Lumière et compagnie (1995) - film review

Lumière et compagnie is a French-Danish-Spanish documentary film first released in 1995, directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, Youssef Chahine, Alain Corneau, Costa-Gavras, Raymond Depardon, Francis Girod, Peter Greenaway, Lasse Hallström, Hugh Hudson, Gaston Kaboré, Abbas Kiarostami, Cédric Klapisch, Andrei Konchalovsky, Spike Lee, Claude Lelouch, Bigas Luna, Sarah Moon, Arthur Penn, Lucian Pintilie, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jerry Schatzberg, Nadine Trintignant, Fernando Trueba, Liv Ullmann, Jaco van Dormael, Régis Wargnier, Wim Wenders, Yoshishige Yoshida, Yimou Zhang, Merzak Allouache, Gabriel Axel, Michael Haneke, James Ivory, Patrice Leconte, David Lynch, Ismail Merchant, Claude Miller and Jacques Rivette.  The film stars Romane Bohringer, François Mitterrand, Pascal Duquenne and Isabelle Huppert.  It has also been released under the title: Lumière and Company.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.

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To celebrate the centenary of the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinematograph (the forerunner of the modern film camera), 39 distinguished film directors from across the world took up the challenge to make a short film using the Lumières’ original equipment.  The films had to be 52 minutes in length, not use synchronised sound and take no more than three takes.  The difference in cinematic styles and cultural backgrounds is reflected in the resulting series of films, which range form the banal to the surreal and frankly bizarre.

Disappointingly, only a few of the directors managed to come up with an imaginative short film.  Most were presumably content to have mastered the immense difficulties of making a film with such primitive equipment.  Of particular note are the films recorded by Michael Haneke (a summary of the news on the day of the Lumieres’ anniversary), Régis Wargnier  (a touching portrait of French president François Mitterand, a few months before his death) and David Lynch (a block-buster sci-fi/horror mini-epic).  The films also includes a few of Louis Lumiere’s original films, magnificently restored.

The film also goes in front of the camera and allows the film-makers to express some of their thoughts about their art.  Here again only a few of the great men and women have anything original to say.  Whilst it would be unfair to say that this film was a wasted opportunity, it is certainly does contain a lot of mediocre material and is hardly a fitting tribute to the birth of cinema.

© James Travers 2002

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