Lumière, le cinéma!: A Conversation with Thierry Frémaux

Lumière, le cinéma! compiles 120 of them, beautifully restored, into a coherent feature-length work that functions as a love letter to cinema and as an essay film. Serving as a loquacious benshi, Frémaux narrates, sharing fascinating historic details, critical observations, and philosophical thoughts. As head of the Cannes Film Festival and director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, he has the perfect vantage point to draw stylistic connections between the Lumière films and the work of great directors to follow.

The Lumières dispatched cameramen around the world, to capture teeming cityscapes, domestic scenes, acrobatic performances, military exercises, and the urtexts for such future genres as the cat video, the martial arts film, and, presaging Jackass, the prank film. A bustling Paris scene lingers on a family at rest in the foreground, a moment in time that reminds Frémaux of Proust; a cavalry charge surges from deep background to immediate foreground, then carries on, leaving an empty frame; workers exiting a factory in Vietnam (then Indochina), passing a formation of French soldiers, evokes a colonial past; a scene of women loading wheelbarrows outside a coal mine shows their role in this physically grueling work. And even the simplest subjects—a shoreline, waves breaking against rocks—filmed with the minimalism of Chantal Akerman—take on a striking modernity. 

Frémaux’s film is a celebration and a reminder. At a moment when theatrical exhibition faces ongoing uncertainty, it returns us to cinema’s foundational gesture: the shared experience of watching moving images together. I talked with Frémaux at the Criterion office about Lumière, le cinéma! As always, his energy matched the enthusiasm of the film’s well-earned exclamation point.

Your film addresses a few misconceptions about the Lumière films. Often people say that Georges Méliès was making narrative films and that Auguste and Louis Lumière were just filming life, which takes away from what they really achieved.

And those two conceptions became: Lumière is documentary, and Méliès is fiction. It’s not true. Because one of the first Lumière films is The Gardener, which is a fiction and a comedy. The Lumières right away understood that they can film a story. And, by the way, the first Méliès films were documentaries he did at a railway station.

 

When you watch the Lumière films, you understand they are putting on-screen the daily poetry of life, and Méliès reinvents what life is, creating magic and illusion. That’s why I say in the movie that Lumière is Rossellini, and Méliès is Fellini. Lumière is the French New Wave, the modern. Méliès is maybe Hollywood. And I love both. But it’s not about documentary and fiction. As an artist, writer, or painter, you have two approaches. You make something very realistic—though it won’t be totally realistic, because you find your own way to do it—or you make it from your imagination and you are Picasso. So there is on one hand George Méliès, Stanley Donen, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron. And on the other you have Lumière, Murnau, Bresson, Renoir, Kiarostami, Pialat. And that path. So you have those two. And the history of cinema is the development of those two families. And me, as a movie buff, I love both. I don’t take one over the other.

I think it’s important that you connect the Lumières to these great directors, like Bresson and Chantal Akerman, because there’s so much artistry to what the Lumières are doing. And that’s always what amazes me about their films. The decisions they made about composition and camera placement are so rich. I don’t know if you have an idea of where that came from. They seem to have such a deep understanding of the medium right at the beginning.

We have some archival material and letters about the scientific process but little else. So it’s like with Shakespeare—we don’t know, we have to make hypotheses. The Lumières are the same. Did they know the painting of their time, the literature of their time, the photography of their time? We don’t know. But we do know that they were fully of their time. In the first montage in my film, I mention a Lumière short that is very similar to a Cézanne painting. Did they know the Cézanne painting or not? If they knew it, it’s extraordinary how they remade it, and if they didn’t know the painting, then the anonymous Lumières from Lyon made something similar to the great artist Cézanne. The Lumières were industrial photographers. So the quality of the black and white, the quality of the grain, the quality of the focus looks like the best photography of the time. But the word cinématographe means “writing movement,” so the Lumières made each film as cinema and not a photograph.