Brief introduction and detailed information of Lumiere Brothers Company

In the photo studio run by their father, Lumiere Sr, the Lumiere brothers learned photography techniques. At the same time, their father took charge of the photographic equipment factory and developed the "mobile film machine". As photographers, the Lumiere brothers showed a completely different thinking concept from Edison from the beginning. This difference is not only manifested in the invention of "projection" and the improvement of film machinery and equipment, but also in the fundamental differences in time and space concepts and aesthetics of their film works.

As an inventor, Edison made great contributions to movies. His development of film machines and devices laid the foundation for the birth of new art, and his greater glory is to give this new art a charming, poetic and illusory name-film. However, Edison's concept of film and this new art has great limitations.

First of all, most of the films shown in Edison's "Movie Mirror" were shot in a device he set up called "Black Prison Car". In fact, his creation itself did not break away from the original mode of "photo studio". In front of the "peep mirror" that only one person can see, the viewer's "peep" is just repeating the photographer's "peep" again and again. Followed by Dixon's first 50 or so works, such as The Scene of the Bar, Dance of annabella, Tooth Extraction, Barber, Pierre Buffalo, etc. Most of them simply show entertainment scenes such as dancing, boxing, juggling and playing games. The characters in the film are all performed by actors invited by Edison for the camera, just like "moving photos". It's just some fictional little programs that apply the model of stage play.

On the contrary, the Lumiere brothers took a more realistic attitude. First of all, they got rid of the shackles of the closed artificial space owned by the photographers in the studio and moved towards the vast and open natural space. The content of the work is also to try harder to express and copy the things and lives that actually exist in real life, rather than to arrange and perform those things and lives that don't actually exist for the camera. For example, short films originally shot by Louis Lumière, such as Factory Gate, Train Entering the Station, Woman Burning Grass, Ship Leaving Hong Kong, Delegate Login, Police Parade, etc. , directly shows the off-duty workers, passengers getting on and off the bus, working women, fishermen boating out to sea, photographers ashore, policemen marching on the streets, etc. In these works, the Lumiere brothers truly captured and recorded scenes in real life, allowing people to see real life and familiar people around them. As georges sadoul said, from Louis Lumiere's movies, people know that movies can be "a machine that reproduces life", not just a machine that acts like Edison's "movie mirror".

Statement Narration "Representative Login"

The delegates' landing is called "news film":1In June, 895, the French Photography Association held a photography conference in Vail on the Soyuan River, and Lumiere filmed the moment when the 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: extinguishing the fire with a water hose, extinguishing the fire with a water 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.

In the form of shooting, Lumiere's films are mostly shot by a single lens with a fixed viewpoint. Of course, this does not include the following touching films shot by Lumiere photographers by means of transportation. In Lumiere's "fixed-view single shot", the 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 login" and "fake 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" and regarded Lumiere's "action 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". However, 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.

Despite this, the Lumiere brothers still consider themselves manufacturers and scientists, not artists. They use "movie machines" to shoot and show movies, and more to 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 methods" and 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.

In the embryonic stage of the film, there are two different photography tendencies: one is represented by Lumiere brothers, which mainly captures the real life phenomenon and shows the trivial things around people on the screen; A fictional life picture represented by Meria mainly records the processed life picture on the stage. Along these two creative paths, it developed into two kinds of films: documentary and feature film. These two tendencies are reflected in feature film photography, and gradually formed two different schools: painting school and documentary school. Lumiere brothers summed up their predecessors' experience and invented the world's first relatively perfect, flexible and portable portable "mobile movie machine" in 1894. This is a machine that can take pictures, show and develop. The film machine consists of a black box with a traction mechanism for intermittent motion of 35 mm film and a shutter rotation mechanism. It is equipped with a camera lens to take pictures at the frequency of 12 frames per second. When the picture is still, the shutter opens and the film is exposed. When the shutter is closed, the film moves forward to get a negative. Then take off the lens, put the negative film on the machine, paste another unexposed film, run it under the illumination of light source, and get the positive film after exposure. The film machine is also equipped with a projection lens. After loading the film, put the machine under the light bulb, and the light beam passes through the film and lens, and the camera becomes a projector.

It is in this "moving movie machine" that Lumiere brothers and their photographers produced the first batch of documentaries represented by Train Entering the Station and Factory Gate, thus becoming the originator of documentaries.

Invention of tricolor photo1907 June 10, Lumiere brothers invented tricolor photo making technology. This method was developed by the factory run by his family in France, and it is based on the use of three independent images of the photographed scene. For each of the three images, use an appropriate color filter to make a negative with one of the three primary colors of red, green and blue. Then, place a particle screen on the three-color master. When the screen is placed on it and the light shines on them, a full-color image will appear. Although color photos were made as early as 186 1, james maxwell made the first production process at the Royal Society of London. However, their application is still limited because the technology used to make full-color photos is too expensive and complicated.

Invention story 1872 One day, in a hotel in California, two people had a heated argument about whether the hoof touched the ground when the horse was running. "When a horse is running and jumping, it always has a hoof on the ground," said one. "When the horse jumped, all four hooves were empty," retorted another man. The two men blushed and decided to make a bet. They went to the racetrack first and wanted to see it on the spot. Unfortunately, the horse runs too fast to see if the horseshoe touches the ground.

When British photographer McBride learned about this, he said there was a solution. He placed 24 cameras side by side on the runway, all aimed at the runway; On the other side of the runway, 24 stakes were hit, and each stake was tied with a string; These lines cross the runway and are tied to the shutter of each camera opposite. When everything was ready, mcbride let the horse run from one end of the track. When the horse passed the road where the camera was installed, it tripped over 24 wires in turn, and at the same time, the shutters of 24 cameras took 24 photos in turn. It can be clearly seen from this continuous photo tape that a horse always has a hoof on the ground when running, so the person who holds this view wins the bet. At the same time, mcbride accidentally twitched the photo tape quickly. As a result, the static horse in the photo was folded into a moving horse, and the horse was "alive"! McBride also made these photos transparent, pasted them evenly on a glass disc in order, made a metal disc with the same size, pasted them on the position of the photos, opened a hole with the same size as the photos, and then projected them on a white screen with a slide show, and turned the two discs upside down, so that you could see the continuous movement of the horse running. McBride called the machine he designed a "monitor". It takes advantage of the visual persistence effect of human eyes, that is, human visual reflex can stay in the brain for a short time. Therefore, if a still photo rotates rapidly, two adjacent photos can be connected in this short time, and the picture will be "alive".

1887, the inventor Edison was inspired by the display and made the first "projector": it looks like a rectangular cabinet with a protruding mirror inside, which is equipped with batteries and equipment to drive movies; The film is wound on a series of criss-crossing pulleys and moves at a speed of 46 frames per second; Place a magnifying glass with a large magnification where the film passes through the mirror. When the audience watches from the small hole in the mirror, the fast-moving movie forms an active scene under the magnifying glass.

In April, 1894, the first cinema officially opened in Broadway, New York, USA. There are only 10 projectors in this cinema, and only 10 tickets can be sold at a time. As a result, there was a sea of people at the gate of the cinema, and people were proud of watching movies. But this kind of "movie" can't be projected on the screen, which makes the audience very limited and the image is not clear. Because it is to let the film pass through the film door continuously, instead of passing through the film door in a "stop-and-go" way (that is, cover the film door when the film is moving and open the film door when the film is not moving). Edison was also very dissatisfied with the "projector" he invented. He wanted to solve the problem of film transmission mode, but he was helpless at the moment.

French scientists Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumiere are also very interested in the development of movies, hoping to overcome the difficulties in development and produce real movies. /kloc-one night at the end of 0/894, when Louis was designing the simulation diagram of film transmission, it suddenly occurred to him: when sewing clothes with a sewing machine, isn't the material just doing a "move and stop" movement? When the sewing machine is sewing clothes, the cloth does not move; When the sewing machine sews a needle and stands it up, the material moves forward. Isn't this very much like the way movies are spread? So, he told his brother Auguste excitedly that he could pull the adhesive tape with the movement produced by machinery such as sewing machine presser foot. When the traction mechanism rises again, the sharp claw will retreat from the hole at the lower end, making the film static. After the experiment, Louis's idea was proved to be feasible. Later, August said in an article: "My brother invented the film machine in one night." In addition, the two brothers also made many improvements to the original work by using the research results of many scientists.

1895 65438+February 28th. At the invitation of Lumiere brothers, some celebrities in Paris came to the basement of the big coffee shop at Kapesin Street 14 to watch movies. In the darkness, the audience saw a vivid picture on the white cloth. A reporter reported: "A carriage was pulled by a galloping horse, and a woman sitting next to me stood up in fear." This is the first real film in the world, which means the maturity of film technology. Later, people designated this day-1895 65438+February 28th as the film birth date, and Lumiere brothers were also called "the fathers of modern movies".

The main documentary is the eldest son of the film and the poor brother of the feature film. It is always accompanied by the journey of the film, sometimes brilliant, sometimes depressed, but always has a loyal customer base. Documentary has experienced ups and downs for more than a century. During this period, the recorded masters and surging aesthetic thoughts have created brilliance again and again. Moreover, every ups and downs are always intertwined with the focus of social change. As Evans, the master of record, said, wherever there is war, I will go. I am always in the midst of world events. In order to sort all this out, we must go back to the original source of this film, starting with the Lumiere brothers. 1895 12.28, Lumiere brothers sold tickets to the public for the first time at the "India Salon" on the ground floor of the big coffee shop at Kapesin Road 14 in Paris, and showed the public the first batch of short films they shot by documentary methods. Among them, there are 12 movies, such as The Gate of Lumiere Factory, Tearing Down the Wall, Belcour Square in Lyon, Train Entering the Station, Baby's Lunch and Watering Gardener. Each movie has only one minute of silent short film. Especially Watered Gardener, which is the earliest film with comedy factors in the world, has set a precedent for the creation of feature films in the future.

Lost in the complicated image space-time, perhaps we have forgotten that when the Louis Lumiere brothers made a mobile camera weighing only 5 kilograms in 1895, it became an ideal tool to shoot real life truthfully. Short films such as Train Entering Station and Factory Gate, which were released for the first time that night, were not only the pioneering works of world movies, but also the first breath of world documentaries, and were even branded as "folk documentary images".

The Lumiere brothers sold tickets for commercial screening in this basement for several years, and changed their programs from time to time, showing more than 50 films, such as Fire, Blacksmith, Poker, Beach and Sea Bath, Chess, Goldfish Catching and Ship Leaving Hong Kong, some of which were starred by Auguste Lumiere himself. 1896 In late February, Lumiere brothers went to London to show their films publicly. Due to the technical perfection of this "moving film machine" and the authenticity, novelty and action of the film, the Lumiere brothers gained a worldwide reputation. Not only is it recognized in the world that1895 65438+February 28th is the birth date of the film, which makes the film "the only art that can let us know its birth date" (Bela Balazs), but the great writer Gorky predicted after watching their films that "it will surely serve general scientific tasks, improve people's lives and develop people's wisdom", and it will gain extensive development.

The Lumiere brothers were not only the first successful experimenters on the screen, but also completed the invention of the film and tried to imitate the audio film for the first time, which reflected their strong desire to make the "big dumb" speak as soon as possible.

June 1895 The French National Photography Conference jointly sponsored by 26 scientists was held in Naville. Louis Lumiere seized the opportunity to shoot the news film "The Landing of Delegates". Delegates disembarked from a pier on the bank of Xionghe River, and the film was shown to the delegates 24 hours later.

The theme selection work scene is called the first film in the history of world cinema, Train Entering the Station, which takes the factory of Lumiere brothers' own home in Lyon as the background and shoots 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.

Family life A movie with the theme of your most familiar family life is undoubtedly the best choice for early film production. In this kind of films: baby's lunch, playing cards, chess, fishing, goldfish bowl, cat's lunch, children's quarrel, family dinner, quiet family life and so on. They are the most representative works.

Sadoul once commented on these films: "These films are not only like a family photo album, but also like a social documentary about a wealthy French family at the end of last century, which was shot unintentionally. 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.

Political Culture 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 church in Jerusalem, the coronation ceremony in Tsar Nicholas II, my house in Japan, the delegates logging in, a new ship launching, 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 our understanding and understanding of the end of last century.

Outdoor shooting of natural scenery 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 the boat out in the face of the waves that have washed up on the shore 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.