Essential Films
Chapter 7

Buy this film
(Early Cinema - Primitives
And Pioneers, DVD)

La sortie des usines Lumière [Leaving the Lumière Factory]
Louis Lumière
Lumière / France / 1895

Produced by: Louis Lumière
Cinematography by: Louis Lumière

Ion Martea
posted 7 August 2006

The Lumière brothers foresaw no artistic future for film. For them, their 'invention' was nothing more than a photographic medium, best used for capturing documentary evidence. Their work was therefore led by this principle, leaving a significant volume of historical documents of late 19th century society to posterity. However, despite their contribution to the development of what must be the most common film genre today (particularly if we include television news reportage), the Lumière brothers have consistently failed to score highly when critics are referring to the greatest directors in history, unless the latter want to add a historical dimension.

This is unfortunate. L'arroseur arrosé [The Sprinkler Sprinkled] (Louis Lumière/France/1895) is a veritable attempt at stylising slapstick comedy. Repas de bébé [Baby's Dinner] (Louis Lumière/France/1895) is haunted by a quiet tenderness, which creates an inner tune that transcends the silence of the film. La mer [The Sea] (Louis Lumière/France/1895) breathes with a vastness and ignorance of time quite specific to European art-house. The frame composition, the action, the stylised choreography of movement - all make a Lumière film rise above the concept of raw documentary images.

A good example is Leaving the Lumière Factory. At first sight, the film is nothing but a record of an ordinary procession of a handful of employees leaving their workplace. The grand gates to the factory are at first closed, then when opened the workers move in small groups or independently, on foot, on bicycles or in carriages, directing themselves towards their homes. Once everyone has left, the gates are closed.

If we consider the single shot, running at just under one minute, as a spontaneous snapshot of a social event, then it is quite hard to justify the fact that there are three versions of the film available. They differ only by the number of horses used in the shot (ie. none and two, or one in the originally released version), and in one of them employees fail to exit the factory in time. It appears quite clear that Louis Lumière was searching for something else when shooting the scene. The opening and closing of the factory gates were the two elements that he wanted to have integrated, representing quite obviously the start and the end of the film image. The workers' leaving process was therefore destined to represent the core substance of the work.

In one word, what Lumière was after was narrative. Leaving the Lumière Factory is unique in as much as it is the first work that aims at constructing a story, with a beginning and an end, solely by using the film image.

The factory workers are diverse in their mood as well as their social status. The general atmosphere is complicated. Excitement is mingled with a certain tired boredom, but also relief. It would be interesting to know to what degree Lumière directed his actors, and whether he actually desired a specific mood throughout. Was there a statement about class-consciousness that he was trying to deliver? On the other hand, did he just want to stand back and watch, with the aesthetic eye of a filmmaker?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there was little rehearsing of the scene, at least regarding the performance of the workers. The relative consistency of the three alternative versions, however, works against this argument slightly. However, it is reasonable to assume that his directorial effort was mainly focused on choreographing the action, rather than directing the mood of the workers. (The enthusiasm of the boy on the bicycle, always referred to as the first film star, is unquestionably the spontaneous reaction of a young man who was simply told to impress, and in consequence made himself noticeable.)

Lumière is aiming for an artistic exploration of the state of society at the time. By producing a film image that allows us to judge the elements impartially, Lumière allows himself to explore sociological problems without the didacticism of academic writing. This mode of presentation is very different from the trend already established by American directors, who were concentrating more on individual experiences than on the grander social setting. The continuous use of extreme long shots in the Lumière output reflects this curiousity about wider society. Even in the early stages, these two particular trends seem established on the two sides of the Atlantic. The Dickson-Lumière dichotomy is not so different from the contrast between Griffith and Eisenstein, two directors who chose significantly different tactics for presenting epic social events: Griffith through individual struggles, Eisenstein through class struggles. The same applies for Ford-Visconti, or Welles-Fellini.

At the risk of succumbing to generalisations, we can identify two reasons for the development of this dichotomy of styles in the primary stages of the industry. Technology is one of them, as the various cameras used for filming and projectors used for the presentation of the works, allowed for distinctive possibilities. In pariticular the Dickson peephole setting, allowing only one viewer at one time, was not well-suited to presenting vast landscapes, though it worked for small-scale action. The Lumière cinema presentation was specifically designed to deal with this difficulty.

A second argument is usually taken by early European film critics, who happened to share certain socialist aspirations. For them, film was a modern form of art that escaped the traditional bourgeois distinction between high and low art. Thus Lumière's film, specifically presenting the social status of the (exploited) working class, appears to be a shout for the latter's pulsating spirit of emancipation. Essentially, the argument assumes an already established individualist American society, incapable of common struggles.

Irrespective of what the correct theory is, it is unquestionable that a discourse would not have started if the film was without substance. Each of us can gain something quite meaningful while watching Leaving the Lumière Factory, be that entertainment, historical evidence, an emotional engagement with our own lives and social status, nostalgia for times gone - all of that is taken from the story that lives within the film image. It is like passing through a special experience through a film that runs at a distinguishable tempo, changing from slow rhythms, followed by an allegro pace, seamlessly slowing down to a quiet closing.

There is a sense of inner music that possesses most of Lumière brothers' output, unique in early film history, but later enriched in the work of Tarkovsky, Fellini, Murnau and a few others. It is deeply saddening that Louis Lumière, in particular, did not give credit to his own artistic vision. Admittedly, he was above all a technical pioneer, yet his style of shooting films, permitting the image of film to shape its own narrative, is the basis for some of the best works produced in film history. The cinematic centenary celebration of the Frenchman's influence on film Lumière et compagnie [Lumière and Company] (various/France-Denmark-Spain-Sweden/1996), bringing together forty of the leading film directors working today, has shown that a single one-minute unbroken shot is just as capable of presenting a story, with its own depth and charm, as any epic.

Leaving the Lumière Factory can be just a simple presentation of 19th century life for a careless viewer. However, Lumière offered us a work which is engaging for academic scholars of narrative construction, as well as for social theorists. Ingeniously, the director did not deliver any clear answer on what is the meaning of his works, yet like an artist worthy of his name, he left the theory to us.

About the Essential Films series.