Chapter 1: What is a Movie?

Essay: The Cinematographe and other Movie Cameras

The 1995 film Lumière et Compagnie (Lumière & Company) celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s contribution to the birth of cinema. The Lumière brothers shot short, factual films such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) on their own handmade, hand-cranked, wooden camera. Lumière et Compagnie enabled over one hundred filmmakers from around the world to use the original Lumière camera to create their own films, with the stipulations that they had to use a long take, could not use synchronous sound, and could shoot only three or four times. Since the camera can hold only a small amount of film stock, the filmmakers were also limited to movies of about fifty seconds.

The opening of Lumière et Compagnie shows both the original The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and French director Patrice Leconte's contemporary homage:

Many of the directors involved in the Lumière project tried, as Leconte did, to juxtapose the past and the present. French director Nadine Trintignant used a moving camera (carried by wheelchair) to film the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris—her shot begins by showing the old fountain and original buildings of the Louvre and then surprises us with I. M. Pei's glass pyramids:

American director David Lynch offered a tour-de-force presentation that reflects his obsession with juxtaposing the normal and the nightmarish. Without the aid of editing, Lynch achieved changes of scene by old-fashioned magic: he created curtainlike transitions by crossing the camera in front of pure black or bursting flames even as his actors and crew offered up one setup after another—all in a single take!

Director Alain Corneau's film of a traditional Indian dancer celebrates the simplicity of the original Lumière films. This film's delicate colors were created by hand-tinting, the same process used to create the first color films of the silent-film era.

To play a matching game and learn more about the Lumière camera, the camera used for The Wizard of Oz, a nearly indestructible camera used during World War II, and the new, digital minicameras, click here.