Cannes Chief Thierry Frémaux on the origins of filmmaking in ‘Lumière, le Cinema!’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:12Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, Thierry Frémaux, is the artistic director of the Institut Lumière and of the Lumière Film Festival. He has made his first full-length picture film as director, which he also does the voiceover for. where he does the audio commentary. And he is, of course, known to us as the Artistic Director and Delegate General of the Cannes Film Festival. Thierry, thank you so much for being here. Your film is Lumiere, La Cinema, and it asks so many questions and does such a great job of taking us from the birth of film and the birth of so many genres of film.

0:50And I think what's so interesting to me about the film is that there are so many things in this movie that are antecedents of what we see today. I mean, there's one point where you show a Lumiere footage of a cat playing, and that could be a video on TikTok, couldn't it? Yeah, yeah, and especially the timing of the TikTok. Well, TikTok is like 5, 10 seconds. Lumiere is 50 seconds. But yes, you're right. We can see a Lumiere film and then at the end get the desire to see another one and then another one and then another one. The timing of the Lumia programs or even Edison programs or Mellius program at the end, at the beginning when the film were short, and it was permanent excitement of watching more and more because the curiosity of the world was so strong that cinema gave that, fed that desire to people.

1:47Well, what's interesting is that we still have a word in English that we use that takes us back to cinematograph, that is cinematographer. So we're still using that word, and in essence, we're still using that idea in the making of film, aren't we? Yeah, and especially because the name of the Thomas Edison invention was kinetoscope, and even the American people today goes to cinema and not to Kinetto. But I really want to mention that the process of the invention of cinema at that time was really made by a bunch of people everywhere, in the US, in France, in Britain, in UK, in Germany, the Skladanowski brothers.

2:37But at the end of the process, We had to have someone who made the right stuff. And it was the Lumière brothers, by the way. Lumière, which is a real name of those two brothers, means light. And that neighborhood where they invented their own machine is called Mont Plaisir in Lyon. So the light brother of my pleasure invented cinema. So Thomas Edison couldn't compete. It's the truth. My guess is Thiawe Fermot, who, of course, he knows the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival. His film is, of course, on the Criterion Channel starting on May 1st, Lumiere, La Cinema. In watching the film, I actually find myself thinking about another art form that was inventing itself in real time at the same time, taking what had come before and converting it into something else.

3:32I was reminded of the invention of jazz, which kind of corresponds to the invention of cinema, doesn't it? Yes, you're right. A lot of invention, even the invention of the modern sports. Cinema is 1895. The first new Olympic Games is 1896. And jazz and popular music at the same time, yes. all the cafes and restaurants and bistros and music halls were full of people. And cinema, the invention, the Thomas Edison invention, was an individual machine. You had to put a coin of money to get the images. I used to say, to be ironic with you, my American friend, that it's an American way to make cinema.

4:26You want to see any images? You have to pay. And Thomas Edison said, but the French guy is crazy. Because Lumière said, no, no, no, we have to put the image on the big screen and to have people all together watching it at the same time. So Edison said, it's crazy because once people will have seen the movies, they won't be back. And Lumière said, yes, they'll be back because we are going to make a lot of movies. That made the success of cinema. We want to see more. We want to see more. And then there is that act, very surprising from a bourgeois lionet, when he decided to send young cinematographers all over the world.

5:13One of the things that this movie shows that film cinema is still strong and alive is the fact that there's so many things from early film that we see that still live in this world today. I mean, there's a piece from Lumiere of a Japanese family having dinner shot from a low angle. And you mentioned the fact that it predicts Yazajiro Ozu, who shot film the exact same way. Yeah, yeah. So we don't know. As there is no archive, nothing. We have some technical archives, letters about the invention, but about his own method of making films. We have nothing. And he was an humble man. He made films, him, Louis Lumière, and his cinematographer during five strong years.

6:03But it's a decade, only a decade, 1895 until 1905. And we don't have any archive, but we have the films. Because people like you, me, and a lot of people will listen to us. we know what cinema is today from what we have learned from the history of cinema. And going back there, you know, Wim Wenders said, for example, a wonderful thing about the Lumière film. He said, we can trust those films. We can trust the image we see as today. Who can be sure about the images we see? we can never be sure because of technology because of manipulation and so on so the Lumière films or the first films even Mellies, even Edison they are not polluted, they are clean what was in front of the camera is what is on the film or what is on the film is what was on the front of the camera and that is also a good lesson for today because still I think, and coming from my can point of view, I still think that it's one of the best things we wait for.

7:21Cinema is for us still to learn about the world, learn about human beings. And that simplicity, that sincerity is quite precious. and it was strong. That's why we are still able to watch those films and being very impressed by the beauty, by the meaning, by what still they give to us today. Yeah, you mentioned that, but it's the mark of modernity, but it's also the mark of the quality of those films. We are all movie buff and historians of cinema and we know that the best critic in the world is time. When a film goes through decades and decades and decades, it's all a piece of literature or music or painting.

8:15It's because it's the quality. And we can say that about Lumière, no? We can. We'll take a short break. We're talking about critics and purity with my guest, Thierry Frumaux. He is the artistic director of the Gantt Film Festival, his new film as director. and voiceover artist, of course, is Lumiere Le Cinema. It's on the Criterion channel. We'll take a short break. It's the treatment. There's more to come.

8:44Thierry Frémaux:There's the story you hear and then there's the story behind it. Who's telling it? What are their motivations? What's at stake? I'm Brian Reed and on my show from KCRW, Question Everything, we tell stories about power and influence and the ways that people are manipulating the truth. And we do that by talking to the people living with the consequences. My feed was flooded without my consent. I was targeted by Instagram. Listen to Question Everything wherever you get your podcasts.

9:14Welcome back. We're still talking about the purity of cinema with my guest, Hiawe Fremont, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival. His film as director on the Criterion channel now is Lumiere Le Cinema. It's The Treatment, by the way. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I want to get back to the thing I said to you in the first half, Terry, about jazz, which is to say that jazz took something that existed already and changed it by bringing a new kind of experience to it. And you make the point in the film that Lumiere was influenced by one Renoir and started to make films and then influenced another Renoir in that.

9:48And for me, that so much brought jazz to mind for me because it was a music form that took music but invented a new language for it. And cinema is something that took a visual art and invented a new language for that, didn't it? Exactly. And there is another thing in common between jazz and cinema. It's at that time, going to some, how do you call that, Boata Jazz, going to the first place in New York, was getting a new adventure in the world. Even at those times with segregation, it was an adventure in New York to go and see those people doing that strange music. And it was the same in going to the movie theater, getting and doing a journey to something new and different.

10:44jazz and cinema, yeah, were born at the same time and both another way to understand and to visit what another world was. And that's why also we said that cinema, I said that in the movie, when I say cinema tells me who I am and who are the other people on this planet, which is also something to me is precious for music, with music. The film is constructed in a way like a book. I mean, each section of their chapters, you start off by building it around years, 1895 and 1896, but then you go from talking about the years to movements because every couple of years, it goes from being the smaller thing to kind of a movement, doesn't it?

11:34When you mentioned, and you're nice for that, that I directed my first film, I did another one about Lumière, But so I do only films about Lumière as my job is to pick up and select among a group of 3000 feature films, 70 for the official selection in competition. So I don't want to then to arrive with my film. What do you think of my film? but on the other hand I'm the only director in the world who can introduce his own films in saying you're going to see a wonderful film because it's not my film these are Lumière films and they are wonderful and I'm still in love with that and the idea was how to screen those films because if I give you one hour and a half of silent Lumière film.

12:30It will be, despite the beauty of each of them, it will be quite boring. And so my comment is inspired by some of my friends, they are specialists in classic music, and then they are able to comment a symphony from Beethoven in saying the chords here because of that reason, and also because the Lumière screening at the time was half an hour, 10 films. But then cinema got its length, and at the end of the 20s, at the end of the silent era, despite the Napoleon of Abelganz of seven and nine hours, but it was one hour and a half, two hours. And so I wanted to make an object of cinema of one hour and a half with music, the music of Gabriel Foré, a musician of those times.

13:31But you're right, I could have tasted the jazz music because at that time people used to listen jazz, especially in your country. but I wanted that kind of product who makes Lumière able to be back in the screening room, in movie theater. I wanted the name of Lumière on the front of a building, of a cinema, on a poster, and for people to pay a ticket and to go and see a normal film made by the first films. I don't know if I succeed, but that was a project. What the film really communicates, this thing I've got from the handful of times I had a chance to speak to you, is your excitement about the medium and your excitement about the medium conveyed to an audience.

14:21And we get that from the clips that you've chosen. But we're also aware of how film still speaks as a language. I mean, there's that terrific piece from the fake legless man, which has this incredible sort of depth of field, and it really sort of changed storytelling when the fake Legolas man runs off at the end into the distance, and he's followed, and we realize perspectives being used in film in the first time. It's, again, watching a medium invent itself is really like watching the way people, young people, upload films onto YouTube or TikTok. It's got that same, for me, the same excitement about wanting to communicate a story to the world that we got from seeing these Lumière Brothers clips.

15:05Yes, you're right. And I think that the young generation is open to everything. And when you show them good things, they see good things. That's why I said at the end, the Lumière film is a way to wash our eyes because our eyes are polluted by all the images we have seen. And going back to the origin is also like reading Omer, like reading Jack London, reading the novelist of old times, because literature was like that at the age of Shakespeare or Moliere. To me, it brings to mind the literature of Zola, who was writing about things that were happening around him at that time, and Lumiere's did the same thing.

15:59They were basically, in their way, journalists, weren't they? Exactly, you're right. Zola, because they made a lot of films about workers, about all that stuff, and Marcel Proust, because the Paris of the Lumiere brother films is exactly what Proust wrote at that time about Paris. It's the truth, by the way, my guest is our old friend, our new friend, I should say, Thierry Fumont, who's the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, who's made his feature film debut as a director with the film Lumiere La Cinema. And I think the thing that fascinates me, though, about this, Thierry, and again, it's about excitement.

16:35And there's that short film, The Rocking Chair, which for young people will predate break dancing and hip-hop by just watching movement in that. And I was fascinated by that too. There's so many of these moments that the medium uses to introduce things to the world that change the world. You know, Wim Wenders also said a wonderful thing when he got an award in Cannes for Wings of Desire. He said, if we can change the images of the world, maybe we can succeed to change the world. And I think that art, it's about that. And especially literature, music, but especially cinema. Lumière is a form. It's modern, as you said, and a lot of Lumière films exist, can exist only when you watch them.

17:28It's impossible to tell the story of some films, because it's the pleasure, the beauty come from your eyes and your brain when you watch it. And the emotion is a pure art form, artistic emotion. And that also makes something we forgot about that, about them, and what we still have in mind when we go to see a film in a movie theater. Of course, I like a lot of films, but that's why the film opens with a quote by Agnès Varda about characters in the Lumière films, when she says, they are not our ancestors, it's us in the Lumière films. And she was right. And I like also the idea that Lumière is the last inventor and the first filmmaker.

18:29And he tried, and of course to me he succeeded, to be, he tried to do films and to make good films. So he's not only the first filmmaker, but he's also a good filmmaker. You're charting somebody, as you mentioned in the film, who is the first illiterate, who goes from that to being really the first artist in the medium, but also the film, and you brought up Proust, and I can't help but think about how Proust, how those tomes, those volumes, were really chronicling something that was happening, but also about the end of an era in real time. I guess what I'm saying is that it's about the end of an era too because it goes to that purity of him being an observer to Miliers' shaping and manipulating the medium.

19:16And I can sort of see this a little bit of forlornness, a little bit of sadness for you as the medium goes to being this pure thing of observation to this medium of fiction and manipulation. Yes, but it's also the other dimensions of cinema. coming from Méliès about illusion, magic, and so on. And I think that why cinema is rich, why cinema is powerful, is because of those two dimensions. That's why I mentioned in the film that it's not the opposition between Lumière documentary and Méliès fiction. It's more Lumière getting the realism of life and putting that life on the screen and showing the poetry of normal life when Méliès reinvented normal life to make some magic.

20:16And, of course, Jean-Luc Godard had that wonderful line about that, saying that Méliès is normal inside extraordinary and Lumière is extraordinary inside normal. And that was quite true, because we can make poetry with just a shot of 50 seconds in a camera in a street, because life is poetry. Your film, I think, is poetic as well. My guest is Thierry Frumaux. He is the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival and the Lumière Film Festival, which you should attend if you get the chance. I've had a chance to go, and it's really terrific. His film, which is on the Criterion channel now here in the States, It's just Lumière, La Cinema, Thierry, I cannot thank you enough for doing this.

21:05Thank you so much. No, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thierry Formal is best known as the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival. This year's edition starts May 12th. He runs the Institut Lumière and the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon. He's also a documentary director, and his new film combines many of his loves. It's called Lumière Le Cinema, which is having a run at select theaters and is also available on the Criterion channel. Directors who bring their passions to the screen, find conversations with them at the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment, and find our weekly series on inspiration, The Treat, wherever you podcast.

22:00For the newest treat, director Ben David Grabinski, whose new film, Mike and Nick, and Nick and Alice, is now on Hulu, talks about a Broadway revival of an absurdist classic starring a pair of most excellent dudes from an absurdist screen classic. The show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist. to better days, everyone. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.

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