CONSTANT GIREL IN JAPAN 

In 1896, Inabata Katsutaro, a textile industrialist from Western Japan, visited Lyon. He had studied at the renowned technical high school La Martinière where one of his fellow schoolmates was Auguste Lumière. Now they met again; and when Inabata returned to his country in early 1897, he brought back three Lumière cinématographes, the Lumière license for Japan, enough films to do screenings and a technician to do the screenings, Constant Girel. Girel had the additional job of filming vues in Japan.

Mr. Inabata saw his mission as introducing advanced Western technologies to his country and not as being associated with popular entertainment; he handed things over to Yokota Einosuke, a show manager. Only a few days after the first screenings of the Cinématographe Lumière in Osaka (February 15, 1897), Kyoto (March 1) and Tokyo (March 8) the Japanese could also see Vitascope shows. Cinema was a success, and in late 1897 the first domestic films were made.

The Catalogue Lumière lists eighteen views shot by Girel in Japan in 1897. Why not more? Why come back to Europe with so little, after more than ten months in Japan? Maybe there is a reason known to the entire world except me. Maybe Girel was simply too busy training people and organizing electricity for the screenings, maybe negative stock was scarce, maybe he had exposed hundreds of films and botched them all up? There is nothing wrong, however, with those we have: Kyoto, the old capital, a charming “Goûter du bébé Inabata”, Ainu dancers and a famous Kabuki actor (Ichikawa Sadanji) striking a mie pose in nondescript surroundings, with the camera as his only audience.

Mariann Lewinsky

REVEALING LUMIÈRE 308 – BÂLE: PONT SUR LE RHIN A VIDEO LECTURE ON AN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY

Lumière 308 – Bâle: Pont sur le Rhin provides a glimpse of Basel at its fin-de-siècle apogee. The film had not met with great scholarly interest for a long time until we managed to involve some fifty archives and institutions in a comprehensive study. After three years of focussing on these forty-seven seconds of footage, intensive research has led to a multitude of surprising new results – beyond the exact dating of the film and the reconstruction of the circumstances of Henri Lavanchy-Clarke’s production. The discovery of new documents illuminates this flamboyant organiser’s privileged position within Lumière’s first distribution system for their Cinématographe. Our renewed examination of Lavanchy’s earliest Swiss films (produced in association with the 1896 Geneva National Exhibition) led to the identification of illustrious members of his artistic, philanthropic, industrial and missionary networks. It also helped to put his 1897 films into a new context, correcting some errors.

Most of all, Lumière 308 has turned out to be a missing link between Lyon and Basel as sister cities in the silk-dyeing industry: The film is carefully staged by a prominent local silk dyer – as a dynastic parade combined with his guild’s folkloristic procession. At the same time, it appears as a re-enactment of a huge patriotic pageant which had enthralled Basel four years earlier.

Last but not least: It is more than likely that Abbé Joye, this earliest amateur collector of films (which he used as a tool for proselytizing a staunchly protestant city), makes a prominent appearance in this clip.

Hansmartin Siegrist