A Lumière film is composed of a strip of celluloid 17 meters long and 35mm wide lasting about fifty seconds. At the time, they were defined as ‘cinematographic views’. The 35mm format was chosen because it was the same as that used by the American Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope. There was only one difference: four rectangular perforations per frame in Edison’s, but only a round one in the Lumière’s. In this way it is still possible today to recognise a film shot with an original Cinématographe.
If 80% of silent cinema has disappeared and much of George Méliès’ oeuvre has been lost, Louis Lumière kept his output intact in Lyon, in the cellar of his family’s castle. In 1946 he deposited it in the Cinémathèque française. In the Sixties and Seventies a collector in Lyon, Paul Génard, in turn compiled a good number of films. In 1982-1983, the creation of the Istitut Lumière allowed Bernard Chardère to assemble the Lumière’s cinematic output almost in its entirety. In 1991, under the urging of Maurice Trarieux-Lumière, Louis’ grandson and the first president of the fledgling Association des Frères Lumière, the CNC – Archive françaises du film at Bois D’Arcy undertook a first attempt at cataloguing their work. A second attempt has been underway since 2014 and the curator, Béatrice de Pastre, has indicated that the Societé Lumière was directly responsible for producing 1,422 films. In 2009, on the occasion of the first edition of the Lumière festival, the Lumière Institute, in collaboration with the CNC and the Cineteca di Bologna, undertook a digital restoration in 2K. In 2013, it was decided that, for the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the Cinématographe’s creation in 2015, about 150 Lumière films would be restored in 4K from negative and positive elements belonging to the collections of the Cinémathèque française, the Istitut Lumière and the CNC, conserved at Bois d’Arcy.
The restoration was conducted in October 2014 by the Éclair Group in Paris and carried out by the Istitut Lumière in collaboration with the CNC and the Cinémathèque française, together with the Cineteca di Bologna and its laboratory, L’Immagine Ritrovata. This restoration led to the printing of a new negative, 35mm copies and a DCP, allowing the films to be projected on screens around the world.

Thierry Frémaux