Descriptif

Inventing Motion: France, the Moving Image, and Global Origins

The last decade of the 19th century saw a raging competition between engineers, entertainers, entrepreneurs and artists focusing on the moving image. While the Lumière brothers (as early documentary-style filmmakers) and Georges Méliès (as the crafts-and-special effects mastermind) gained most of the credit, historians have since corrected this perception of the birth of cinema, acknowledging the role of European and American inventors in the emergence of cinema as a technology and as an art form. What does that say about cross-cultural exchanges in the era of early cinema? What can these strange short films teach us about the birth of narration on the silver screen? And eventually, how has the irruption of cinema influenced other popular and artistic practices (such as poetry, photography and design) in France and beyond?