Cinematograph Filming Locations

The film depicts the Lumière Brothers discussing and examining their Cinématographe machine. The sequence was filmed by the Paris-based cameraman Frédéric Fesneau in the Lumière's laboratory in Lyon, France, on July 14, 1925. A portion of the film was used for a Fox News story on the Lumières, which would have been screened as part of a longer newsreel program shown before a silent feature in 1925-6. Over the 93 years since it was first shot, this film has been stored in several facilities. Since the early 1980s, the film has been archived at the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina, as MVTN A8398 8399 Lumiere Brothers. During that time, the nitrate film stock originally used to record the Lumières has begun to deteriorate. All the degradation to the image seen here has been caused organically as a result of its natural decomposition. I did nothing to compromise the original image in any way. My contribution here was to edit the shots to create continuity and structure. I also slowed down (and sometimes reversed) the running speed by 50%, so that two frames appear for every original frame. I then copied the sequence onto itself, offsetting it by one frame, so that each frame is blended with a copy of itself or with an adjacent frame. The random marks of decay are unique to each frame. As each frame records a new movement in time, we are reminded that Cinema is a sequence of individual photographs seen in time, which have survived over time.