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Lumiere and Company
Directed by Numerous Directors
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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In 1895, Louis and August Lumiere patented the Cinematographe, a box-like device that not only worked as a camera, but processed the film it took, and doubled as a projector. The first films of the Lumiere brothers ranged from charming little scenes of Fin de Siecle French life – women with babies, trains arriving – to exotic shots taken in remote regions of the world. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere’s invention, French television producers gave 40 of the world’s best filmmakers – or at least those brave enough to take the challenge – the chance to use the Lumiere’s Cinematographe and produce a short film with the following rules: no synchronous sound, only 52 seconds of film can be used, and only three takes could be made. An interesting idea to say the least, and while most of these mini-movies are at best charming little cinematic doodles, giving little insight into the filmmakers or the history of cinema, some of the directors here rise to the occasion – and one goes way beyond the call of duty and into the stratosphere.
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 Lumiere & Company Multiple Directors VHS Tape - $16.99 Subtitles in English |
There are some truly wonderful things here too: Jacques Rivette turns in a sweet street scene of a little girl becoming a conduit for a meeting between a man and a roller-skating girl that has the director’s stamp all over it (and the ironic fact that it’s on 52 seconds is not lost on Rivette, who’s film Out One ran 12 hours). Spike Lee tries to get his son to say "dada," and Spain’s Bigas Luna (who made Jamon Jamon) films a lovely nude woman breast feeding her child on a freshly tilled field.
There are some attempts here at more challenging imagery, however. Peter Greenaway gives us a creepy and typically numerically obsessed film of a nude man (looking like he stepped out of an Muybridge motion study) surrounded by signs with the years on them. Arthur Penn films a scene of race relations in South Africa, and Andrei Konchalovsky turns in a bizarre film of a gorgeous scene of nature offset by the corpse of a rotting animal being consumed by maggots. Pretty, it ain’t.
And then there’s David Lynch’s film.
It’s a temptation to over-praise Lynch’s contribution here, as in the context of the other films, it seems light-years away in concept, execution and ambition. Suffice to say that Lynch took the assignment to heart in a way that is truly extraordinary; his 52 seconds make you love Lynch’s truly unsettling, Eraserheaded images all over again and makes you forgive past transgressions, indulgences and Twin Peaks-isms. Here Lynch gives us a bizarre series of rapid events that give off the impression of nightmarish unease: we see a group of policeman approach a body lying on the grass, and the film goes dark. Next we see a blinding light and we see a group of creepy looking aliens who seem to be torturing a naked woman who they have inside a huge clear tube of water (I know, I know but I’m not making this up). A huge flame engulfs the screen, and we see a living room where a concerned looking couple answer the door to a policeman who appears to be the bearer of bad news. After the clip, Lynch says he like films because he likes to "get lost in another world." This isn’t lost, however, it’s flat out gone. (I mean that in a good, Beatnik sense.) If you’re a Lynch freak, you need this now.
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NICK BURTON lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.