1995.
Documentary, featuring directors Peter Greenaway, Lasse Hallström, Spike Lee, Claude Lelouch, David Lynch, Ismail Merchant & James Ivory, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou, and 31 others.
Rating: 7/10, 5/10 (reccommended).
Lumière & Company sounds fascinating, and it actually is, in a way. Forty acclaimed directors from all over the world were asked to make a short film for the documentary. But not just any short film—a short film shot with the original camera used by the Lumière brothers at the end of the 19th century...you know, the one they shot "The Arrival of a Train" with. It’s a little wooden box with a crank on the side, and it’s called a cinematograph.
The rules were as follows: the film could be no longer than 52 seconds (we’re talking very short films). No artificial lighting, no synchronized sound. No more than three takes. The films that resulted ranged from genius to interesting to boring to dreadful. Sadly, and surprisingly, the vast majority of them ended up falling into the "boring" category. I think a big part of the problem is that the directors didn’t talk to one another about what they were doing. As a result, a number of them do the same thing, a thing which is very understandable under the circumstances, but which gets very boring indeed when seen over and over again: they filmed cameras filming. Over and over and over again. In mostly unremarkable ways.
Most of the others were good, though most of these were very forgettable. A few I remember: a woman dancing as her dress changes its hand-tinted colors. A Chinese man and woman dressed in traditional garb of some sort (I know embarrassingly little about China) dancing on top of the Great Wall until they strip off their traditional clothes and reveal punk rock outfits, doing a new kind of dance and then running away at the end. These were the interesting ones.
The worst of all the bad ones belonged to Spike Lee. Confirming my impression of him as a massive asshole, he placed his daughter in front of the camera and repeated, "Say dada. Say dada. Say dada!" getting angrier and angrier as time started to run out. Unreasonably, frighteningly angry at his baby daughter. I thought perhaps he was just trying to make some sort of point about yelling at children, but no: the documentary section after his film showed him screaming in frustration that she had never said "dada."
The best of all the good ones was, by far, David Lynch’s. Sadly, since I saw the movie months and months ago (I am SO behind in my reviews right now), I can’t remember what his film showed, but I remember vague images of a woman wearing a flowing, poofy dress, possibly submerged in water, and camera movements that made me think he must have broken the rule about no cutting. His film showed an ingenuity with visuals that none of the others did, a joyous simultaneous acceptance and overcoming of limitations.
And that, I think, was why I was so excited about Lumière & Company before I saw it. The idea of artists working within limitations and finding new ways around them is very exciting to me. Non-genre artists working in genres (Robert Altman’s drawing room murder mystery, Gosford Park; David Bowie’s electronic album, Earthling) excite me. Genres with very specific requirements—punk and country music, say, or film noir and romantic comedies—excite me, especially when artists come up with new ways to play with the rules: think Sleater-Kinney, Lyle Lovett, Chinatown, and Amélie, respectively. In Lumière & Company, forty great artists have had an extreme limitation placed on them—Ebert compares what they’re doing to writing haiku. Some rose to the challenge, others didn’t. Jacques Rivette, who made the fantastic Celine & Julie Go Boating, which is just over three hours, and who regularly makes films that long or longer, made an excellent cinematograph film. He shows a little girl in the middle of a crowded square and makes beauty out of it. After the film ends, we see him complaining that it’s "too short." After all, he’s used to making films several hundreds of times longer. And yet, even if it is too short, he’s overcome that limitation to create something that has stuck in my mind as great art. Few of his colleagues did.
Regardless of which or how many of the films are good or bad, the creators of the documentary made something interesting and useful pretty much by default. Forty of the world’s best film directors making films using the same rules is automatically something worth watching, and I highly recommend this to anyone who is serious about either filmwatching or filmmaking.
However, the documentary’s creators fell short when it came time for them to use a camera, and the documentary itself is pretty damn awful. It somehow manages to be cheesy as it shows the directors at work, rather than fascinating. And it asks them all, all forty of them, the same two questions: Why do you film? Is film mortal? This could have been OK if the directors had been able to talk at great length about these questions, but as it is, they give no more than a sentence or two, almost always failing completely to be interesting at all.
The film as a whole is eighty-eight minutes long, not much more than twice as long as the short films by themselves would have been. And yet, by the end, I felt as though I’d been watching for countless hours. If this movie is out on DVD, I hope you can just go straight to each film and not bother with the documentary bits. Now that would be worth watching.