Bruce Loeb on Piano

Films Lumière: 1895-1898
Paris Cinema (Pierre Chenal, 1929)
Le Grand Méliès (Georges Franju, 1951)

The films of Louis Lumière, the first to record “life as it happened,” today are fascinating for their realism, humor, and striking visual beauty. Most are actualities, showing the fabric of everyday life. But others, such as Feeding the Baby or Teasing the Gardener, are enacted. As early as 1896, Lumière recruited a score of assistants to shoot footage of people and events around the world. Thus in the work of one “primitive” we see the birth of film realism, of mise-en-scène, and of the newsreel and documentary. (80 mins, Silent, B&W). In Le Grand Méliès (25 mins, B&W), Georges Franju, the master of poetic documentary, takes us back in time to study the work and life of Georges Méliès, who saw that the possibilities offered by the cinematograph were purely magical. Paris Cinema (35 mins, Silent, B&W) is an early documentary on “this new god, the cinema,” an energetic look at the work involved in making cinema in the prolific period of the 1920s.