Museum of the here and now – Actualities

As material objects, these Lumière views are a homogeneous batch. Our screenings take place in 2016, and the 35mm prints screened here were made twenty years ago, in 1995, via intermediary elements, struck from negatives that were exposed and developed in 1896, a hundred and twenty years ago. What appears today on the screen happened to be in front of a Lumière Cinématographe a hundred and twenty years ago.
During their screenings, however, the views do not all stay there, in 1896; they behave in many different ways (and individually with different viewers). A flag flying, for example, crosses over easily and reaches the present, so does the play of light and shadow on a Boston tramway, and while a Tsar or a dowager Empress of Russia remains bound to the past, animals and children are free, timeless.
The uncanny magic of time in these very early films is overwhelming. How is it possible that we should be permitted to see the past, in 50 second glimpses. The old harbour of Marseilles, silvery sardines taken from nets, boys skating back and forth, a bird unfolding its wings – they appear and reappear, and every time we are engulfed in their present time, le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.

Mariann Lewinsky

Méliès Star Film 1896

Magician Georges Méliès, owner of the theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris, attended the first public screening of the Lumière Cinématographe December 28, 1895, and realized how valuable such an attraction would be for his venue. Alas, the Lumière brothers refused to sell him a cinématographe, so he went to Robert William Paul in England to buy his first apparatus. 
He started filming the most common subjects, documentaries, men playing cards, children, etc. until one day his camera stopped while filming the Place de l’Opéra, resulting in the first accidental stop-motion special effect. 
Méliès quickly specialized in trick films. He shot a series of films in his Montreuil garden, and built the first film studio in 1897 in the same place. Because Méliès destroyed his own negatives in 1923, he became the symbol of lost films, and discoveries of new title today seem almost impossible (220 films survive of his 520 productions).
This programme includes films shot by Méliès 120 years ago in 1896, which was his first year of production. Only a handful of titles survive of the 80 films he made that year.

Serge Bromberg

Spectacle. The Power of the Cinématographe

You turn the handle a few times and your machine transforms a pig into appetizing sausages. You turn the handle a few times, and your Cinématographe transforms whatever it films into a spectacular appearance, endowing everything with meaning, mystery and glamour. Everybody becomes a protagonist, a performer. This effect is less noticeable in performances such as music-hall numbers and in family films (where people put on little shows for the benefit of the camera) and is at its strongest in apparently unarranged scenes of play or work, such as Bassin des Tuileries, Chargement du Coke and Mauvaises herbes.
The views Lumière form an amazing documentation of work, much of it collective and unmechanized, done by groups of men, women and animals in orchestrated movements. Captured by the Cinématographe they appear as effortless choreographies when screened now in front of audiences no longer familiar with such kind of work and the sight of it.

Mariann Lewinsky