I went years believing that Auguste and Louis Lumière created motion pictures, that L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (Train Pulling Into a Station) was the first public demonstration of the technology, and that people freaked the heck out when it did.

I now know these are factually incorrect: The true origin of motion pictures is fraught and you can go down a lot of Wikipedia rabbit holes if you’re so inclined; the Lumières had cataloged 652 separate shots and presented some number of them before that particular train pulled into that particular station; and if #2 isn’t true then #3 couldn’t hope to be (though it’s easy to see why the story endures). 

Yet I think there’s some philosophical truth underpinning all of that, because even though the Lumières are not responsible for the technology of capturing motion, Thierry Frémaux’s new theatrically distributed video essay Lumière, Le Cinéma! has convinced me that they are responsible for the artform that grew out of it.  

And I use that qualification with some affection but tbh mostly disdain. Obviously I'm a big fan of video essays! And this is far from unique or new: I wrote about “YouTube aesthetics invad[ing] film festival documentaries” 14 freaking years ago, when the New York Film Festival programmed the Shining conspiracy breakdown Room 237 (which I liked) and the fishing boat experience Leviathan (which I loathed). Like Room 237, Lumière, Le Cinéma! contains no “new” footage. It is a collection of around 100 shots captured by members of the Lumière company, sequenced with some occasional additional editing, a soundtrack, and narration.

(This is actually a sequel of sorts: the real name of the project is Lumière! The Adventure Continues as a follow-up to his 2017 project, Lumière! The Adventure of Cinema Begins, which I haven’t seen but sounds like it was exactly the same thing just with a different 100ish shots.)

Like Leviathan, Lumière, Le Cinéma! probably could have used a little more of that editing, ya know? The guy immediately behind me fell asleep about 30 minutes in and though I found the snoring deeply irritating, I can't pretend I didn't get it. For the vast majority of the runtime, it is just 50ish-second shot after 50ish-second shot – few of which could be called thrilling – with voiceover that could never be called energetic.

To that point, this is the first movie I ever wish I'd seen dubbed. Frémaux is a pretty bland speaker, and when the whole intent of the project is for the audience to just experience these shots, the fact that at least several seconds of each one required me to read the bottom of the screen diminished its impact. (To be clear, I found the words worthwhile; I just don't think that was the right way to present them to this particular (non-French) audience.)

But let's talk about those shots, because this is a solid sample of what the Lumières cataloged in the decade following 1895. They are the beginning of cinema, and I think it’s important how much of the beginning of cinema was the capture of life: here are a bunch of people leaving a factory (three versions of it, actually!); here is a circus family practicing in the yard; here is a man controlling a water wheel to irrigate his rice paddy; here are people pulling a boat; etc. etc. Some of it is inherently compelling (circus performers are amazing!) and some of it is inherently pretty boring (here’s a moving walkway)… but at the same time all of it is amazing because holy shit no one who is currently alive was alive when any of these recordings were taken. These are all a literal bygone era, and so we get to be transported across time to a Paris and New York and Tokyo and etc. that are often unrecognizable.

And back then… they were the only opportunity for many people to be transported across space! Something that is blindingly obvious but I never really grappled with the implications of is that prior to the public presentation of motion pictures, people literally did not know how the world moved. Words are wonderful and can be endlessly descriptive; paintings and photographs can capture a feeling of movement… but if you’ve never experienced a big ol’ sailboat or a trolleycar? You need a movie. You need the truth 24 times per second (it was actually 16-20 frames per second… but the point stands). And this was the job of mostly people working at the Lumière company, who were set around the world to film e.g. Americans taking a tram or a man in Japan watering his rice paddy. 

And because the Lumières were the first ones to figure out public projection, they could play these shots for the audiences elsewhere. Roger Ebert called cinema an “empathy machine,” and that was true from conception: the audiences got their first glimpses into other lives and other cultures. For many of them, the movie theater was likely the only way they ever got those glimpses, and once things became more narratively driven in the years to follow, I expect the amount your typical audience would see dwindled.

Which isn’t to say that Lumière shots were never narrative: they had all kinds of skits and bits. An early classic shows a little boy stepping on a garden hose (weird that that’s what garden hoses used to look like!) which then stops it from spraying so the gardener looks into it and the boy gets off and ha ha water to the face very funny!

And the fixed-ish length of the shots resulted in unintentional hilarity: a boy takes too long trying to hit a piñata and finally makes his swing as the screen cuts to black and an official comes aboard a crewed ship and completely ignores the pageantry expected to play out for the camera, so we get to see everyone onboard kinda freak out a little bit. There’s also a samurai-style action scene ends with the enemies being dispatched too early, so we see the swordsman break character before presumably being told it’s still rolling and jumping into a pose. 

This mix of subjects and styles is what makes the project remain compelling across the 100 minutes as long as you aren’t the guy who sat behind me, particularly because the restoration work here is exceptional. It’s a genuine tragedy that this level of care and craft can’t be given to every old film… Even worse how few have elements good enough to do the work in the first place (we do see a couple of unrestored shots, including one that is just too damaged: so sad!).

And with the quality of the restoration comes the revelation that many of the basics of cinematic language around staging and composition have been there from literally the very beginning. That this new medium came out as an artform from day one. Frémaux tells us how George Melies was at that very first public screening and immediately understood how he could use it (and that Lumière refused to sell him a camera because he knew a rival when he saw one). The people who captured images under the Lumière company name had to step beyond the basic rules of photography and static arts and build something new. It’s incredible what they did. 

And I feel genuinely lucky that I got to see their work restored on the big screen 

Seven Point Nine out of Ten