Lumière! reintroduces some of cinema's foundational moments through gorgeous restored prints of the work of the Lumière Brothers.
Workers exit a factory, crossing each other's paths as they head home for the evening, and just before the great doors close, someone scrambles to get in.… A boat arrives and offloads its finely dressed passengers.… Labourers push and prod at a large brick wall, the last standing piece of some unspecified structure, until it collapses.
These casual moments captured on film by brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière — inventors of the motion-picture apparatus that gave birth to cinema as we know it — have been made extraordinary by the last century's cultural and technological evolution. Though the events the Lumières captured on celluloid were the epitome of quotidian at the time of shooting, historical hindsight shows them to be the foundation of the most popular art form of the past 120 years. The Lumières' legacy is felt to this day. And now, with Lumière!, new life is brought to the world's oldest moving images.
Lumière! includes 98 brief films made by the brothers, rapturously restored for digital presentation, lovingly assembled by film historians Thierry Frémaux and Bertrand Tavernier. Frémaux's insightful narration illuminates the process by which the brothers arrived at the creation of these iconic images, and traces their remarkable influence. Frémaux, Tavernier, and the Lumières transport us to a time when movie-going wonderment had little to do with computer graphics or special effects, and allow us to gaze in awe once again. This rapturous compendium performs some much-needed restorative work on the cinematic soul.
JESSE WENTE
Screenings
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