One film consisting of 120 films. It may sound like a contradiction or even madness, but it’s true. Lumière, l’aventure continue! is a film (conceived and directed by Thierry Frémaux, director of Institut Lumière in Lyon and the Cannes Film Festival) that retraces the origins of cinema history to the time when the Lumière brothers sent their camera operators around the world to capture everything they possibly could (they were chased out of New York because Edison couldn’t stand the competition). It is also made up of 120 vues, 120 actual films, many of which have never been seen – even if they are only 50 seconds long, the maximum length possible at the time – and each one of which has a subject, a staging and a purpose … It is a world that comes to life in front of the first spectators, a world in which everything is worthy of being shot, and in which cinematographic language begins to take form, because when faced by those images one cannot but be fascinated by the beauty and elegance of the individual vues. The question every director should ask (where to place the camera?) finds its perfect answer in these shots: it is difficult to imagine a different way of framing, of filming what is in front of the lens. Whether it is a Japanese family keeping their children under control or a train entering a tunnel, a sail of a sailing boat ploughing through the waves, or visitors to the Exposition Universelle, we realise that in that moment cinema is inventing its gaze, it is offering us a vision of the world that is inseparable from its representation. And while giving shape to that which does not exist (cinema), it is also establishing the spectator’s need to observe a world they do not yet know. Thus, the words spoken by the father of the Lumière brothers to the young Méliès to dissuade him from buying one of those machines (“it’s an invention without a future”) takes on its true meaning: the jealousy of one who wants to keep that future all to himself and his children.

Paolo Mereghetti, Lumière. L’avventura del cinema: una lezione sempre valida su come guardare il mondo, “Corriere della sera”, 31 March 2025