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  • The First Jewish Film: Georges Méliès’s L’affaire Dreyfus (1899)
  • Joel Rosenberg

In Lyon, France, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, first used the motion-picture camera in 1895 to capture glimpses of urban life and bourgeois culture1—films that were, although brief (most only a few seconds long or, maximally, a few minutes), nonetheless masterpieces in miniature, because they captured what could not be captured: the substance and duration of experience in the common, ordinary world. This was a world of experience that had escaped all other visual arts, from sculpture and architecture to painting and even theater (which showed duration but had no permanence) and photography (which had permanence but could not show duration). The Lumières filmed the entire range of ordinary experience: prosperous-looking men seated around a garden table playing cards; workers leaving the Lumière factory at the end of a day, merging in two directions into a cross-traffic of pedestrians, bicyclists, and dogs; a train arriving at a station as travelers prepare to exit or board; a mischievous boy playing a prank on a gardener as he waters foliage. Each of these could not quite be considered a “scene” or “drama” (though the boy and gardener had the makings of a tidy little comedy). The temptation to invest photographic images with narrative meaning seems almost inevitable, but film historians have tended to set the Lumière products against the works countryman and contemporary Georges Méliès. While the Lumières epitomized “actualities” or “representational” cinema, showing life “as it is,” Méliès created a “presentational” art: fantasy, storybook heritage, alternative worlds. His works displayed (often self-referentially) the virtuoso showmanship of a stage magician (a trade Méliès continued to practice throughout his filmmaking career). If the presentation was relatively flat and two-dimensional, like a performance stationed at the proscenium, it was nonetheless dazzling, extraordinary, uncommon.

One of the exhibits at Lyon’s Musée des Beaux Arts displays the Lumières’ relation to French Impressionist painting.2 This connection might seem counterintuitive, given the Impressionist penchant for richly textured canvases, with their nuanced rivalry of colors, and of light and shadow. The consummate “painterly” quality of an Impressionist work apparently stands in sharp contrast to the keen eye of a Lumière camera trained on factory workers heading home. Mostly limited, in that era, to black-and-white (except for some famously hand-tinted frames) and to the disciplining factuality of happenstance, the Lumière camera established a very different palette from that of nineteenth-century painting: a sense of an immediate, often gritty, connection to the real. Of course, viewers at an art museum were, in that era, mostly the privileged classes—the aristocracy and haute [End Page 15] bourgeoisie.3 Art spoke to them and gazed back at them from a familiar, even protective, distance, unlike the startling and disarming contact that the Lumières initiated when filming passers-by:


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What the Impressionists and the Lumières had in common, however, whether veiled in color or bared in black-in-white, was their iconic subject matter. Their portrayal of an era ranged over multiple social classes, over town and country, parks and gardens, ponds and rivers, streets and plazas, cathedrals and shops, circuses and fairgrounds. The oil brush and camera encompassed both the activities of leisure and those who served it: on the one hand, picnickers, carnival goers, couples dancing in the open air, men at their schnapps, male clients of prostitution (some having their pockets picked by the women they sought); on the other hand, waiters, gardeners, factory workers, bar proprietors, and theatrical entertainers—actresses, divas, musicians, ballerinas—and, for good measure, prostitutes and lesbians (these last addressing the perennial curiosity of heterosexual tourists). All were immortalized by Impressionists such as Manet, Renoir, Monet, and Degas; by post-Impressionists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or American-born Robert Earle Henri (Robert Henry Cozad), of Ashcan realism fame; and by the young Picasso, before he turned to cubism and beyond. All the rage then was style Japonais, still bearing the echo...

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