Cinematography appears in the official classification of the 1900 Paris Exposition as a subset of photography. But across the vast exhibition site, moving pictures were used in many different places and ways: in the gardens of the Panorama de Rome Pope Leo XIII appeared on film, and animated photographs of appropriate subjects enlivened the pavillon Le Tour du Monde, the Diorama of Monaco, the Colonial Exhibits and the Palais du champagne. In the Voyages Animés pavillon, Lumière films depicting the regions of France made up programmes with the lofty title Visions d’Art – they were accompanied by music and recitals of poems and folk songs. Louis Lumière took charge of the construction of the gigantic 400 m2 screen for the Cinématographe Géant in the Galérie des Machines. (His plan to screen films shot on 75mm did not get beyond a trial stage). According to the final report of the Expo, an average of 5,000 people attended 326 screenings, each presenting 15 Lumière views and 15 Lumière photographic colour slides made by trichrome process. Gabriel Veyre seems to have been the specialist in this very tricky technique, first proposed by Louis Ducos du Hauron in 1869 and improved and patented by the Lumière brothers in 1895 as “procédé photographique aux mucilages bichromate”. It required three exposures on black and white negatives, using filters, resulting in three colour gelatine positives that were mounted one on top of the other between glass. (The famous Autochrome process, for which the Lumière brothers obtained the patent in late 1903, was a simplified trichrome process; it required a single plate and exposure. And coloured potato starch particles). There is no detailed informations on the films presented by the Cinématographe Géant, so I have (apart from smuggling in a panorama by a visiting Edison cameraman) freely selected 15 views from the Lumières’ 1900 production slate. I combined them with the very rare tri-colour prints that Philippe Jacques, great grandson of Gabriel Veyre, and Eric Lange have offered us from their private collections so as to make this special screening possible. We thank them for their generous friendship.

Mariann Lewinsky