“Lumière invented the public, and the public reinvented cinema”

Thierry Frémaux is the artistic director of the world’s most important film festival: Cannes, the most prestigious contemporary film showcase. But, at the same time, he is also the director of the Lumière Institute in his hometown, Lyón, where he is dedicated to the restoration and exhibition of classical cinema, such as Louis Lumière, one of the parents of the cinema himself.

In Lumière, the adventure continues!, Sequel to its lumière, the adventure begins, released in 2016 (and available in Filmin), condenses and comments more than one hundred shorts restored from Lumière to claim the artist above the inventor. How does this have one foot in the roots of the cinema and another in your avant -garde? I feel a privileged. But it is something that goes with my way of watching cinema, since I do not distinguish between the past and the present. A contemporary film awakens me the same passion as one of 1940. The staging, the dialogues, the actors, the camera … It is clear that to value today’s cinema you have to know yesterday’s. Yes of course. Although there are French contemporary critics who dismiss the cinema of the past. It is true that it is not good to compare, because every film period has its own technique and reflects a completely different society. You cannot compare the different eras. You have to live with your time. But, at the same time, I regret that, for example, in the death of Alain Delon no one would remember as the tragic hero, who died in almost all his films. No one wondered why there are no tragic heroes left. It also belonged to a time when it was still believed that cinema could change the world. An imatge of the documentary ‘Lumière! The adventure continues’ ceded to l’Acn Per Caramel Films / ACN Do you think that idea has been lost that cinema can change the world? Yes, even if it is still alive in some countries, as in Saudi Arabia. I am not pessimistic either. If the cinema is 130 years old, he has another 130 ahead. For now, with this new film about Lumière again claim the artist above the inventor, in what would differentiate her from the previous one? Lumière was the last of the cinema inventors and the first of the filmmakers. Even if he had not invented anything, his work as a filmmaker would remain important. It is the same thesis for the two films. But this is more philosophical. I try to bring Lumière to 2025, when the world of images, that not the cinema – that is, the platforms, the Internet … – has returned to the primitive gesture, to the essential question of where I place the camera and what I do with it. At the same time, Lumière’s cinema cleans our eyes, which is very contaminated. The cinema is the only place where we can escape the Internet, ”he looks like his eyes. Yes, he teaches us to look again at a time when, with the Internet, everything goes very fast and nobody looks. In addition, Lumière immediately raised an ethic of the look. The duel film with guns, for example. It is a reconstruction. Lumière would not have filmed at death. Internet films death. On the Internet there is no ethics, it is the true pornography of our time. It has no ethics, because there is no author behind the images. When the images have an author, he has a responsibility. Cinema is the only place where we can escape the Internet. Godard said that Lumière was looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary, while Georges Méliès looked for the ordinary in the extraordinary, do you agree? Yes, Lumière is Rosselini, and Méliès is Fellini. Lumière is Abbas Kiarostami or Robert Bresson, and Méliès is Hollywood. But they are not exclusive, but complementary. Of course, if we think that the cinema starts with Méliès we are wrong. Lumière began writing with the camera, to create a movement within the plane, using trains and ships, and that movement ended up being what we call staging. Lumière made the cinema a language. Méliès then worked on the assembly, but it is more illusion, the theater. Lumière is Rosselini, and Méliès is Fellini. Lumière is Abbas Kiarostami or Robert Bresson, and Méliès is Hollywood “would they say that they are the two great currents that have marked the history of cinema? A little yes. If Méliès is to invent reality, Lumière records it because in reality, in life, there is already a permanent beauty. In fact, the theme of this film is beauty. cómo nos sorprende la modernidad de las películas de Lumière. Sí, la calidad y la composición de la fotografía quedan más en evidencia. Enseguida se ve que Lumière se hacía las mismas preguntas que cualquier cineasta mañana por la mañana. Y haciéndoselas, alcanzó esa potencia, esa poesía. Mire, mi pintor favorito es Mark Rothko. La abstracción está bien cuando es bella. La emoción viene de la belleza. La Abstraction, by itself, does not make quality, does its ability to create beauty. In part, yes. In the film I show how Lumière practically invented the sequence planes. There have been many filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Maurice Pialat, Chantal Akerman or Béla Tarr, who have struggled to capture the real in their duration. In Cannes as in other places, we are always looking for new film forms, such as at first. Thomas Alva Edison invented the quineoscope, a film format, but Lumière invented cinema as a form, and turned it into art. Without lumière, the cinema would have stayed in a scientific invention. Also read a popular art. Yes, because people were going to be seen and recognized, or not, and that founded cinema as popular art. Edison was American and wanted people to pay to see a small image. Lumière took it out of the box and projected it on the wall, and made the public share the same emotions. Lumière invented the public, and the public reinvented cinema. Without audience there is no cinema, it is over. Luckily we continue to have in all movie theaters. It is something we still need. Lumière’s characters are us. The cinema tells me who I am and tells me who the others are. That is cinema, we learn the world through cinema. Speaking of screen sizes, in Cannes there is always controversy with Netflix. I have no problem with Netflix. But, in Cannes, to compete, a film must have been released in a room, because it is a completely different experience that must be supported, not only for us, but for the new generations. Our generation has been happy in movie theaters, and we want the new ones to remain. They are not happy with their phones. It is the era of homo telephone. Yes. The man of the twentieth century has gone to the cinema, that of the 21st century is conform to his phone. Let’s see how they manage with that.

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