Lumière et Compagnie

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.