Lumiere Jubilee
Lumiere Jubilee
The President of the Republic, sad-eyed M. Albert Lebrun, the Ambassadors and Ministers of the European States and the Papal Nuncio in his silk skirts gathered at the Sorbonne last week to see flicker and jiggle on a screen three strips of streaked and yellowed cinema film, each only three yards long.
Thus was climaxed the solemn jubilee of Louis Lumiere whose name means light and who has never claimed that he and his brother Auguste invented the cinema
40 years ago. Europe assumes that such was their achievement, ignoring Thomas Alva Edison. Invincibly bourgeois and perfectly satisfied with their large business in making still films and plates, the Brothers Lumiere left the invention of the cinema to stew for years in a shambles of litigation. The basic invention, they considered, was that of George Eastman who in 1889 produced sheets of celluloid film with which motion pictures could be made and were bound to be made by someone as soon as the necessary machine was tinkered into shape. The idea was patented as early as 1864 by a now forgotten Frenchman named Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron. In terms of pure theory he set down accurately at great length what ought to be done to make motion pictures. In the early 1890"s the supremely practical tinkering of Edison produced a peep-show device into which one spectator could look at pictures which moved while an Edison phonograph talked. The Brothers Lumiere produced at about the same time pictures thrown on a screen. The Lumiere camera which took them could be carried in one hand. The Edison camera of similar date was portable on a truck. Of the early projection machines, the Lumieres' was manifestly the best, but it was bad enough, as M. Le President and the diplomats agreed last week. The august audience saw a French train of 1895 chuff into a station, watched a gardener wet a fat man with a hose. Today Auguste Lumiere is dead and Louis tinkers with cameras and projectors for "three dimensional cinema." In another 40 years Europe and the President of France may or may not again honor Lumiere whose plastic cinema productions until recently required the spectator to wear goggles with tinted lenses to get the stereoscopic effect, must still be looked at through a colored glass screen.
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