2023-10-24 22:32:22
Lumire Heritage, camera and action History of Spanish cinema A documentary rescues an unreleased film by Berlanga and the first nude of the Franco regime
“The image needs to come out of the box.” “One night, my brother invented cinema.” The first sentence is from the father and the second from the firstborn. I pronounced the first one Antoine Lumire after admiring in surprise the rudimentary and claustrophobic kinetoscope patented by Edison, and the author of the second is Auguste Lumire after his brother Louis (the same one who found the key to the instant photo) solved in a sleepless night what he himself had been unable to do in long waking afternoons.
The first is the formulation of a desire and the second is definitely just that: pure desire. In the main room of the renovated Lumire Museum which reopens its doors on Thursday the 26th after almost an entire year of works, the camera is proudly displayed – just a wooden box, dazzling in its simplicity and elegance, with a lens and a 35 millimeter perforated film – to which they refer one way or another the two sentences above as desire and culmination.
The official opening (or reopening of facilities closed since January) will finally take place just a few days after the celebration of the Festival Lumire, where people as diverse as Wim Wenders, Marisa Paredes, Alexander Payne, Terry Gilliam… or, from the other side of the abysses, Yasuhiro Ozu, Ana Mariscal and Robert Altman. “Inauguration of the museum at the same time as the contest would have been too complicated,” comments Fabrice Calzettoni, head of the center’s cultural and pedagogical area, in protocol. His comment occurs while he solicitously shows a mansion from another time that is at the same time a study center, a projection room, a reference institute, a cinema library, a tourist attraction and, if necessary, a place of holy and pagan pilgrimage.
Entering the nineteenth-century mansion of Art Dec pretensions that houses the new permanent exhibition that honors, explains and even gives splendor to the origins of cinema has a lot of almost fetishistic ceremony and, in short, political vindication. All together. You step, since it is the Lumire parents’ house, in exactly the same place that the two brothers stepped on and the mansion is located just a few meters from the place where the three versions of the film were filmed. ‘Factory departure’ which inaugurated a new art in 1895.
It’s nostalgia, yes; but it is also a reflection of a desirable future from a past, despite its proximity, perhaps too long forgotten. “We are clear that dealing with the past is essential not only to understand the present, but because, deep down, both are the same: the present is the past itself,” he says now. Thierry Frmaux, the director of the Lumire Institute on which the museum depends who is also, in effect, the general delegate of the all-powerful Cannes Festival.
An image from a Lumire film at the Lumire Museum.LOIC BENOT AND MAXIME GRUSSMUNDO
Among all the pieces, assemblies and artifacts, the instantaneous and simultaneous projection of the images stands out for its novelty and audacity. 1,422 films that the Lumire filmed. On the screen, the visitor is invited to observe a tight grid in which all the films run at the same time. The device first confuses; then, hypnotize. As you progress, it seems impossible to take your eyes off each of the tiny pieces of an almost eternal puzzle. ‘The irrigated irrigator’, ‘The Spanish army dancing a jota’ or the most incredible images from all corners of the world are filmed in an installation that, like a crucible, ends up being the best definition of what was intended: “Putting “in value not only a technical invention but the birth of a new art.” “The Lumire were the first filmmakers and, in many of their films, there is already a staging that announces the first sketches of a grammar of a new means of expression,” Frmaux likes to repeat that some time ago he was responsible for the movie ‘Lumire! The adventure begins’ (2016) that serves as rediscovery.
It is worth keeping in mind, as Calzettoni strives to explain, that cinema is very much a global discovery. Despite how arrogant the sentence at the beginning may seem, in reality, cinema was arrived at after a stormy cataract of inventions and discoveries with a thousand authors. The magic lanterns of the 17th century announce a future conquered step by step with the chronophotograph rifle of Tienne-Jules Marey or the aforementioned kinetoscope of Edison until reaching the Indian Salon in Paris where on December 28, 1895 We saw the first gag in the history of cinema (‘El regador regado’), the first children’s film (‘Baby’s Food’) and even the first document for conscience or, given the case, the revolt (‘The Exit). from the Lumire factory in Lyon’). A detailed, precise and beautiful model reproduces the space of that moment for history. “The idea is that the visitor understands that it is a collective scientific evolution,” says the person in charge of the pedagogical area.
To all this, we must add the effort that the museum makes to value the work of the cameramen that the Lumire sent around the world. Poisoned by the passion of the new art, the pharmacy student Gabriel Veyre arrived in Lyon, who soon set sail for South America; the soldier Flix Mesguich, in charge of opening a branch in a United States reluctant to accept that the patent was French; the mechanic Charles Moisson, who filmed the coronation of the tsar in Russia, and a former student at the Lyon university La Martinire, Alexandre Promio, whom the regent of Spain, María Cristina, authorized to film some scenes of the royal guard and navy (those with the jota).
A magical lantern from the Lumire Museum.LOIC BENOT AND MAXIME GRUSSMUNDO
The museum, accompanied by the two small projection rooms that it houses in its basement, is, for the moment, the penultimate step taken by an institution with a soul of movement, sponsored since its origins in 1982 by the deceased filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier. The first thing was to recover the family home in the Monplaisir neighborhood; then, reconfigure as a movie theater the almost demolished factory of the Lumire family, dedicated to manufacturing the brand of photographic plates with his name that received the name Blue Label. And later, for the future, the construction of a large complex that occupies all the factory space.
It is impressive to attend the screening of any film at Hangar Lumire – that is the name of the cinema that occupies the space where it was filmed for the first time. The gala screenings of the Lumire Festival take place there and there is no filmmaker who cannot help but surrender to the evidence. One of the last was Alexander Payne, that there he presented his latest work, ‘Los que se se’, and there he celebrated his status as a filmmaker and cinephile almost on his knees.
A montage made for the occasion by the musician Jean Michel Jarre about some of the most celebrated images of the Lumire is one of the latest surprises. Next to her, a piece by the sculptor dazzles milie Tolot that plays with hundreds of three-dimensional figures to reproduce the sensation of movement in a kind of gigantic and surreal zotrope. And not far away, intact, the room of the Lumire couple, the parents, where, says Frmaux, one day, closer to the present, they slept Agns Varda y Jane Birkin. And so. A museum, without a doubt, outside any box.
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