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 THE ART OF THE LUMIÈRES
This museological experience is based on collections belonging to the Ville de Lyon and the Institut Lumière. The Ville de Lyon's collection was assembled by Dr Paul Génard, who owns a large number of pieces dating from the "pre-history" and early days of the cinema.
The Villa Lumière, whose four floors are now open to the public, gives the visitor an opportunity to become acquainted with the lives of Antoine, Louis and Auguste Lumière.
The aim of this permanent exhibition, L'Art des Lumière, is to bring back to life the Lumières' "vues" (which are films in their own right) a century after their production, rather than to provide an exhaustive chronological account of how the technique developed. This approach has drawn on the work of Jacques Aumont and Bernard Chardère, the first historians of the Lumières' careers.
The priority has thus been given to the figurative power of the "Lumière vision". What was recorded by the Cinematograph actually took place; and a "vue" is an invitation to an eternal present moment. It is this constantly-renewed moment that is being revealed here, first and foremost.
LUMIÈRES – PAINTERS
Auguste and Louis Lumière probably owed their penchant for the visual arts to their father Antoine. Their "vues" belonged to a revolution in perception that had been pioneered by Impressionism: the representation of the invisible (light, wind), the inaccessible (clouds, snow-covered mountains) and the intangible (smoke, vapour).
The fixing of each frame that passed through the camera reproduced the movement of beings and things, but also reconstituted the vibrations of particles of light. The agitation of the atoms in the film formed a stellar surface on which the outlines of bodies and objects, and their shadows, were delineated in a way that was reminiscent of the pointillist experimentation that took place in late Impressionism.
The framing of the Lumières' "vues" probably did not result from a deliberate intention to produce "art". It was simply in keeping with the iconography of the period, and particularly with the atmospheric depiction of urban and natural settings, along with the professions that were flourishing at the end of the 19th century, and the visible effects of the industrial revolution.
With the "vues", one is often reminded of Manet, Monet, Millet and Cézanne, as well as the "pictorialist" photographers.
LUMIÈRES – ENGINEERS
As photographers with artistic influences and an engineering background, the Lumière brothers perfected the techniques that were to bring about the consolidated figuration of the motions of beings and things.
The large central display case contains the innovations that were the predecessors of the Cinematograph, along with a number of others that were developed subsequently.
LUMIÈRES – FILM-MAKERS
From 1895 onwards, laudatory reports about the Cinematograph resulted in numerous buyout proposals. But the Lumières preferred to retain control of their invention.
They supervised the development and production of the machine itself, and the film that went with it. They also trained people to take "vues", and to project them. Between 1896 and 1898, these operators travelled widely round the world.
The diaspora of the Lumières' operators gave rise to what was actually a sort of press agency, with a sense of proximity that shrank the planet as never before. In many cases there was no particular news-gathering role, simply the idea of bringing other parts of the world to France – in a box. But it was only a matter of months before this diaspora turned an "invention with no future" into a planetary trail-blazer.
LUMIÈRES – PHOTOGRAPHERS
Scarcely had the first pictures been taken with the first Kodak (in 1878!) than numerous inventors set about capturing and conserving their own images of reality, ever more accurately and rapidly.
With their research in the realm of photography, Auguste and Louis Lumière were actually perpetuating a certain impressionistic pictorialism, which might seem paradoxical in view of the extraordinary progress they were making in the cinematographic visualisation of the world. Their "autochromes" were melancholic portrayals of the idealised family.
The stereoscopic reproduction of reality frozen in relief was an integral part of the rush to represent nature as infinitely elastic, with photography being conceived of as a means of making it visible in a way that went beyond the scope of the human eye.
LUMIÈRES – BEYOND LUMIÈRES
The Lumière brothers became involved in a number of unusual activities in the medical and orthopaedic fields. After the First World War, for example, Louis invented a mechanical hand that was capable of prehensile movements. The Dadaist artists George Grosz and Raoul Haussman supplied other views of the Great War's horrors.
The claw was a motif that evidently loomed large in Louis Lumière's subconscious, from the anthropomorphic prosthesis to the sewing machine, via the mechanism by which the film was drawn through the Cinematograph.
And the act of sewing had a further extrapolation. Gauze bandages used for burns ("Tulle Gras"), which were one of Auguste Lumière's many inventions, might be taken, retrospectively, as a metaphor of the way the world is unified through atoms of light imprinted onto film. But does the cinema not sew up temporal segments into a fiction, in other words a plausible illusion of life?
LUMIÈRES – OUR CONTEMPORARIES
Closer to the present day, a number of artists, and children who are film-makers in their own way, knowingly or not, have adopted the Lumières' attitude of seeking out those "magnificent effects that offer themselves up to our gaze, and yet are nothing more than accidental combinations" (Auguste and Louis Lumière).
Chantal Akerman, looking out over the landscape; Alain Fleischer, paying an allusive tribute; children in 1995 – the cinema's centenary – casting around for a new angle on observation: they have all participated in this "childhood of the art".
SALLE PAUL GÉNARD
Paul Génard has now retired after a career as a dentist in Villeurbanne. It was in 1948 that he started a collection of several hundred machines going from the end of the 18th century up to 1930. He was one of those who helped save the Hangar du Premier-Film and the Villa Lumière from destruction. This room, which is dedicated to him, contains some of his finest pieces.
In the early days of the cinema, cameras and projectors were extremely expensive: only rich people who had ambitions to be serious film-makers could afford them. If the cinema was to come within reach of the amateur, cameras had to be made simpler, lighter, and easier to use, and the width of the film had to be reduced. Dual-purpose devices (i.e. ones which were capable of acting both as cameras and projectors) made a comeback, the film itself became narrower, and specialised cameras were introduced.
THE LUMIÈRE FAMILY
o The bedroom of the patriarch Antoine Lumière evokes the history of this building which is now the Institut Lumière, with its museum, its library, and the institute's offices.
o 120 years of the history of the Lumière family are presented in an extensive mural biography illustrated with photographs.
o Sophie and Jean--Claude Chuzeville's exhibition presents a selection of family photographs taken around the turn of the 20th century with a stereoscopic Vérascope camera, which is what the Lumières used most frequently to record their daily lives. The resulting twin images could only be viewed by one person at a time, using a special apparatus, but for this exhibition the artists have enlarged one of each of the pairs of images on paper. The delicacy of the colouring around the subjects gives them the impression of being three-dimensional.
Towards the cinema
The cinema combines the principles of the magic lantern, the darkroom, and devices that generate motion. It is at the crossroads of a series of inventions and discoveries in disciplines as diverse as optics, theories on the perception of movement, mechanics and chemistry. From the magic lantern's glass plate to nitrocellulose film, and from Plateau's slitted discs to Marey's chronophotographic gun, each innovation extended the common ground of the two lines of research that were followed in different parts of the world during the 19th century, one being aimed at creating the illusion of movement, the second at analysing it.
It was in Paris, on 22 March 1895, that Louis Lumière gave material expression to the confluence of these different currents when he projected animated photographic images with his Cinematograph.
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