Coming Soon
LUMIÈRE, LE CINEMA!
2025
Director
Thierry Frémaux
Starring
Louis Lumière
Auguste Lumière
Runtime
106 minutes
Select Showtime to Purchase Tickets
Select Showtimes
In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years.
Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses LUMIÈRE, LE CINEMA! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures.
The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.
“A deeply sympathetic and rigorously open-hearted presentation of the brother’s wide range of cinematic expressions. From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each film speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory. At times the images are hypnotic, at others simply stunning in their accomplishment. This is one of the purest demonstrations of cinephilia ever brought to a theater.” - Jason Gorber, Collider
Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses LUMIÈRE, LE CINEMA! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures.
The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.
“A deeply sympathetic and rigorously open-hearted presentation of the brother’s wide range of cinematic expressions. From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each film speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory. At times the images are hypnotic, at others simply stunning in their accomplishment. This is one of the purest demonstrations of cinephilia ever brought to a theater.” - Jason Gorber, Collider