Presentazione del cofanetto Dvd I colori ritrovati. Kinemacolor e altre magie (Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna)

ALEXANDRE PROMIO I: Seeing and Watching

They should be called Promio films, not films by the Lumière brothers! “There is no doubt that at least a third of the vues in the Lumière Catalogue are by him” (Lumière Catalogue, 1995). For those who are interested in statistics: of the 1428 titles in the Lumière catalogue about 800 are not attributed to anyone, 350 are attributed to Alexandre Promio, 34 to Louis Lumière and just one to Auguste Lumière.

Alexandre Promio (1868-1926) entered the Lumière company on March 1, 1896. Entrusted with directing the department of cinematography, he trained the cameramen who subsequently went abroad; he himself travelled for most of 1897. While the first Lumière films (the most famous ones) by Louis Lumière have a carefree holiday mood of friends meeting, beloved infants and pets playing, the vues by Alexandre Promio are visual sensations of speed, light and shadow, depth, composition and movement.

The two programmes are made up mainly of views by Promio, many of them taken from trains or ships in motion. For contrast, the first one includes three clown bits and a sketch, and the second one four dances by Ashanti.

Mariann Lewinsky

GEORGES MÉLIÈS: Grand Spectacle d’Actualités – Machines – Trucs – Grivoiserie et Tableau animé

(Introduzione e accompagnamento al piano di Serge Bromberg)

The frères Lumière, inventors and industrialists of the machine age, created the cinématographe as a natural progression of photography; their Plaque Étiquette bleue (1881) had made instantaneous photography possible, and their newest device could photograph motion. Many of their cameramen were trained in chemistry or pharmacology; photography held a scientific allure for them.

Méliès lived and worked in the much older universe of theatre and magic shows, a realm rich in form and content. In 1897 he greatly enlarged the scope of animated photography with phantasmagorical diableries full of tricks and transformations such as Le Château hanté and with other genres common to theatrical venues in 1897: naughty grivoiseries (Après le bal), acrobatic sketches of cops and robbers with amazing tempo and timing (Sur les toits) or actualités réconstituées from the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 such as Combat naval en Grèce or La Prise de Tournavos. (In those days, news items could become topics of fireworks, circus shows or mechanical puppet-theatres). Les dernières cartouches is a dramatic tableau vivant of a famous painting at that time depicting an episode of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. If Méliès had first imitated Lumière films, by 1897 it was the other way round with Alexandre Promio and Georges Hatot doing a dozen Vues historiques et scènes reconstituées, including a version of Les Dernières Cartouches. The one by Méliès is vastly superior, but then Méliès already had a big glass-studio built and was a master of stage machinery and elaborate sets – which he used for more than one film.

Mariann Lewinsky