The Anthology Film Archives last night provided a showing of 130 Lumière Films; it was an amazing show. The show opened with the famous Lumière Factory scene of workers pouring out of the gates at quitting time, obviously instructed not to look at the camera, followed by an assortment of train, steamship, swimming, petanque and jokester movies.
One thought that kept popping into my mind was how full-circle we’ve come and how today’s vloggers are creating the next wave of moving images. Though vloggers of course have a huge amount of technology at their fingertips that are still wrestling formats, bandwidth and universal distribution. It’s a far cry from the issues of Lumière claw device invention which moved along the strip of film in the camera / projector but vloggers are none the less sorting many issues, from compression to database search to syndication.
It will be interesting in 50 years to look back on projects like Rocketboom and vlogging boards such as the Yahoo! videoblogging group to see where it all started and how they brought today’s reality to the flat panel displays the same way Lumière brought reality to the big screen.
BTW, I Googled and located a DVD box set that appears was released in Japan. Anyone know the details, please email me via the contact form if you do. Did the Institut Lumière release a set of the films in other regions? Thanks.
