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Lumière et Compagnie (1995)

Director: Gabriel Axel, Claude Miller, Jacques Rivette, Michael Haneke, Fernando Trueba, Merzak Allouache, Raymond Depardon, Wim Wenders, Jaco Van Dormael, Nadine Trintignant, Régis Wargnier, Hugh Hudson, Zhang Yimou, Liv Ullmann, Vicente Aranda, Lucian Pintilié, John Boorman, Claude Lelouch, Abbas Kiarostami, Lasse Hallström, Costa-Gavras, Kiju Yoshida, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Gastone Kabore, Youssef Chahine, Helma Sanders, Francis Girod, Cédric Klapisch, Alain Corneau, Ismail Merchant-James Ivory, Jerry Schatzberg, Spike Lee, Andrei Konchalovsky, Peter Greenaway, Bigas Luna, Arthur Penn, David Lynch, Theo Angelopoulos, Sarah Moon, Patrice Leconte

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From Time Out Film Guide

A Lumière centenary production (cf Les Enfants de Lumière). Forty film-makers were invited, or challenged, to make a Lumière movie: one shot, 52 seconds long, no direct sound, using an original 1895 camera. The result is a series of tableaux - elaborate, banal, enigmatic - in which the favourite gambit has been to include the past and the present in the same shot (Boorman, Yimou, Merchant Ivory). Several look like fragments that have shaken loose from one of their director's features (Wenders, Rivette), while the most distinctive (Greenaway, Lynch) blithely ignore the ground rules. Even 40 of these film-lets don't add up to a feature, so each director is quizzed on such topics as 'Is cinema mortal?' and even 'Pourquoi filmez-vous?' And yes, in principle there's a 1995 'train arriving at La Ciotat station' - that's Leconte, opening the proceedings. Except the train doesn't stop there now.

Author: BBa

Time Out Film Guide

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