Realism is the discovery of what the human eye cannot perceive directly.
This observation by Jean Grémillon is borne out in the very first films of “life as it happened.” Louis Lumière, who with his brother Auguste invented the cinematograph, was “the last impressionist painter,” according to Jean-Luc Godard. Lumière's passion was to record the passions and pleasures of the French at the turn of the century. But he had, as well, a penchant for light, movement, resourceful framing, even close-ups and traveling shots, that made his films true works of art.
Lumière's Century explores his legacy in French documentary filmmaking from the early silents to the 1980s. Presented throughout October, it is a selection of films, some well-loved classics, some wonderful discoveries, that show how the term “documentary” spans everything from storytelling to the avant-garde and experimental cinema.
In France (as throughout Europe), the late twenties saw a flourishing of experimental documentaries; works by Marcel Carné, René Clair, Grémillon, and Jacques and Pierre Prévert ran the gamut of themes, from the sociological to the aesthetic. They are integrated into the twenty-one programs that make up Lumière's Century, which is organized thematically for a welcome change in perspective from the usual emphasis on author and chronology. Thus, Jean Vigo's inventive “kino-eye” document of decadent Nice, A propos de Nice (1929), is side-by-side with the Jean Renoir-led collaborative project La Vie est à nous (1936), on the Popular Front; and not far from another collaborative film, Far from Vietnam, which thirty-one years later brought together a new wave of politically outspoken filmmakers.
This series reminds us that Chris Marker, that peerless film essayist, had both peers and predecessors in Jean Rouch, Joris Ivens, and even the inimitable Sacha Guitry. Nor were poetry and surrealism anathema to the documentary, in the films of Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and most particularly, Georges Franju. “In Franju,” Raymond Durgnat wrote, “the reference is constantly to the objective world...at which our eyes unseeingly stare....(As with) Paul Eluard: ‘There is another world, but it's inside this one.'”
