Georges Sadoul on the Lumières

An important early advocate for film, Georges Sadoul’s a monumental five-tome history of cinema, Histoire générale du cinéma, helped give the area of study a scientific legitimacy by focusing on its technological and economic bases (Bazin, on the other hand, would argue against this technological determinism). Sadoul was a strong advocate for early cinema (in particular, the Lumières and Méliès), French films, and socialist ones (for their ‘realism’).

Known for being a Marxist film historian and having rigid views, Sadoul reviewed films for the communist papers, presided over ciné-clubs, and helped create the Critic’s Week.

Sadoul travelled broadly to study cinema and his global approach favored smaller industries, which were comprised of the masses and who made films for the masses (in opposition to Hollywood, which the young Cahiers critics would reacted against).

Here are his brief entries on the three Lumières from the Peter Morris edition of his Dictionary of Film Makers. It’s the most precise description, which I’ve seen, of the origin of French- and cinema, in general.

This is the beginning of the film camera as we know it. What would it show us? - D.D.

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Lumière, Antoine PHOTOG France. (Ormay, Haute-Saône 1840-Lyon 190?) The father of Auguste and Louis Lumière was originally trained as a painter and in 1860 became a photographer in Besançon, where his sons were born. In 1871 he moved to Lyon and in 1881 he opened a factory for his photographic products in Lyon-Montplaisir. His business prospered and became a major industry. By 1894 he was taking less of an active role in the Société Antoine Lumière et ses fils (founded in 1893) but in that year he became enthusiastic over the Edison Kinetoscope, which he had seen in Paris. He purchased one of these and asked his sons to develop a means for projecting its pictures. In 1895 he took the apparatus his sons had patented and organized the first public screening in Paris at the Grand Café with his friend and former collaborator, Clément Maurice. In 1896-97 he refused to sell the Cinématographe equipment to Georges Méliès and arranged for Georges Hatot to direct some films for their company.

Lumière, Auguste INVENTOR France. (Besançon Oct 20, 1862-Lyon April 10, 1954) With his brother, Louis, he filed the original patents on the Cinématographe, in the invention of which he played a small part. He later devoted himself to medical research. He directed one film: Mauvaises herbes/les Brûleurs d’herbe (1896).

Lumière, Louis INVENTOR France. (Besançon Oct 5, 1864-Bandol, Var June 6, 1948) He is, first and foremost, the inventor of the Cinématographe, but he was also an excellent film maker. In 1894 the Cinématographe represented a major advance over all existing equipment (various parts of which he had adopted) because it could not only record moving pictures anywhere but could project them on a screen. Its worldwide success was such that it gave birth to a new form of entertainment and a new industry; the name he gave the equipment has been adapted into the languages of most countries as the term for the art and industry of film. Few countries have retained the names of rival equipment – Bioskop, Biograph, etc. As a film maker he was the first to record “life as it happened” in his first very short films, all of which reflect his feeling for visual qualities, background, and framing. He used “close-ups” in Déjeuner de bébé, depth of field in Arrivée d’un train, and devised the first “comedies” with L’Arroseur arosé and Le Faux Cul-de-jatte. He trained numerous cameramen who traveled around the world and made major contributions to the development of documentaries, editing, and the film industry in various countries. His importance in the history of the cinema is considerable, even though he was eventually outstripped by his competitors in making commercial films and was indepted to the work of the American Muybridge (q.v.), Armat, Jenkins (q.v.) and Latham and the German, Skladanowsky (q.v.), who first demonstrated his equipment before Lumière. 1882: Perfected Van Monckhoven’s silver bromide on gelatin formula, creating the Etiquette Blue, photographic plates on which the Lumière factory’s success was based. December 1894: Developed a process for moving film using two perforations per frame, abandoning the Marey chronophotographic camera and the Kinetoscope in the process. The first films were made on paper. January-February 1895: Developed the apparatus (prototype built by Charles Moisson) for making films on 35mm celluloid. February 13, 1895: Patent granted for an “apparatus used for obtaining and viewing chronothotographic prints.” March 10, 1895: Additional patent granted for the perfected apparatus, now called Cinématographe. March 22, 1895: First projection of the film, La Sortie des usines, to the Société pour L’Encouragement à L’Industrie. Other presentations to the Congrès des Sociétés Française de Photographie (Lyon, June 10 and 12), to the Revue Générale des Sciences (Paris July 11) and at the Sorbonne (Paris Nov 16). Louis Lumière made some 30-40 films during 1895. December 28, 1895: First public presentation of the Lumière Cinématographe in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café, 14 boulevard des Capucines, Paris. 1896: Louis Lumière hires and trains many cameramen and operators (including A. Promio and Félix Mesguich) and sends them around the world. The Cinématographe is premiered in London (Feb 17), Brussels (Feb 29), Vienna and Madrid (April), Berlin (April 30), Geneva (May 1), Bombay (June 7), Belgrade (June 25), New York (June 28), Saint Petersburg (July 17), Bucharest (August), and later in Egypt, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc. 1897: Lumière’s representative leaves New York. The Cinématographes are placed on sale. 1898-1900: Louis Lumière experiments with large screen cinematography for the Paris Exposition. May-November 1900: Projection of widescreen (21 meters by 16 meters) films photographed on 72mm film with 8 pairs of performations per frame. November 3 1900: Lumière patent for Photorama, static, circular panoramic photography, which is exhibited in Paris in 1902. 1905: Last films made for the Société Lumière, which thereafter ceased the production and sale of films. 1920: Louis Lumière abandons his position with the Lumière factory. 1934: Makes his first stereoscopic films. May 1 1936: Premiere in Paris of stereoscopic films (which required special bicolored glasses for viewing).

DIR (in 1895, notably): La Sortie des usines (two versions), L’Arroseur arose/Le Jardinier, Forgerons Pompiers (four films), Le Déjeuner de Bébé/Les Repas de Bébé, Pêche aux poisons rouges, Le Débarquement, Saute à la couverture/Brimade dans une caserne, Lyon, place des Cordeliers, Characuteri mécanique, Atéliers de la Ciotat, Barque sortant du port/La Sortie du port, Arrivée d’un train en gare, Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, Partie d’écarté, Assiettes tournates, Chapeaux à transformations, Photographe (?1896), Démolition d’un mur (?1896), Querelle enfantine, Aquarium, Partie de tric-trac, Le Déjeuner du chat, La Voltige, Départ en voiture, Enfants au jouets, Course en sac, Baignade en mer, Le Maréchal-ferrant, Lyon, place Bellecour, Récreation à la Martinière, Lancement d’un navire à La Ciotata. See entry: Lumière Films in the companion Dictionary of Films.

Georges Sadoul

WILD Press Conference

Wild Press Conference.

Café de Flore

I need to thank Marc Saint-Cyr for letting me post this fascinating essay on Café de Flore. - D.D.

Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore is one of those rare, special works of art: a film that perfectly marries the cosmic with the intimate, filtering a concept that transcends the boundaries of time, nationality, and probability through an assortment of stories entrenched in intensely relatable human experiences. As demonstrated by both this film and his earlier masterpiece C.R.A.Z.Y., Vallée understands the anatomy of memory, illuminating with insight and detectable pleasure the roots of those golden moments that linger and resonate within us long after they occur. In such moments, which rarely feel special as they are happening, and which Vallée so skillfully isolates and freezes in cinematic amber, anything could turn out to be the Rosetta Stone that serves as the key to a larger, grander narrative beyond your field of vision in which you only play one part: a specific incident or sequence of events, a song or album, a cryptic word or name, a picture on the wall that contains more than initially meets the eye. Passed down from person to person, weathering the seasons, these artifacts serve as tokens of personal history and testaments to the longevity of memories – whether we are fully aware of it or not. Music serves as an especially potent material for the weaving of these memory maps, as Vallée can attest: in C.R.A.Z.Y. and Café de Flore, he repeatedly uses songs and album covers as sturdy, reliable landmarks dotted across the charts of his characters’ lives that add continuity and meaning to the mysterious, incredible journey of human destiny.

            Just as it did in C.R.A.Z.Y., Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is a reoccurring fixture in Café de Flore’s sonic landscape – specifically Clare Torry’s fantastic, echoing yowl heard in the classic album’s opening track “Speak to Me/Breathe,” created by the band that is by now as much a staple of Vallée’s cinema as the Rolling Stones are of Martin Scorsese’s. Antoine (Kevin Parent), a DJ based in present-day Montreal, loves that particular song, integrating it into his sets and indulging in it by himself through his headphones in order to reach that “special place” that music lovers like him know so well. Antoine’s story involves his relationship with Carole (Hélène Florent), his ex-wife and the mother of their two daughters, and Rose (Evelyne Brochu), the new woman in his life. Antoine and Carole’s romance was born in the post-punk era of Joy Division and the Cure but grew not only in years of affection and tenderness between the two lovers, but also in the shadow of a specter that only loomed longer and darker as time went on: alcohol, as the many bottles of Beefeater Gin that appear in the old photos of them together, always within Antoine’s easy reach, testify. In the present, he is haunted by the crimson-uniformed figure from the bottle label in eerie, blink-and-you-miss-it subliminal flashes – a demon that is always lurking in the peripheries of his life.

            The central dilemma Antoine faces stems from the arrival of Rose in his life and the strain it places on both the family he and Carole made together and his faith in the idea of there being just one person out there with whom you are meant to spend the rest of your life. With this premise, Café de Flore straightforwardly adopts a rare philosophical complexity while fiendishly throwing a wrench into the most cherished dream of die-hard romantics everywhere. Having been cheated out of her life with Antoine by Rose and, in a greater sense, fate, Carole soon becomes one of the film’s most sympathetic characters. In her, Vallée and Florent illustrate the cruelty and pain that can come from love, desire, and destiny’s mysterious ways, which Antoine and Carole’s angry oldest daughter keeps bringing back to the surface with her own distress from seeing her father fall for another woman besides her mother. In pure Valléeian fashion, she claims a measure of revenge against her father by deliberately playing the songs associated with their time together, as if her and her sister’s very existence wasn’t a vital enough reminder of his past life with Carole. Music has that power: to summon the pain and glory of the past with an intensity and directness that nothing else can quite manage.

            On the same subject of music and past lives, there is the story of Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), a young woman living in Paris in 1969, and Laurent (Marin Gerrier), her young Down syndrome-afflicted son. For film-savvy folk, their world should be quite familiar, since it is the same place and almost the same time period – it’s close enough for government work – that Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Rohmer, and the rest chronicled so well in their day with their tales of records, cafés, cigarettes, boulangeries, young love, and the movies. But Vallée doesn’t take the bait and sacrifice any measure of his story in favor of yet another homage-laden jaunt into Newwaveland (which he previously evoked with his memorable inclusion of Charles Aznavour amongst C.R.A.Z.Y.’s musical delights). And thank goodness for that – as nice as it is to be back in the milieu of Breathless, Cléo from 5 to 7, and The Bakery Girl of Monceau, this is strictly Jacqueline and Laurent’s story, and by keeping his focus on them and their experiences, Vallée expresses a sincerity and authenticity that, beyond their cinematic allure, were what the finest New Wave films were all about. After all, to paraphrase a famous quote from Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, there are more than eight million stories in the City of Light; the story of Michel the car thief and his American girlfriend Patricia was one, the story of Antoine Doinel was another, and the story of Jacqueline and Laurent is simply another. It primarily concerns the incredible strength and beauty of parenthood, which is manifested in the pure, unwavering devotion Jacqueline pledges to her son as she tries her very best to ensure that he receives a “normal” education – one without segregation or special treatment. Despite the daunting nature of her goal, she successfully manages to provide Laurent with a life of safety, happiness, and routine. Together, they create their own secret language made up of private, affectionate rituals only they know – a language of absolute fondness. But soon a new challenge arises with the appearance of Véro (Alice Dubois), a little girl Laurent’s age who also has Down syndrome. A new bond of love, fresh and intense, is formed between the two, sending Jacqueline into a maelstrom of anguish, jealousy, and pain at the thought of losing her soul mate to another. Sound familiar? “Speak to Me/Breathe” may be the Pink Floyd song that is heard again and again in the film, but “Echoes” from 1971’s Meddle perhaps would have been a better thematic fit – though on top of the less subtle devices that Vallée uses to link his two narrative threads together, including ominous reoccurring dreams and a psychic whom Carole visits to try to decipher their meaning, him sampling the prog epic might have fatally tipped the film’s scales from helpful clarity to blunt hand-holding.

            But even with the abovementioned elements in play, Café de Flore is by any reliable measure a brave work crafted with great subtlety and sophistication. Some of its mysteries take longer to develop than others, some of them remaining shrouded in the kind of ambiguity that rewards multiple viewings, prolonged contemplation, and in-depth discussion. From the repeated image of the plane carrying Antoine perfectly aligned with the bright white ball of the sun against a pristine blue sky right before it disappears in a sudden blip of orange to the numerous split-second appearances of the sinister Beefeater man to the special significance of a song called “Café de Flore” to both Laurent and Antoine in their respective time periods, the film is littered with countless clues, signs, and omens that form a shattered mosaic depicting its characters’ destinies and bonds with one another. As a viewer, you are given the task and pleasure of putting the pieces together to try and bring into sharper focus the twisting, turning, intersecting trajectories of these people’s lives. In this way, Café de Flore exemplifies one of the most satisfying traditions of art house cinema – the kind that engages and entertains its viewers in the same way a smart, well-designed game would its ready players.

            In its refreshingly nuanced portrayal of lovers, parents, and children, Café de Flore achieves a rare universal sweep that makes you more deeply aware and appreciative of the various roles you play throughout your life as well as the place you occupy in the labyrinthine narrative of history – which perhaps bears more commonalities and connections across generations than anyone realizes. As I write this, I’m thinking of the scar on the ring finger of my left hand that came from an injury I got many years ago while listening to – you guessed it – The Dark Side of the Moon while riding my bike a little too fast and a little too recklessly. Will there be someone else, born many years from now, who will one day bear a scar that looks exactly like mine in exactly the same place? Was there someone born decades before I was in some other part of the world who bore such a scar? Which albums did/will they count among their favorites? More importantly, did/will either of these hypothetical people ever have relationships that resemble any of the ones I currently have with the people I love? After seeing Café de Flore, not only am I more likely to wholeheartedly place my faith in the likelihood of such things, but also, more importantly, I am more determined to cherish the bonds that connect me to those few special people in my life. In whatever time period or incarnation, such bonds should be treasured while they are intact and unharmed by the forces of fate, time, and death; thankfully, we have films like Café de Flore to remind us of that every now and then.

Marc Saint-Cyr

Pasolini l'enragé

Jean-Marie Straub

Jean-Marie Straub on Hors-champs






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Consumed Recommendations

Film Review: Nightcrawler

A guest contribution by Lori A. Russell. - D.D.

 
A pair of pliers in the midst of an abandoned junk yard - that is where we first meet Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a socially awkward man desperate to earn a living any way he can, even if he has to commit reckless vandalism to pay the bills. We realize upon his first encounter, that he is learned. He is factual. He is reliable. He is conniving and ever so persistent. After an untimely rejection for employment, he quickly proceeds to his next opportunity: the scene of a car accident. Intrigued by the commotion, he pulls over to investigate the incident and thus begins his ravenous quest for fulfillment. During the next 108 minutes, we watch as Bloom operates a camera to navigate, and adapt, to the confines of late night news television.

The brilliance of Gyllenhaal’s portrayal lays purely on Bloom’s ability to mask his sociopathic tendencies through his persistence to please and impress those who he feels are worthy of such admiration. Gyllenhaal easily captivates the audience through his verbal fluidity and talent to dance along the lines of perversion without completely giving it all away. He prances throughout the film with hollowed eyes that speaks greater volumes than his mouth ever does. He is constantly challenging the individuals around him with facts he’s learned from the internet and knowledge he’s gained from those who have rejected and belittled him. Nevertheless, the more praise he receives for his footage, from Producer Nina (Rene Russo), the greater his appetite grows for the grotesque. Each stakeout becomes more horrendous than the last and he will stop at nothing until he has abolished whatever moral compass the viewer has left.

Visually, the film is stunning; shot mostly during the night as Bloom scours the city for the latest suburban catastrophe. The city lights transform into a mesmerizing blur as he speeds down the streets in an effort to beat the ambulances and cop cars that race against him but, as riveting as the cinematography may be, the score is even more enticing. Electric guitars, soft pianos, and rhythmic drums enhance and emulate Bloom’s character to great effect. The gong that beats every so often reminds us that we are in Bloom’s world, trapped inside the frame of his lens, whether we like it or not.

Written and directed by Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler exemplifies Bloom’s reality, as well as our own. Gilroy denotes Bloom’s thirst for violence by fulfilling the audiences’ resounding thirst for violence each time that Bloom re-enters the editing suite. We are aware that what he is about to show Nina is extremely graphic, invasive and probably inappropriate for daytime television yet Bloom always seems to get his way. As a result, Gilroy fantastically portrays Bloom’s indiscretion and the consequences for those around him who ignore it. Nightcrawler is a magnificent film; one that will resonate in your mind long after you have left the theater.

Nightcrawler opens in cinemas on October 31.