The very first commercial, public cinematic exhibition took place just over 117 years ago on December 28, 1895 when Auguste and Louis Lumière screened 10 short films in a salon in Paris.

It was the first day anyone in history had "gone to the movies."  And what did those 1895 Parisians see at the screening that day?

A man attempting to straddle a horse.

A baby being fed at a table by its parents.

Men and women leaving a factory at the end of the workday.

Video Link: The Lumière Brothers first films (1895)

The 10 films shown were each about 50 seconds long.  This is because the newly-invented cinema camera was made to take one reel of film, which, at 17 meters long, was hand-cranked at a rate that amounted to about 50 seconds' duration.

I was entranced from the very first time I saw these moving images, taken the year that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted in French military court.  

My imagination played over all the stories that weren't being told on screen:  Could the baby potentially be alive at 106 years old?  What did everyone at the factory do when they got home from work?  What did the roads look like where the horses carried travelers?

As a filmmaker, I was impressed by the way these films could truly be said to document something. Whereas the modern "documentary" is really more of a fact-oriented show of artificially-produced scenarios (staged interviews, conceptualized animation, dramatic re-enactments, archival footage loosely linked to a written and rehearsed voice-over), many of the Lumière Brothers' films were as genuine a cinematic reproduction of reality as could be achieved with a motion picture camera.  No artifice in lighting, no artifice in camera movement, no artifice in editing.  No such techniques yet existed in cinema.

The original cinématographe moving-picture camera.


In the back of my mind, I developed the idea to shoot an 1895-style documentary some day.  The chance finally came in the summer of 2011.   I was living in Paris, and after developing a string of documentary ideas that did not reach production stage, I decided to simply take out my HD (high-definition) DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera and a tripod on the day of my favorite Parisian festival, Fête de la Musique, the longest day of the year, and just document reality Lumière style.  Over the next 3 months, I shot hundreds of long takes of Parisian life.  For six months more, I narrowed the selection down to the 90-or-so best shots, organized them in a meaningful way, had a musical score written, and there I had myself an hour-long Lumière-style documentary.  

MOVIE TRAILER: Postcards from Paris Trailer

(Postcards from Paris is screening with live music at Brooklyn Heights Cinema at 7pm on Monday, January 14.)

There were significant differences between my film and the original Lumière films.  The most obvious being that my images were in color and had sharper resolution.  I also had the advantage of 116 years of cinema language to inform my shot composition.  In the 1890's, even popular still-photography was largely yet-to-be-discovered as Kodak had only recently been founded, in 1889.

I called my film Postcards from Paris for the way that the reproduction of handpicked images is part of the form and the content of the film.

Another thing I discovered as a result of this style of filming, is that the long, fixed shot does not stop our modern brain's habit of expecting the buffeting of incapacitating visual bombardments that we have become accustomed to.  An action movie such as The Bourne Ultimatum averages a cut every 2.2 seconds for 115 minutes--or, count how many seconds between edits next time you watch television or an internet video, in some cases a 30-second commercial won't contain a single image that lasts a full second!  As a result, our eyes now tend to scan an image quickly for a stereotypical meaning and then gear up for a new image to accrete to it.  And in the meantime, we lose appreciation for what can be grasped in a single image: it's smaller details, authorial choices, appreciation of color, relation of subjects, layers of composition.  I know we are still capable of appreciating a single image at a time, however.  It was at the Musée d'Orsay where I saw thousands of people stream in to stand in front of Impressionist paintings that they had traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to absorb for ten whole seconds! two whole minutes!! that I realized it was possible to make a movie that might attract a longer glance per image.  One of my goals was to wrest the modern brain's fixation on 'new image! new image!' to a more thoughtful search for 'new detail! new detail!' in the same image until the appreciation of a single image could last with enough depth that a 50-second shot seems to cut away before you have time to take it in.

Link: Postcards from Paris Facebook Page

The Lumière brothers could hardly have imagined how the role of their invention would evolve over the course of a century.  While revolutions in the medium from sound to digital have multiplied its possibilities beyond measure and for the better, I think it's nice to take a step back on occasion and see images at the speed we experience present moments: one second per second, one minute per minute. Before the 1800's, the idea of a moment of life being captured and repeated was the stuff of a philosopher's speculative mind game.  The invention of cinema brought it closer to reality with the representation of captured light in motion. Eventually colors could be reproduced and sound, too, and filming from new angles could be achieved. Yet somehow, the more cameras we have in every nook and cranny of our lives, the less accurately our media bring back real 'moments.' Whether it's the pixelated swoops of an iPhone's erratic movement in a dark restaurant whose candlelight dazzles the eye but barely registers on an 8 megapixel camera, or a flashing music video that juxtaposes a Porsche speeding down a mountain highway with a choreographed dance in a white-box studio next to eleven other screens playing at a gym with 50 treadmillls and stair masters oriented in regimental files to watch them, the moving images we see have less context, less space to communicate as moving images per se,  and less of a quality of 'moments' as we would recognize them from real life.  Long, fixed shots could make us more aware of the enhanced nature of footage that is often accepted with the label "real," to help us perceive where and how camera and editing (even without "special" effects) create fundamental illusions in everything from "reality" TV to the nightly news.

One of the functions of art is to help us to see the world we live in with more clarity.  In a media landscape saturated with the work of cutting-edge cinema tools, perhaps a step back into the techniques of the very first cinema shows of the 1890's, can allow author and audience alike to find more art where there is less artifice.

DVD's and Blu-Ray's of Postcards from Paris are available.  

Inquire with an e-mail to postcardsfromparismovie@gmail.com