The Imagery World of Louis Lumière

The Lumiere brothers learned photography techniques in the photo studio run by their father, Lumiere Sr., and later helped their father run the photographic equipment factory while developing the "Movie Movie Machine". As photographers, the Lumiere brothers showed a completely different mindset from Edison in their approach to film. This difference is not only reflected in the invention of "projection" and the improvement of film machinery and equipment, but more prominently in the fundamental differences in concepts of time and space and fundamental aesthetic differences in 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 hallucinatory name - film. However, Edison's concept of film and this new art had great limitations.

First of all, most of the films shown in the "movie mirror" provided by Edison were shot in a device he set up called the "black prison car." In fact, his creation itself does not deviate from the original model of "photo studio". In front of the "peeping mirror" that can only be viewed by one person, the viewer's "peeping" is just a repetition of the photographer's "peeping" again and again.

Secondly, the 50 or so works first completed by Dixon: "Bar Scene", "Annabella's Dance", "Tooth Extraction", "The Barber", "Buffalo" "Pierre" and so on. Most of their contents simply show dancing, boxing, juggling, playing games and other entertainment scenes. The characters in the film were performed for the camera by actors hired by Edison, just like "moving photos." These are just some fictional short programs based on the stage play model. In contrast, the Lumiere brothers adopted a more realistic approach. They first got rid of the constraints of the closed artificial space that photographers in photo studios have, and moved towards the vast and open natural space. The content of the work also strives harder to express and replicate things and lives that actually exist in real life, rather than specifically arranging and reenacting things and lives that do not actually exist for the camera. For example, the short films originally shot by Lumière: "Factory Gate", "Train Arrives at the Station", "Women Burning Grass", "Ship Leaving the Port", "Delegates Landing", "Police Parade", etc., It directly shows the workers after get off work, passengers getting on and off the train, women at work, fishermen rowing out to sea, photographers ashore, and policemen marching on the streets, etc. In these works, the Lumiere brothers truly captured and recorded real-life scenes, allowing people to see the real lives and familiar people around them. As Georges Sadoul said: From Lumiere's films, people understand that film can be "a machine for recreating life", rather than just a machine like Edison's "movie mirror". A machine that makes motion."