Dominique Moustacchi (CNC) presents the Work in progress on the Lumière catalogue

In view of the celebrations for cinema’s centenary in 1995, an international project to reconstruct and restore the entire output of the production company A. Lumière et fils was undertaken in France by the Centre National de la Cinématographie. In collaboration with the University of Lyon II, this wide-ranging project, which started with elements belonging to archives throughout the world, led to the identification of 1408 views (of which only 19 are considered lost) and the publication of a catalogue, La Production cinématographique des frères Lumière, edited by Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin and published by BiFi, Editions Mémoires de cinéma, 1er siècle du cinéma.
Twenty years later, in an era characterised by the global sharing of information online and the internationalisation of cataloguing standards, what is the current state of knowledge on the earliest productions in the history of the cinema? For the CNC, the Institut Lumière and the Cinémathèque française, the commemoration of the 120 anniversary of this exceptional material marks an opportunity to continue this work, reprising the indexing of the films according to current cataloguing standards, and, above all, to study the so-called ‘out-of- catalogue’ films: a corpus of about 600 views that principally comprise those that were indicated as never having been marketed. Comparing them with the ‘catalogue’ views allows us to reflect both on the distribution of images – why was one view preferred over another? – and on the production of ‘series’ like Arroseur et arrosé or the various Entrées d’un train en gare. Moreover, these unpublished images allow us to adopt new cultural and ethnographic approaches to reading the films.

Béatrice de Pastre and Dominique Moustacchi