The films of Auguste and Louis Lumière might seem as easy to understand as they are to access in the age of YouTube. But Thierry Frémaux is on a mission to change that with his documentary Lumière, Le Cinéma! The film makes a convincing argument that these deceptively simple shorts aren’t the last vestiges of a primitive proto-cinema. The Lumières are the originators of the medium—and its essence still. Poetically, their surname translates in English to “light,” and Frémaux’s documentary ensures their radiance still shines.
In addition to his better-known role as director of the Cannes Film Festival, Frémaux serves as director of the Institut Lumière, honoring the brothers’ contributions to cinema. His documentary marks a natural extension and expression of that artistic mission. Lumière, Le Cinéma! exalts these pioneers of cinema without resorting to lazy hagiography. Frémaux’s tour through over a hundred restored Lumière shorts—including many never before seen—makes a rigorously researched case for their historical and aesthetic importance.
The construction of Frémaux’s documentary might resemble an audiovisual textbook with its various thematic chapters, though it’s never reducible to just an information delivery system. His gently explanatory narration helps provide the context necessary to appreciate the steady stream of images that flicker across the screen. Yet Frémaux’s auditory presence never becomes overbearing. He’s both a teacher and student of cinema, humbling himself before the Lumières’ work while providing plenty of space for the audience to watch and learn for themselves.
Through repetition, Frémaux demonstrates the brothers’ mastery of the shot as the building block of cinema. Their trademark became their single-shot depictions of working-class people in fin-de-siècle France. These 50-second films are dense with visual information and bursting with vitality. Lumière, Le Cinéma! trains the viewer’s eye to see these as painterly compositions unfolding in time rather than merely incidental scenes of everyday life. It’s an exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, overview that still only scratches the surface of their 1,400 shorts.
Beyond merely explaining what we see unfolding on screen, Frémaux weaves in context on the significance of the Lumières’ contributions to science, art, and commerce. The brothers may not have invented the moving image, but Lumière, Le Cinéma! plants a flag for the their instrumentality in getting images out of the box, turning cinema into a collective experience.
A few shorts shown in the documentary do help correct the record and establish that the filmmakers weren’t entirely disinterested in spectacle. They cannot be so easily contrasted to the American showman Edison or fellow Frenchman George Méliès, who drew more explicitly from the conventions of magic and stagecraft. But Frémaux establishes that their camera “gestures” gravitated toward the glorification of the proletariat, a love of the common laborer that went hand-in-hand with their communitarian instinct to exhibit the films in a group setting.
Other assertions in the film range from the provocative (“There are no inventors after Lumière”) to the playful (“Lumière even invented cat videos”). At the genesis of the art form, so much of where cinema would go was already contained inside the Lumières’ images. Frémaux’s tribute is at its best when it spotlights just how much can still be rediscovered in the Lumière brothers’ formidable filmography, over 130 years after they filmed workers leaving the factory.
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