Characteristics of Louis Lumiere's Works

In Lumiere's works, the theme and content can be roughly divided into four aspects:

Labor and working life

Known as the first film in the history of world cinema, Factory Gate takes Lumiere brothers' own factory in Lyon as the background to shoot the scene of workers leaving work. When the gate of the factory opened, women workers in aprons and men riding bicycles walked out of the factory laughing. Then, the master drove into the factory in two horse-drawn carriages, and the door closed again. Ordinary images and active people appeared on the screen for the first time, which made people feel extremely surprised. The natural and simple scenes in workers' daily life, even if people look like today, will be infected by their simple artistic charm. In his later works, Lumiere took ordinary workers as the theme and enthusiastically expressed their lives. For example: carpenters, blacksmiths, women who tear down walls and burn grass, photographers, gardeners who water and firefighters (four parts) and so on.

Interest in family life

Sadoul once commented on these films: "These films are not only like a family photo album, but also like a social documentary depicting a wealthy French family at the end of last century. Lumiere filmed some very successful scenes, allowing the audience to see the same life as themselves or the life they yearned for on the screen. " These emotional and poetic films are full of the interest of family life and the troubles of the bourgeoisie.

Politics, culture, news

Lumiere and the photographers he trained also focused on social politics, religious culture, factual news and other contents and states, showing their broad vision and broad interests. For example: the Jerusalem Church, the coronation ceremony of Tsar Nicholas II, my home in Japan, the landing of delegates, the launching of new ships and so on. These films first accurately captured the colors and characteristics of foreign politics and culture in that era from different perspectives. At the same time, as far as today is concerned, these works are also the most intuitive and true examples of people's understanding and understanding of the end of last century.

Natural scenery and street view

Outdoor shooting is the main feature of Lumiere's works. In this part of the work, Lumiere better shows a photographer's talent and his thinking about movies. Works: Departing ships, incoming trains, police parades, street scenes, cavalry performances, as well as two films, 39 scenes shot in America and Venice by two photographers in Lumiere. To truly and naturally "capture real life" and record the fascinating natural space where human beings live and people's daily life. In the movie "The Ship Leaving Hong Kong", people who go out to sea are struggling to row their boats against the waves coming ashore again and again. In the upper right corner of the picture, Mrs. Lumiere and her children standing on the dam waved handkerchiefs to the rowers against the sea breeze, and their clothes fluttered with the wind. Lumiere used backlight to make the whole picture poetic. In this part of the film, the arrangement of lens position and the processing of picture composition are very elegant. Lumiere used depth of field and mobile photography to express himself, which made him worthy of the reputation as the best photographer in early movies.

In less than 50 short films shot by Lumiere, he also showed people the possibility of creating different expressions and narrative forms. Among them,

Delegates ashore is called "newsreel":1In June, 895, the French Photography Association held a photography conference in Weil, Soyuan River, and Lumiere photographed the moment when delegates left the ship and landed. Twenty-four hours later, the film met the delegates. Therefore, Lumiere is called the pioneer of news documentary.

Fireman is called "documentary": the film consists of four segments: putting out the fire with a hose, putting out the fire with a hose and saving the victims (one minute each). Limited by the screening equipment and film length at that time, the works had to be separated. Then the work is reconnected. As a result, the moving scenes of street firefighters in Lyon from different angles and locations have formed a "montage" form and produced dramatic changes.

The Famous Watered Gardener is a budding comedy with gimmicks: based on a set of cartoons, the film is small in scale, but it contains many comedy factors, and it is "the embryo and prototype of all comedy films that appeared later". In Lumiere's films, we can also find other different styles of performance, such as: "False Kneeling" can be regarded as the prototype of the earliest "film chase"; The 39 Scenes of America (new york, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Niagara Falls) shot by Lumiere photographer Meschi Qi can be regarded as the first "travel film", and so on.

artistic form

Formally, most of Lumiere's films are shot with a single lens with a fixed angle of view. Of course, this does not include the following films with migration effect shot by Lumiere photographers with the help of transportation. In Lumiere's "Fixed-view Single-shot", "Train Entering the Station" is the most typical work: the camera's picture is on the platform, and the track of the train extends far away. There is no one on the platform. A train is approaching deep in the scene. The locomotive pulled out of the picture and stopped along the platform. Passengers get on and off. One of the girls hesitated in front of the camera, showing a natural shy expression. The train leaves the platform, turns left, and the movie ends. In this film, objects and characters are far and near, and the visual changes of different scenes form a deep scene scheduling. This is precisely the "long lens" shooting method that people usually use today, that is, the space-time continuum in which a single lens shoots from a fixed viewpoint. Interestingly, Jean-Luc Godard once again humorously imitated The Train Entering the Station in his film The Carpenter (1962). In Lumiere's films, the use of depth of field lens, "representative landing" and "false kneeling" are also very distinctive works.

Most of Lumiere's films are recording the movement of the world around him, and he has no intention of making "active film" a narrative art. Macy Heezen said, "The Lumiere brothers properly defined the real field of film. Novels and plays mainly express the human mind. As for movies, they show the dynamics of life, nature and its phenomena, and the changes between people. Everything that moves is within the shooting range of the film machine. The lens of the film machine is open to the whole world. " This passage not only accurately summarizes Lumiere's view of film, but also embodies the inherent documentary nature of film.

However, film theorists and film historians began to pay due attention to this point, but after 1950s, French film theorist Bazin and German film theorist Krakow advocated a deep exploration of film aesthetics from the perspective of film ontology, taking Lumiere's "active film" as the essence of film. Since then, people have a more appropriate evaluation of Lumiere's films. Although the history of film art is deeply influenced by traditional art, it is also developing in the direction of exploring the "human mind". Lumiere's viewpoint that "the lens of the film machine is open to the world" has laid a broader and more scientific foundation for us to study film aesthetics.

Although, the Lumiere brothers still consider themselves manufacturers and scientists, not artists. They use "mobile film machines" to shoot and show movies, and more importantly, they show the world their scientific inventions and the performance of their machines. They have never changed the method and purpose of "the wind blows the leaves and makes waves" to record the scenery. However, Lumiere's films have undeniable potential, that is, they can be used for narration and become a storytelling tool. So movies are quickly used by artists.