The performance of the Lumiere brothers

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.

?firefighter

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.

Watering gardener

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. 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 "transfer" 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 and showed 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 we 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 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. When Gorky first saw Lumiere's film, he had a presentiment:

The realism of these shots will soon be abandoned and replaced by less natural techniques, which will be replaced by films of other genres. In this sense, it may also reflect the difference between the film art media itself and other traditional arts. It is so easy to attract people's attention and so profitable for artists of traditional culture. Then other forms of art media were extended in the film, and the ancient art media itself was given a new life. Facing the grand traditional culture, the film in its infancy can't help but flinch. Even, it is impossible to explore the film itself as an abstract system of a new art form.