Lumière, Le Cinéma at the Digital Gym Cinema

Director: Thierry Frémaux Run Time: 103 min. Release Year: 2024 Language: French

Starring: Bertrand Tavernier, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Coppola, Thierry Frémaux, Valerio Mastandrea

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinéma! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a…