Gabrielle Jennings
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Revisiting Lumière

On December 28, 1895, the first paying audience gathered to see a program of films projected from a machine called the Cinematograph.  The place was the Grand Café in the Salon Indien, the city: Paris, the Directors: August and Louis Lumière.

 

The original Lumière films are source material for this remake process.  Each of the original 10 short Lumière films are being reenacted with 10 slightly different takes and shot on digital video, resulting in 100 scenes.  A dvd will be produced which will enable the random shuffling of the 100 different scenes into 10 ordered programs; each program will run 5 minutes.  In order to explore early cinema and compare it to modern technologies, the piece will ideally be installed as a large screen projection. 

 

My interest here is in staging 'updates' of the now classic scenes, while incorporating a contemporary viewpoint so that the “Workers Leaving the Factory” (the Lumière Factory in Lyon which produced all kinds of photographic products) might now be an optimistic ‘Workers Leaving the American Apparel Building’ (a progressive, ‘sweatshop free workplace’).  The goal here is an inquiry into the things that change and those that remain the same over time.  Dress, technology, architecture (style) certainly change, while expression, curiosity, human movement (gesture) : a child eating ‘Feeding the Baby” or bodies in water “The Sea” may not.

 

Revisiting Lumière

video, 2008

 

On December 28, 1895, the first paying audience gathered to see a program of films projected from a machine called the Cinematograph.  The place was the Grand Café in the Salon Indien, the city: Paris, the Directors: August and Louis Lumière.

The original Lumière films are source material for this remake process.  Each of the original 10 short Lumière films are being reenacted with 10 slightly different takes and shot on digital video, resulting in 100 scenes.  A DVD will be produced which will enable the random shuffling of the 100 different scenes into 10 ordered programs; each program will run 5 minutes.  In order to explore early cinema and compare it to modern technologies, the piece will ideally be installed as a large screen projection. 

My interest here is in staging 'updates' of the now-classic scenes while incorporating a contemporary viewpoint so that the “Workers Leaving the Factory” (the Lumière Factory in Lyon which produced all kinds of photographic products) might now be an optimistic ‘Workers Leaving the American Apparel Building’ (a progressive, ‘sweatshop-free workplace’).  The goal here is an inquiry into the things that change and those that remain the same over time.  Dress, technology, architecture (style) certainly change, while expression, curiosity, human movement (gesture): a child eating ‘Feeding the Baby” or bodies in water “The Sea” may not.