Babies breakfast

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Movie
German title Babies breakfast
Original title Repas de bébé
Country of production France
Publishing year 1895
length 1 minute
Rod
Director Louis Lumière
production Louis Lumière
camera Louis Lumière
occupation
  • Auguste Lumière : father
  • Marguerite Lumière: mother
  • Andrée Lumière: The baby

Baby's Breakfast (original title: Repas de bébé ) is a French short film from 1895. It is one of the films by the Lumière brothers , which were shown to a paying audience for the first time on December 28, 1895 at the Salon India du Grand Café in Paris . In the 45-second long strip, Louis Lumière shows a family scene in which a baby is being fed by his parents at the breakfast table.

action

A family of three is sitting in the garden enjoying breakfast together. While the mother pours herself a cup of coffee, the father lovingly feeds the baby, who is sitting in a high chair between his parents.

Origin and performance history

Louis (right) and Auguste Lumière, 1895

Louis and Auguste Lumière, who with their Société Lumière were among the leading producers of photographic plates , applied for a patent on February 13, 1895 after several months of development work for the cinématograph , an apparatus that could be used as a film camera , copier and film projector. They presented their invention for the first time on March 22, 1895 in Paris to the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale . For the screening, they produced the almost one-minute film Workers Leave the Lumière Works , which caused a sensation among the specialist audience.

In response to the success of this first presentation, the Lumière brothers made further films in their hometown of Lyon in the spring and summer of 1895 and at their summer residence in the southern French port city of La Ciotat . Similar to Workers Leaving the Lumière Works , they put their everyday world at the center of their moving images; they recorded workers at work, various leisure activities and scenes from family life.

Louis Lumière shot his brother's family for the film Babies Breakfast , one of the series of early Lumières works. The film was shot in her own garden, Auguste's daughter Andrée Lumière played the “main role” in this almost 45-second long presentation, which looks like a familiar snapshot of the passionate amateur photographer .

Program of the first demonstrations in the Salon India du Grand Café

The first screening of babies Breakfast took place on 10 June 1895 for the first time a selection presented as Louis and Auguste Lumiere during a multi-day congress of the French photographer association in Lyon their films on a larger scale. In the following months, further private screenings of the Lumière films were held for members of photographic and scientific societies. Baby's Breakfast was a featured film at most of these screenings. Reports on these events in the specialist journals aroused great interest in the cinematograph. In view of the numerous requests for further screenings, the Lumières decided to prepare a first commercial screening of their films.

Antoine Lumière, the father of Louis and Auguste, rented a basement room in the Grand Café on Paris' Place de l'Opéra and prepared an initial presentation there. The first screening took place on December 28, 1895 in front of theater operators and press representatives, but without the inventor of the cinématographe. Ten films were shown within a quarter of an hour; According to the traditional program, Baby's Breakfast was shown as the seventh film (under the title Le Repas , German: The meal ). A total of only 33 paying customers turned up on December 28th. In the following days, however, the number of interested parties rose continuously, so that in January 1896 up to 2500 spectators attended the demonstrations every day.

Parallel to the Cinématographe, competing film projectors were presented in Germany, the United States and Great Britain, but thanks to the technical superiority and professional marketing of the Cinématographe, the Lumières prevailed with their system and within a few months became the world's leading film producers. In 1896 the cinematograph was presented in numerous European countries, in North America, Mexico, North Africa, India, Japan and Australia. In many places, baby's breakfast was part of the premiere program, which made the film very popular.

Even after the Lumière brothers had largely withdrawn from film production in 1897, the film continued to be distributed by the Société Lumière . In 1905 a catalog of the Société appeared for the last time , in which the now ten-year-old strip was published as film No. 88 was offered.

reception

Advertising poster from 1896: film screenings as an experience for the whole family

Even if Baby's Breakfast is one of the best-known and most popular films by the Lumière brothers today , the contemporary reports on the cinématograph hardly went into the film. The show values ​​of the “moving photographs” were more important to the audience of early cinema than the content of the individual strips. The film historians Tom Gunning and André Gaundreault coined the term cinema of attractions for this early reception of the medium of film .

The premiere of the Cinématographe Lumière on December 28, 1895 went largely unnoticed by the press due to the lack of timely advertising. The only representatives of the press, reporters from the lesser-known newspapers Le Radical and La Poste , reported on pictures that, in their wealth of detail, not only provided a “perfect illusion of real life” , but were also able to preserve and reproduce this life. As a result, death ceased to be final. The later film pioneer Georges Méliès , who was also present at the first screening, described in detail the impression that babies' breakfast had left on him. However, he is more impressed by the background than the foreground, Méliès described how the leaves of the trees moved in the wind.

Film historians such as Henri Langlois see a reference to Impressionist painting in this apparently conscious involvement of nature in the staged breakfast . The half-close shot chosen in Baby's Breakfast corresponds to impressionist portraits of artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Mary Cassatt . Alan Williams also stresses that the overall composition of the single setting of the film took place under the artistic point of view. The wall of the house in the background forms a diagonal, which gives the film a spatial depth.

According to film historians Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, Baby's Breakfast made an important contribution to the acceptance of the new medium of film. Unlike Thomas Alva Edison's early films , which tended to appeal to male viewers, the authentic portrayal of a middle-class family was aimed at a wider audience. Movies like Baby's Breakfast helped make early childhood entertainment a form of entertainment for the whole family.

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Conférence de M. Louis Lumière à la Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale. In: Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris. No. 51, April 1895, ZDB -ID 215174-1 , pp. 125-126.
  2. ^ Georges Sadoul: Louis Lumière. 1964, p. 51.
  3. ↑ See the list of all presentations ( memento of the original from February 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from the Lumière Institute (accessed September 23, 2009). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.institut-lumiere.org
  4. ↑ André Gay provided the first detailed description of the cinematograph technique in July 1895 in the article Le Cinématographe de MM. Auguste et Louis Lumière. In: Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées. 6e Année, No. 14, July 30, 1895, pp. 633-636 .
  5. ^ Robert Pearson: Early Cinema. In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Ed.): The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 1996. ISBN 0-19-874242-8 , p. 14.
  6. ^ Erik Barnouw : Documentary. A history of the non-fiction film. 2nd revised edition. Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1993, ISBN 0-19-507898-5 , p. 11.
  7. ↑ The films were numbered thematically rather than chronologically, cf. Georges Sadoul: Louis Lumière. 1964, p. 158.
  8. ↑ Tom Gunning: The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. In: Robert Stam, Toby Miller (Eds.): Film and Theory. An Anthology. Blackwell, Malden MA et al. 2000, ISBN 0-631-20625-6 , pp. 229-235.
  9. ↑ Quoted in Maurice Bessy, Giuseppe M. Lo Duca: Louis Lumière. Inventor. Editions Prisma, Paris 1948, pp. 47–48.
  10. ↑ Quoted in Dai Vaughan: Let There Be Lumière. In: Dai Vaughan: For Documentary. Twelve essays. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1999, ISBN 0-520-21694-6 , pp. 4-5.
  11. ^ Thomas Elsaesser : Film history and early cinema. Archeology of a Media Change. edition text + kritik, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-88377-696-3 , p. 60.
  12. ^ Nancy Mowll Mathews: The Body in Motion. In: Nancy Mowll Mathews, Charles Musser: Moving Pictures. American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910. Hudson Hills Press, Manchester VT 2005, ISBN 1-55595-228-3 , p. 90.
  13. ^ Alan Williams: Republic of Images. 1992, p. 28.
  14. ↑ Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer: Film projection and variety shows. In: Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer (Eds.): The Silent Cinema Reader. Routledge, London et al. 2004, ISBN 0-415-25284-9 , pp. 31-39, here p. 33.

literature

  • Georges Sadoul : Louis Lumière. Choix de textes et propos de Louis Lumier̀e brevets. Témoignages sur les débuts du cinéma chronologies. Filmography. Bibliography. Documents iconographiques. Seghers, Paris 1964.
  • Alan Williams: Republic of Images. A History of French Filmmaking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1992, ISBN 0-674-76267-3 .
  • Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. French Cinema 1896-1914. Updated and expanded edition. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1998, ISBN 0-520-07936-1 .

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