Lyon prepares to honour cinema at the latest Lumiere Festival

Lyon prepares to honour cinema at the latest Lumiere Festival
By Robert HackwillBelle Donati
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Special guest of honour for this edition is Jane Fonda.

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In 1895 in the French city of Lyon two French brothers placed a device they had invented outside their factory at the end of the morning shift. That device was the first motion picture camera-projector, and the film of the workers piling out of the factory gates to go for lunch is considered the first projectable motion picture ever made.

“123 years later and the factory is still standing, a shrine to the artform it created, and the setting for an annual festival that celebrates cinema,” reports euronews' Belle Donati.

Alternatively, the Skladanowsky Brothers have a claim to creating moving pictures, with the Lumiere Brothers improving on their Bioscope technique, and subsequently capturing the market.

The factory has been preserved along with the Lumiere brother's home next door, and today is a museum and cinema, called the Institut Lumiere. Fabrice Calzettoni is a cinema historian.

"To come here is to step back into the 19th century. The brothers’ house is exactly as it was back then. The Lumiere Festival is a heritage festival. The films you see here are not new releases, and artists come to talk about their love of cinema and to present other people’s films,” he says.

The following year the Lumiere brothers showed this movie to audiences in Paris, some of whom screamed with terror and fled the cinema, thinking they were about to be run over...

Filmmaking may have changed but even Hollywood directors return to where it all started.

Martin Scorsese was unable to resist a cameo appearance in his remake of the Lumiere brothers’ film, and cementing Lyon’s reputation as the birthplace of cinema.

The upcoming edition of the annual Lumiere Festival honours Jane Fonda, and will feature her attendance at a screening of her father Henry's classic, "The Grapes of Wrath".

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