A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DLight, Smoke and Mirrorsfirst seen on 'The Discovery Channel On Line'
One morning last year, fighting sleep in front of the tube, I (the author of this work for the Discovery Channel) happened to catch an ancient black-and-white film, perhaps one minute in length. It was produced before the turn of the century, I later found out, by a family firm called "Lumière", French for "light." The TV tribute was only one contribution to a year long cinema centenary frenzy. This included a Lumière world conference in Lyons, regular Lumière screenings at the Pompidou Center, and a program of minimovies made by contemporary filmmakers using a 100-year-old Lumière cinématographe. Not that I had the foggiest idea what a cinématographe was. Several months and many kilometers, history books and Lumière films later, I began to get an inkling of what all the fuss was about.
Poster for an early (the first?) paid public movie show
La Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, December 28, 1895
It all began just a century ago in Paris, (the 28th of December 1895) when a handful of passersby were lured inside the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines by a poster enigmatically advertising "Cinématographe Lumière." After paying a franc, descending into the grandly named "Salon Indien" in the basement, and sinking into armchairs before an empty screen, some of them wondered if they'd been tricked into seeing yet another cheesy magic lantern show. Then, as the audience stared in disbelief, the two-dimensional screen turned into a panorama of movement, a convincing, Frankensteinian display of artificial human life that would forever change the way we spend our Saturday nights.
The question is a tricky one. In Lyons, the Lumières' hometown, there's an entire institute devoted to the standard version of the story. It goes something like this: Raised during a time of great change by an ambitious if easily distracted father, young Antoine and Louis Lumière were migraine-prone workaholics before they were out of their teens. Dad Antoine began as a studio photographer, then moved into the more lucrative manufacture of photographic equipment. Young Louis tinkered with a formula for what was to become the famous Blue Label brand, a high-speed film that enabled amateur photographers to forget those stuffy professional studio portraits and capture candids instead. Blue Label film stayed on the international market for decades, making the family quite rich. By the 1880s, the robber baron era, the Lumière family was running a factory in Lyons, where hundreds of workers ran an early version of an assembly line. In 1895, inspired by the same restless genius that helped turn the Lumière family firm into a lucrative business, Louis made history by fashioning the world's first movie camera.
A Lumière Cinematographe Camera / Projector, 1895
At a time when a half-dozen entrepreneurs in nearly as many countries were working overtime to record movement, the Lumières had economic clout, business know-how and sense enough to invent a new medium. Thanks to their photography experience, they understood the appeal of people "caught in the act of living," as one early critic put it.
Frames from "The Waterer Watered", Lumière Brothers, 1895
One of the films shown on December 28 at the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines
Source: Discovery Online
Unlike many rival inventors, they were poised to launch not only films but film technology 1 embodied in a lightweight, hand-cranked camera that could move movies out of the studio and into the streets. Looked at another way, Louis was simply the first to get to the patent office.
Source: Discovery Online
Clever Louis Lumière wasn't the first person to experiment with movies. I had no sooner started dabbling in the world of early cinema when I encountered the anti-Lumière underground. A small but rather intent group, the critics seemed to emerge just as the lights of the centenary were banking down. Among those who don't buy the Lumière legend is Toronto historian Marta Braun, who has pretty much written the book on Lumière contemporary Étienne-Jules Marey. Braun thinks worlds more of Marey, who was inspired by photographer Eadweard Muybridge, than she does of the Lumières. She suggests they ripped off an obscure inventor named Léon Bouly, who patented a "cinématographe" of his own back in 1892. Unfortunately, Bouly let the patent lapse, enabling the Lumières to snap up the name that would soon be shortened to "cinema." Meanwhile, megalomaniac American inventor Thomas Edison was also hoping to record movement, much as he had already recorded sound. After visiting Marey in 1889, Edison rushed back to the States and commandeered a crash course in movie technology at his New Jersey headquarters. This work, largely carried out by an assistant named W.K.L. Dickson, led to the invention of a peepshow for one called the Kinetoscope, patented in 1893.
Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson's Kinetoscope
Source: Discovery Online
Various warring histories carry conflicting versions of what happened next. But most seem to agree that somewhere along the way one of the Lumières got his hands on an Edison Kinetoscope and decided to one-up the American inventor with a camera/projector that would spring film from inside that black box. From Marta Braun I learned about a little-known ethnologist named Jean Dominique Lajoux 2, who operates a kind of cinema history project and guerrilla campaign out of a basement near Paris' Chinatown. Lajoux is a Marey partisan, too, arguing that the physiologist not only filmed musclemen, dogs and cats moving through space, but also such Lumiëresque topics as a Paris street scene. More amazing, I thought, was his high praise of Edison, the last person you'd expect to attract a following in France. But, lo and behold, there were Edison's films getting top billing at a tiny little Paris exhibit that opened in January (1995). The centerpiece of the show was a beautiful wood-and-brass reconstruction of what was probably the world's first cartoon projector. The original patented by inventor Émile Reynaud in 1888, his so-called second-generation "praxinoscope" went into operation at the Wax Museum in Paris in October 1892, a full three years before the Lumiëres got their start in the movie business.
1995 Reconstruction of Émile Reynaud's so-called second-generation "Praxinoscope"
Source: Discovery Online
"Well before the Lumière brothers," read the wall outside the movie room, "Edison and Dickson had already directed works of fiction and scenes that evoke the American cinema of today. It was after the inventions of Marey, Demeny, Reynaud, and Edison that Louis Lumière conceived of, at the beginning of 1895, his "Cinématographe." With an emphasis on everything leading "up" to the Lumières, and its tart dismissal of Louis as a businessman (not an honored position in culture-conscious France), the exhibit almost seemed designed to pique the puffed-up Lumière constituency. It also provided a rather bracing counterpoint to the hagiography on display in Lyons, where I'd been convinced the Lumières practically invented life itself. No fools they, the Lumières quickly patented their "cinématographe", floated it, then fought off rivals who tried to imitate it. In a display of entrepreneurial one-upmanship, Antoine Lumière invited the well-known magician Georges Méliès and the directors of both the Folies-Bergères and the Wax Museum to his first picture show. As soon as the lights came up, the three clamored to buy their own "cinématographes", and naturally Antoine turned them down. The Lumières also did everything they could to maintain control over the production and distribution of their films, making them industrialists of the first order. Specially licensed "operators" were sent on the road to both make and project films in countries as far away as Vietnam. According to one account, they were forbidden to let their "cinématographes" out of sight.
Poster for Lumière's cinématographe
Source: Discovery Online
During the next few years, the brothers and their operators drove Edison's peepshow device out of business and set a new standard for mass-media entertainment. Audiences were charmed by these early introductions to the global village and lined up to see Lumière movies in cities in 35 countries on four continents. You might assume the family is still plugging away behind the camera, churning out the stuff that passes for art and entertainment in movie theaters today. But the Lumières left the field almost as abruptly as they entered it. The brothers were part artists, part inventors. But mostly they were entrepreneurs. Their goal was to monopolize film production and distribution for as long as they could. Ultimately their monopoly crumbled, the victim of competition in the camera-manufacturing and moviemaking businesses alike.
You could argue all night about which of the pre-Hollywood luminaries came first. Plenty of people do. And I'll let the simmering pool of film historians at places like NYU and Yale argue about the upper-class hegemony reflected in the Lumières' world-view. But at a time when French cinema seems to be in the doldrums, the Lumières' films are more than "worth the detour." Here's early slapstick, a bridge between vaudeville and comic geniuses like Buster Keaton--along with documentaries and news footage, travelogues and even a sampling of lighthearted corporate PR. The Lumières helped open up the world to anyone with a spare franc to spend--a bit of humor, a bit of drama and a panorama of vivid movement. Even a remarkable 100 years later, it continues to come through. We see trains pull in, horses prance by, soldiers march and boats sail away. But most of all, we see people. Viewed in a dark room by an audience whose existence they could only imagine, their every movement captured by an odd new device and suspended in celluloid forever, they seem almost alive.
Fusil Photographique (Photographic Rifle) image by Étienne-Jules Marey, c. 1882
Source: Discovery Online
At a time when money-making types were desperately searching for ways to spice up vaudeville and magic shows, the 19th century equivalent of commercial television, Marey, a physiologist, was leading a quiet life of intellectual dedication. Marey and his assistant George Demeny experimented in a Paris laboratory with bands of sensitized photographic paper during the late 1880s. Marey's goal was not to make money, but to fashion a system for recording and studying movement along the lines of Eadweard Muybridge's work. Of course, Marey didn't look at Muybridge's work and say "popcorn"; his idea of interesting was "muscle groups." As early as 1894, Marey filmed a bottle breaking and a cat falling. Later footage of Paris' Gare Sainte-Lazare is similar to the Lumieres' work.
Zoopraxograph or Zoopraxiscope image by Eadweard Muybridge, c.1884
Source: Discovery Online
An Englishman who emigrated to California, Muybridge was the first to capture quick movement in a series of photos. His initial motion studies were of racehorses, captured in mid-stride. Later, Muybridge photographed humans engaged in almost every imaginable activity, sequential studies that are considered an early precursor of film. Muybridge's own motion picture machine, the zoopraxiscope, came on the scene in 1879. Based on earlier motion toys, it projected a series of images from a whirling disk. Both Edison and Marey used Muybridge's work as a springboard for their own inventions.
Émile Reynaud's so-called second-generation Praxinoscope
Source: Discovery Online
The inventor's advanced praxinoscope used two projectors: One cast a permanent background scene on the screen; the other projected a reel of perforated, hand-drawn moving characters in the foreground. The animated drawings passed in front of a lens and projected off a mirror onto the screen. One cartoon might involve more than 600 painstakingly drawn images on a 140-foot ribbon. Reynaud's projector was large and unwieldy, with a drive about 3 feet in diameter. Poor Émile apparently didn't realize what was afoot when Louis Lumière dropped by to see his "Théâtre Optique" in action--and promptly made use of several of his ideas, critics say. Years later, in a fit of depression presumably brought on by the Lumières' seven-figure revenues, Reynaud threw all his inventions in the river. Only two cartoons survive. A 34-year-old magician and entrepreneur, the elegantly mustachioed Georges Méliès was directing vanishing acts around the corner at the Robert-Houdin Theater when his friend Antoine Lumière induced him to drop by the Grand Café for the first film screening. By the end of the show Méliès was a convert. He'd already been entranced by the work of animator Émile Reynaud, and shared the widespread view that moving pictures, the ultimate visual magic, would one day make entrepreneurs very rich. That very night he offered Antoine 10,000 francs for a "cinèmatographe". The director of the Wax Museum offered double that amount, and the Folies-Bergères went up to 50,000. No dice. "My machine is a big secret and I don't want to sell it," Antoine said. "I want to exploit it myself."
Georges Méliès
Source: Discovery Online
Nonetheless, less than a year later Georges Méliès was making stop-action trick films using a thrown-together camera called a kinetograph. Méliès continued to churn out magical films, many hand-colored, until around 1908, when he in turn was overrun by the competition. The Wizard of Menlo Park imagined a device that would do for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear; his first movie machines featured a similar design to his cylinder sound recorders. Following meetings with Marey and Reynaud in 1889, Edison abandoned the cylinder idea. Two years later, he applied for patents on the kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewer. Much of the credit for the Kinetoscope must go to Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson. His experiments with strips of perforated 35mm celluloid led directly to the creation of the peepshow device. Edison thought movie machines would make money a nickel at a time. Unlike the Lumières, he did not initially see projection as important. Some early Edison shorts, such as "Annabelle's Butterfly Dance" and "Serpentine Dance", caused quite a stir when they were first released. 1 According to family legend, Louis solved a key technical problem during one feverish, sleepless night in 1894. To advance the film at the correct speed (fast enough to trick the eye, and smoothly enough to ward off nausea), he married his prototype reversible movie camera/projector to a sewing machine. Think for a moment about the way sewing machines feed cloth, chug-a-chug, under an up-and-down needle; now think about perforated film advancing on moving sprockets in stop-action fashion in front of intermittent light, and you'll get a glimpse of Louis's genius. 2 Lajoux got interested in the Lumières because their documentaries captured work styles of the late 19th century. But soon he was drawn into the larger debate over just who, exactly, these Lumières thought they were. Last year Lajoux took the time to make a short documentary himself, "Cinema WITHOUT Lumières", which he then lobbied to get on TV during the centenary.
Film Credits The Lumière films included in this narrative were provided courtesy of the Association Frères Lumière and the Archives du Film du Centre National de la Cinématographie, the French national film archives, which is restoring and cataloging all of the Lumières' films. The catalog, which will gather 1,400 films with descriptions, filming dates, and the names of the operators and places where the films were first shown, will be published as both a book and CD-ROM in May. For more information, contact Michelle Aubert, Conservateur des Archives du Film, 7 bis rue Alexandre Turpault, 78392 Bois d'Arcy, Cedex France. Of the films by Marey, The Gare Ste.-Lazare was licensed from Jean Dominique Lajoux; Falling Cat and Smashing a Bottlewere obtained from Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris. The films by Edison were provided courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Movie Sources on Video Kino International
Produced by Film Preservation Associates and The British Film Institute
Eadweard Muybridge Actualities (1896-97) Vol II: The European Pioneers
Lumiere Brothers: Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895); The Baby's Meal (1895); Destruction of a Wall (1896); The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895); Arrival of Congress Members at Neuville-sur-Saone (1895); Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895); Card Party (1895); Boat Leaving the Port (1895); Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896); Snowball Fight (1896); A Fire Run (1896); Niagara Falls (1896); Spanish Bullfight (1897). Vol III: Experimentation and Discovery
C. Hepworth: How it feels to be run over (1900); Explosion of a motor car (1900); Rescued by Rover (1905). Vol. IV: The Magic of Melies
Georges Melies: Untamable whiskers (1904); Cook in trouble (1904) Vol. V: Comedy, Spectacle and New Horizons
P. Freres: Policemen's little run (1907); Troubles of a grass Widower (1908). Source: The Discovery Channel Online http://www.discovery.com
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