at the Palais de Chaillot, including some two hundred 'views'; the evening took place under the patronage of Andre Malraux, then the Minister of Culture, before whom Jean-Luc Godard made a speech. From then on Lumiere was consecrated as a filmmaker (and, at the same time, a painter). A little over two years later, in November 1968, French television broadcast a program made by Eric Rohmer,20 in which Langlois and Jean Renoir commented on Lumiere views, consolidating in their conversation the figure of the new filmmaker, and giving him the characteristics that he has retained to this day. Only two further consecrations were lacking: that of myth and thatof academic studies. The firstwas acquired with the formulation of the young filmmaker Philippe Garrel, constituting Lumiere the 'Grand Master of the Sect'. The second was not far behind, several scholars having attempted to make him not only the first filmmaker, but the first maker of narrative films, not only in the films with fictional subjects, but also in the most documentary of his views.21

It is thus for more than thirty years that, para- doxically and almost shockingly, Lumiere has been recognised as a filmmaker. But what kind of a filmmaker is this, who did not believe in the cinema?

Lumiere in the judgements of his contemporaries

For the first spectators, things were simple: the Cine- matographe reproduced movement 'with the truth of life' (une 1 895),22 and thatwas enough to justify it and make it worthy of admiration. Nevertheless,




424 Jacques Aumont

I believe we can detect a little more than this in the first recorded reactions.

Here are two, one from Paris, the other from London: 'More than a hundred lively people or

groups come through the gate projected on the screen in fifty seconds' (April 1895, on Sortie d'usine); 'Fully a hundred figures came and went across the canvas, people jostled one another, stopped to chat, shook hands and away, newsboys appeared in search of customers, dogs scampered by ... and other details too numerous to mention'

(February 1896). By contrast, it was noted, 'the Edison Kinetoscope only shows scenes in which one or at mosttwo people perform a series of movements which are repeated like those in the Zoetrope' (April 1 895). Thus there was a taste for spectacular abundance which was satisfied by the Cinematographe, and which had been cultivated in nineteenth-cen-

tury painting: battles, scenes from antiquity (Cou- ture's Romans of the Decadence) or contemporary life (Delacroix's Liberty) - and especially in the now obsolete form of the panorama.23 It is surely no accident that 'panoramas' and 'panoramic views'

appear in the Lumiere catalogue; it is also clear, however, that it was movement that counted in the satisfaction of this taste for the quantitative: a cine-

matograph view no doubt showed less than a battle

picture or a painted panorama, but it did so in a limited, constrained time, making the abundance, the profusion, more obvious, while at the same time the fineness of the spatial resolution of the machine, the size of the screen and the depth of field, made

people highly sensitive to that profusion. As well as enjoying so much stuff offered at

once to the gaze, people were amazed atthe effects that gaze singled out. Effects of pure movement, like the famous leaves that moved in the background to

Repas de bebe24 or the 'waves that arrive and break on the beach' in 'Sea bathing' [Baignade en mer, 11]. Effects that became even stronger when the movement lost its materiality, becoming as it were diffuse: 'Certainly, the marvellous detail, even to the

puffs of smoke from the cigarette, spoke volumes for the perfection of the apparatus employed'; 'Some "Smiths" [Forgerons, 51] who seemed present in flesh and blood then carried out their craft. The iron could be seen reddening in the fire, increasing in

length as they hammered it and, when they plunged it into the water, producing a cloud of steam which

rose slowly into the air, until a gust of wind blew it

away.' Is this too not an apparently magical and in-

stantaneous solution discovered for those problems of rendering which had so concerned painting since the firstopen-air sketchesatthe end of the eighteenth century, including the studies of clouds and rain- bows found in the works of Constable or Delacroix as much as those of Granet or Michel? A challenge to painting: how to represent the ephemeral? It has been claimed25 that this problem was one of the aesthetic and ideological bases for the invention of

photography. It seems just as likely that, aestheti-

cally and ideologically, the Cinematographe was

inspired by the desire for a faithful rendering of such

fleeting phenomena. In other words, both quantita- tively and qualitatively, what the Cinematographe provided its first spectators was the enchantment of

seeing, of at last seeing, what painting had only been able to hint at (and which is probably, though that is another story, no longer for us an essential feature of painting).

The aesthetics of the 'view'

It is not easy today to judge the aesthetic properties of the Lumiere views, since too many poor prints have given a distorted notion of them. As Langlois had already noted, the Lumiere view is hard to

dupe, it loses an indefinable but essential quality, a quality of, precisely, light, a radiance, a 'trans-

parency'. It is the rare prints struck from original negatives that have to be discussed, since it is in them and only in them, that one can see why con-

temporaries were so infatuated: because of the profusion of reality effects.

What is a 'reality effect'? It is any one of those characteristics of figuration that result in a picture's uniquely evocative attachment to the reality it

figures. Painters were well aware of this: many representational inaccuracies are forgiven someone who can transmit, say, the precisely evoked

feeling of some material, of a texture, a light, an iridescence. The Cinematographe excelled at this. Endowed by its construction with an automatic ca-

pacity for representational accuracy (particularly where perspective was concerned), it was by contrast deprived of one essential dimension of visual

experience (including pictorial experience): colour.

424 Jacques Aumont



Lumi&e revisited 425

Not that this was often seen as a failing; the majority of spectators, on the contrary, were only too ready to imagine, sometimes to hallucinate, the colours

thattheycould not see, as is evidenced bythe review of Forgerons cited above. But there is in the views of the Cinematographe - at least in its documentary views, the only ones I shall really be considering for the moment - a marked propensity to palliate this absence by a constant and as it were virtuoso dem- onstration of the art of producing something just as

pleasing, as charming, as essentially visible. This

'something' can take many forms, and from the smoke of the 'Weed Burners' [Mauvaises herbes, 64], of 'Shoeing Horses' [Marechal-ferrant, 62] or of the splendid 'Unloading a Ship' in Barcelona

[D6chargement d'un navire, 34], to the water-

spouts of the 'Lake in the Tuileries Garden' [Paris, Bassin des Tuileries, 150] or the moire patterns of sun on sea, the range is fairly wide. Nevertheless, the Lumiere view always demonstrates its capacity to seize these effects in their fleeting evanescence - preferably an effect of pure luminosity, not overly dependent on chromaticism.

But these things are what the Lumiere cameraman captured, as itwere, in spite of himself, simply by recording pictures: they are almost a chemical matter, solved once and for all by the film stock, its sensitivity, its gray scale, its 'clarity'. He was more concerned with the direction of his gaze, the viewpoint from which he cast it, and his distance from the event filmed: in other words, he had to worry about framing. The views that Edison filmed in his 'Black Maria' were very poor in this respect: a barely visible perspective of the balustrades sur- rounding the stage and the floor itself; a minimal opposition between monochromatic (even achro- matic) floor and background; figures in fairly low relief, almost cut out of the black background. The Lumiere view was quite the opposite.

What is immediately striking today in the diver- sity and uneven success of these hundreds of films is the taste for experimentation, but for an experimentation based on a great certainty. Take the example, which must make up a good half of the documentary views, of the generic figure of the procession: military and civilian parades, religious processions, official or privatecorteges, races, lines of passing vehicles and of course, the famous trains entering stations (dozens of them, all over the

world). Almost always the procession is filmed ob- liquely, so that it occupies a nearly diagonal line; but the angle of view is extraordinarily diverse, in order to cope with the precise relationship between the breadth of whatever is processing and that of the available field. Why? Simply to have the most

complete, the fullest possible view. Sometimes, however, physical constraints on the shooting lead to an unexpected solution, which does not offer this

plenitude, but can turn out to be interesting in an another respect: the cameraman who filmed the

'Wedding Procession Entering the Church' [Entree d'une noce a I'6glise, 557] must have regretted having to film it almost frontally, probably because of the lines of seats which prevented him placing his camera more to the side; but he gained thereby an

impression of the compactness of the procession, whose halting movement gives an absurd sense of mechanical indifference to the individual - as is confirmed a contrario by the 'Wedding Procession Leaving the Church' [Sortie de noce de I'eglise, 558], filmed broadly in the church square, and banalised by the facility of the point of view.

Moreover, if an event lent itself to the adoption of a different point of view, a different framing, then the opportunity was not lost. Side views, almost always caused by the production of a lateral motion, whether this was to allow something moving to arrive ('Embarcation for a Promenade' [Embar- quement pour la promenade, 48]) or more com- monly - this is a whole genre, called 'panoramas' in the Lumiere catalogue - because it was the camera that moved and revealed the landscape bit by bit, in an effect of 'panoramic' vision (see the magnificent 'Entering the Station at Aix-les-Bains in Snowy Weather' [Panorama de I'arrivee a Aix-les- Bains, 81]). Frontal views, they too always deter- mined by the logic of the subjectfilmed, butbyvirtue of a flexible estimation of that logic: 'Washer- women at the Riverside' [Laveuses sur la riviere, 626], filmed from far off to produce an effect of repetitiousness which is part and parcel of their activity (they are similar, they do the same thing at the same time), is not the same as 'Bowls Competi- tion' [Concours de boules, 27], in which the camera was placed in the axis of the bowls' trajectory, at the 'end' of the pitch, the better to see, now sequen- tially, each player prepare his shot. (And of course, this competitive match - even if, for the camera, the




426 Jacques Aumont

I r

a

- !

Fig. 4. L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (Lumire, 1895). The waiting passengers become part of the story. [Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.]

pace was forced, resulting in too many misses-was not filmed from the same point of view as the familial 'Game of Bowls' [Partie de boules, 72] in front of the La Ciotat villa, more decently embraced by an

oblique glance ... ) To regulate the relationship between the ca-

mera, the film and the subject filmed, was also to estimate and manage the duration of that 'subject'. On this terrain, too, the Lumiere views are striking; one often has the feeling that the obligatory fifty seconds, corresponding to the materially imposed length ofthefilm in the magazine (seventeen metres, not one metre more or less), also corresponded, by virtue of some mysterious arithmetic, with 'something' in the duration of the event - that the latter ends, returns to its starting point, or seems in some way to come to a climax. To take an elementary case, the view begins with the entrance into the visible field of a moving object, it ends with its exit; or for a famous example of a variation, in 'Train Entering La Ciotat Station' [Arrivee d'un train a La Ciotat, 653], the moving object appears on the horizon, like a point, at the beginning of the view, and the latter ends after the train has stopped at the platform and - a second event that has made this film rather too convenient an object for theoretical

speculation26 - the passengers have got out.

Broadly speaking it is this sense of duration that has so encouraged people to analyse the Lumiere views as little stories or embryonic stories: many of them seem to have a beginning, a middle and an end and thus to 'tell' what they show.

On this point, too, Henri Langlois had offered an explanation, though onethatwas less theoretical than pragmatic. He suggested that the cameramen did not film extempore, but on the contrary, started

by observing what they intended to film, at length if the subject lent itself to that by its repetitious nature, more rapidly if it occurred only once. For example (Langlois's example), a view of Liverpool, Church Street [700] with passing omnibuses seems so perfect because it ends with the entrance in the fore-

ground, to the right of the camera, of a double-decker bus, spectacular in its own right, and with its conductor looking at 'us'; now, it was per- fectly straightforward to time the interval between buses and thus to begin the shot in time for the next bus's arrival to end it ... Well. The calculation was

certainly not as simple as that, and would rarely

426 Jacques Aumont

I



Lumire revisited 427

have produced such a perfect result. This rational

explanation may not be incorrect, but it is surely insufficient.

What is certain, by contrast, is the fact that the cameramen - by a kind of innate sense or more likely a rapidly acquired habit - grasped the order of the time the event took, and also what kind of disturbances might arise to affect it and which they therefore had to bear in mind. This sometimes led them to choose a point of view that at first sight seems clumsy, but then proves, on the contrary, to have been very clever. In order to film the 'Wedding Procession of the Prince of Naples in Rome' [Rome, Cortege du mariage du Prince de Naples, 283- 284], the cameraman chose a fairly distant oblique viewpoint - a bit too distant is one's first thought: it is hard to make out the personalities in the coaches. But this rather remote viewpoint (perhaps insisted on by the police) allowed the view to include, on the one hand, in the background the superb plume of a fountain, which adds to the scenography a very attractive granular, hazy character, and on the other, in the foreground, a second very informal, even shapeless procession of pedestrians who 'du- plicate' the official procession in their acclamation of the monarchs, entering continually but at unpre- dictable intervals in small groups left of frame, and leaving with picturesque gestures in the foreground (some of them visibly brushing past the camera).

I shall give one last example, because this ad- mirable (and very well known) view seems to me to condense all the characteristics of the aesthetics of the view as I have just outlined them. This is 'London, Girls Dancing in the Street' [londres, danseuses des rues, 249]. Three girls, one on the left side, two on the right, dance while looking at one another. Be- tween them the asphalted space of the street, wet and shining from the rain, and the first thing that catches one's attention; beyond this shiny surface - i.e. in the background-the man turning the handle of the barrel organ, and a small group of other men watching the dancers and facing 'us'. This framing is perfect in its own right, it condenses many of the characteristics of the best views: movement, reality effects that attract the eye, a play on laterality and frontality. Halfway through the view, a man in a frock coat and top hat enters front left, crosses the whole space between the dancers ... and to our surprise, calmly goes up to and joins the group of

spectators. Two other men follow him, entering left, and it becomes clear that this magnificent inclusion of accident in the view had been set up or at least foreseen, by the cameraman. The conclusion is no less remarkable: a horse (presumably pulling a cart or carriage) enters front right, blocks the scene - and the view ends.

Is this a 'narrative'? I would not use the term, but there is unquestionably mise en scene. It is just that the mise en scene is already in the things (like photography for Bergson). The art of representation in the Lumiere view is to capture this mise en scene of the real, which the simplicity of the event does not prevent from being elaborate. (And, in contrast, the deliberately elaborate mises en scene of the 'fiction' views, of 'Nero Trying Out Poisons on Slaves' [Neron essayant des poisons sur des es- claves, 747], of the 'Signature of the Treaty of

Campo-Formio' [Signature du traite de Campo-For- mio, 744], of the 'Assassination of the Duc de Guise' [Assassinat du Duc de Guise, 752], seem

highly simplistic by contrast.)

The invention of pictures

If the Lumiere view based its aesthetic on the repro- duction of a mise en scene already included in the real, what is this 'real' that it reproduced?

It has often been noted, with good arguments and convincing examples, that the Lumi6re view relied to a great extent on the same repertory of subjects as one of its contemporaries, the picture postcard. Emerging almost at the same time, they have the same sense of what is picturesque, from scenes of everyday toil in its most typical aspects to tourist spots and a global exoticism (with a predi- lection for a colonial exoticism, still the pride of the imperialist ideology of the French). Strictly speaking, even without a careful investigation one can point to an important difference between them: if the Lumiere catalogue lists dozens, even hundreds, of views of military parades and exercises, or of the ceremonies of the powers that be, the postcard- registered workers' demonstrations (such as the banned May Day parade on the boulevard Magenta) and its vision of labour is often harsher, even miserabilist. But after all, the Lumieres were




Jacques Aumont

comfortable bourgeois, from Lyon to boot, and well known for their paternalism: could they be expected to demonstrate a social conscience?

Nevertheless, even discounting this sociologi- cal difference, the two pictorial techniques are dis-

tinguished by an obvious butessential characteristic in their choice of subjects: the Cinematographe was the first to offer pictures of moving objects. Mobilis in mobile, like Jules Verne's 'Nautilus', it had no need to divide succession to render it, to fragment duration to represent it. In other words, it was a

picture in motion, and knew it. The dozens of trains

entering stations, panoramas from a locomotive (imitated over and over again by Edison and the

Mutoscope), movements of animals or machines, and the constant search for fleeting effects, mean

only one thing: the filmmakers of the Cinemato-

graphe, Lumiere and his cameramen alike, knew, without having the concept, that they were working with the moving-image. The Lumiere catalogue lists

only one Danse serpentine [765] - the genre that Pathe, like the Americans, was going to make so famous - but all its documentary views offer the

picture of movement. Moreover, the first spectators were not mis-

taken: this was radically new. So new that, with the

Cinematographe (and its competitors) a whole

repertory of pictures of a completely new kind came into being. Perhaps the subjects filmed were banal, everyday - or rather, they had just been banalised

by the already very widespread imagery of the

photographic postcard. But to give a moving-image of them implied a complete renewal of their figuration, and obliges us to ask new questions. Questions of scenography: what is it to film Repas de bebe when, in the background, there are trees whose leaves move, so marked that they attract all the attention? There is no denying that this inaugurated a hitherto unseen relationship between a figure and its ground, and the Lumiere view was never to stop finding variations on this relationship (in Decharge- ment d'un bateau it is a splendid spiralling plume of smoke that fascinates, behind two nonchalant dockers leaning on sacks who completely ignore it). Questions of figuration plain and simple: how does the light shining through the water make a

commonplace 'Goldfish Bowl' [Bocal aux poissons rouges, 1 8] filling the whole screen a disturbing and

magical world? How does a 'Boiler' being loaded

onto a boat [Chaudiere, 20] become as impressive as if it were a lunar rocket?

The Lumiere view, primitive views in general, constitute the first pictures, they 'invent' them, in the sense also in which one speaks of the 'invention' of the True Cross. Viewing everywhere everything that moved, they discovered a hundred unsuspected figures. Figures of animals, restoring the animality that still photography had stolen from them, making of them that graceful, fully justified entity, as per- fectly at home as water in water, in Bataille's beau- tiful phrase (hence, let us note in passing, the unease of views of zoos: it is no longer the animal, but only its prison, that one sees [54, 95]).27 Figures of

machines, for which one would like to be able to use the term machinality- making visible for the first time what a machine is, rudimentary and uniquely mechanical as machines were at the turn of the

century: the 'Threshing Machine' [Batteuse de b1e, 628], the 'Steam Roller' [Machine 6 damer, 637] are the embodiment of the new 'spirits' of the industrial age, and the view lets us divine the harmony of their metallic clanking. Figures of man, finally, in certain states that neither painting nor even photography had been able to figure, beginning with the crowd: no one knew what the picture of a dancing crowd was before 'Spanish Street Dance' [Bal es-

pagnol dans la rue, 358]. Thus, it is less a repertory that is being established here than a new interroga- tion of figuration itself, in all its domains.

It is clear why it had been so essential not to

stay in a studio, not to repeat Edison's mistake, but, on the contrary, to go and seek the figures where

they were, in the real. It is less clear why this has so often led people to speak of 'realism' in relation to Lumiere - except through an equivocation endlessly perpetuated by that notion, which should be con-

signed once and for all to its history (that of lit- erature, above all). The Lumiere views are neither realistic nor unrealistic - even if one sometimes has the very strong feeling that they de-realise whatthey show (as Godard noted, what interested Lumiere was 'the extraordinary in the ordinary'). They are less concerned with the real than they work at

figures; they are, if you will, a kind of description. Lumiere's views invented figures descriptive of

the world, and that is indeed how they have been understood by their best critics: the filmmakers who, by quoting them, have remade them. When

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Lumiere revisited

Jean-Marie Straub films Egyptian workers outside their factory (Too Early, Too Late), he is remaking, while radically changing the point of view and hence the mise en scene, Sortie d'usine. When Eric Rohmer films a conversation with a little bit of yellow cloth flapping in the wind in the background (Le Rayon vert), on the contrary, he retains the mise en scene of Repas de bebe while - minimally - trans-

forming its narrative content. When Godard twice28 quotes Arrivee d'un train, it is first as a pure myth, that of the spectators terrified of the locomotive (Les Carabiniers: the character protects himself with his arms), but thirty years later it is as the power of an event, and the train that enters no longer has to stop (Helas pour moi). With these filmmakers, Lumiere has found his true posterity: not that of the 'Lumiere line' to which he has been confined, but

that, quite simply, of cinema pictures. (Translated by Ben Brewster)

Notes

1. Even the official journal of the very serious Associ- ation Francaise de Recherche en Histoire du Cinema is called 1895.

2. 'Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in Lyon' [Sor- tie d'usine, 91], 'Stunt Riding' [La Voltige, 194], 'Fishing for Goldfish' [Peche aux poissons rouges, 69], 'Disembarcation of the Lyon Photographic Congress' [Debarquement du congres de photographie 6 Lyon, 37], 'Smiths' [Forgerons, 51], 'Watering the Gardener' [Le Jardinier(= L'Arroseur arrose), 99], 'Baby's Meal' [Repas (de Bebe), 88], 'Tossing the Blanket' [Le Saut 6 la couverte, 192], 'Lyon, Place des Cordeliers' [La Place des Cordeliers 6 Lyon, 128], 'Sea Bathing' [La Mer (Baignade en mer), 11 ]. In this note and elsewhere in this article, the numbers following the original French titles in the square brackets are those found in the Cata- logue of the Lumiere Company, which is reproduced in Georges Sadoul, Louis Lumiere (Paris: Seghers, 1964), 157-182 and, for the first thousand numbers and with high-quality illustrations, in Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, Auguste et Louis Lumiere, les 1000 Premiers Films (Paris: Philippe Sers, 1990), 149- 221.

3. There were to be other such patents, for minor improvements, on 30 March and 6 May 1895 and 28 March and 18 November 1896.

4. Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparee du cinema, vol. 1 (Tournai: Casterman, 1966), 233.

5. Didier Caron, 'L'in(ter)vention Lumiere', Cinemath- 6que no. 5 (Spring 1994): 104-116.

6. Reported, rather tendentiously, by the anti-Lumierist Deslandes, op. cit., 232.

7. The 'Lumierist' position was presented, with the maximum bad faith, by G.-Michel Coissac in his Histoire du cin6matographe (Paris: Ed. du Ci- neopse/Gauthier-Villars, 1925), especially 202- 260.

8. At least if we are to accept the often quoted testimony of Charles Moisson, the chief mechanic of the Lumiere factory, according to whom, in the summer or autumn of 1894, Antoine Lumiere had shown Louis a piece of Kinetoscope film and told him, 'This is what you should be making; Edison is selling it at a fabulous price' (cit. Sadoul, Louis Lumi6re, op. cit., 10).

9. Sadoul, Histoire gen6rale du cinema, vol. 1 (Paris: Denoel, 1948), 209, 217.

10. An excellent basis for this is furnished in a moder- ately and reasonably anti-Lumierist work, Laurent Mannoni's Le grand art de la lumi6re et de I'ombre: Archeologie du cinema (Paris: Nathan, 1994), 325-431 . See also Vincent Pinel, Chronologie com- mentee de l'invention du cinema, special number of 1895 (Paris: AFRHC, 1992).

11. The anti-Lumi6rist position is exemplified by Maurice Noverre in his pamphlets on the Nouvel Art cinematographique (published at the author's expense, Brest, 1 925-30); Deslandes dedicated his book to Noverre. In the Lumi6rist camp, between Coissac (op. cit.) and Sadoul (op. cit.), might be mentioned, among others, Henri Kubnick, Les fr6res Lumiere (Paris: Plon, 1938), Victor Perrot, Une grande premiere historique (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1938), Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca, Louis Lumiere, inventeur (Paris: Prisma, 1948).

12. See Notice sur les titres et travaux de M. Louis Lumiere, presumably written by himself (Lyon: Im- primerie L6on S6zanne, 1918); this notice is sum- marised and discussed by E. Wallon, 'L'oeuvre de Louis Lumi6re', Bulletin de la soci6et francaise de photographie 8 (August 1921). The Cin6mato- graphe is only one section out of six in this work (two are devoted to the Photorama and to colour photography, respectively). These documents and many others (especially contemporary reviews and operators' correspondence), were consulted in the collection of Dr. G6nard in Lyon. I am grateful to Dr. Genard for his generosity in allowing this consult- ation.

13. 'A proper [sic!] search would, without too much difficulty, establish ... that the phonograph derived

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Jacques Aumont

from the studies, calculations and achievements of French investigators'.

14. Exhibited from 1902 to 1904 at a special venue in Paris.

15.

16.

Coissac, op. cit., 183-184.

In addition to the works already referred to, see Gordon Hendricks, Origins of the American Film (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972), passim; George C. Pratt, 'Firsting the Firsts', Image 14, no. 5-6 (December 1971).

17. Where Maxim Gorky saw some Lumiere films, which considerably disturbed him. His review has often been cited, amongst others by Deslandes, op. cit., 278. [An English translation has been printed as an appendix to Jay Leyda, Kino, A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 407-409, - Translator's note.]

18. Cf. J. Rittaud-Hutinet, Le Cin6ma des origines: Les fr6res Lumiere et leurs op6rateurs (Champ Vallon, 1985).

19. By an irony of history, it was a Lumi6re cameraman who filmed 'President McKinley's Address to the Nation' [Le Pr6sident McKinley adressant son mess- age au peuple, 433].

20. Louis Lumi6re, produced by Georges Gaudu for Radio-T6elvision Scolaire and broadcast in the series 'Aller au cinema'.

21. Symptomatic examples are Marshall Deutelbaum, 'Structural Patterning in the Lumiere Films', Wide Angle 3, no. 1 (1979): 28-37; and Andre Gau- dreault, Du litt6raire au filmique: Syst6me du recit (Paris: M6ridiens Klincksieck, 1988), esp. 37-51.

22. To avoid excessive annotation, I shall cite contemporary newspapers with no reference other than the date. These citations are drawn either from the books referred to at the beginning of this article or from clippings in Dr. Genard's collection.

23. On the panorama, see, among others, Heinz Bud- demeier, Panorama, Diorama, Photographie: Ent- stehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: H. Fink Verlag, 1970); Ste- phan Oettermann, Das Panorama (Munich: Syndi- kat Verlag, 1980). The panorama was also a photographic genre, as Philippe Dubois has re- minded us, 'La Question du panorama: Entre photographie et cin6ma', Cin6matheque 4 (Autumn 1993): 22-39.

24. A perhaps apocryphal comment attributed to Melies.

25. Peter Galassi, 'Before Photography', catalogue of the exhibition Painting and the Invention of Photo- graphy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 11-31.

26. Thus this view was the first to give rise to the expression of the notion of an intrinsic 'narrativity' in the Lumi6re view. Cf. Sadoul and later, Burch, Gaudreault and many others.

27. Georges Bataille, Th6orie de la religion (Paris: Gal- limard, 1973 [first edition 1948]), 23-35.

28. Or perhaps three times: in Pierrot le fou, Ferdinand sits on the line; when the train enters (from the right), he gets up and runs off, like the 'terrified' spectators in the legend of the first screenings of the Arrivee d'un train.

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Documents

Author(s): Jacques Aumont and Ben Brewster Source: Film …lisahistory.net/hist106/pw/articles/Lumiere.pdf · 418 Jacques Aumont Fig. 1. By 1930, Lumiere's invention of the Cin6matographe