Directors Cut Into the Past

To honor the centenary of cinema, 39 directors from around the world--including David Lynch, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders and Costa-Gavras--chipped in to create a very special tribute. Each accepted the challenge to make a film using a restored Cinematographe, one of the original motion picture cameras invented by Louis and Auguste Lumiere in 1895.

Their contributions comprise “Lumiere & Company,” which was given limited distribution (in Los Angeles, it premiered last spring at the AFI Film Festival) and which today is being released as a Fox Lorber Home Video cassette.

The idea for “Lumiere & Company” originated with Philippe Poulet, the researcher at the Museum of Cinema in Lyon who restored the Cinematographe, a wooden box that measures roughly 5 by 7 1/2 by 7 1/2 inches and weighs slightly less than 9 pounds. Following the Lumieres’ recipe, he also reproduced the original emulsion for the 35-millimeter film, punching two sprocket holes per frame (in the only concession to modern technology, the film was made of acetate instead of the more volatile nitrate).

The filmmakers approached by Poulet were charged with working under the same conditions as the Lumieres’ camera operators: They were allowed three takes to film a continuous shot lasting no longer than 50 seconds (which was all the film the cameras could hold), with no artificial light and no synchronized sound.

The apparatus did not allow the directors to view through the camera what they were filming. Shots had to be set up in advance. The film was advanced through the camera by hand-cranking at least two turns per second, at between 16 and 20 frames per second.

The directors who accepted these conditions included Jerry Schatzberg, Arthur Penn, John Boorman, Claude Lelouch, Theo Angelopoulos, Peter Greenaway, Hugh Hudson, Jacques Rivette, Nadine Trintignant, Liv Ullmann and Zhang Yimou along with Costa-Gavras, Lee, Lynch and Wenders. None received compensation (“The experience taught me that it was possible to make films without getting paid,” Boorman mused during a recent interview).

Some said they found the primitive equipment and conditions to be a tonic. “What I liked best about this was the restrictions,” Lynch said. “That kind of got me going.”

Schatzberg responded to the “interesting challenge” of the 50-second limit. “The Lumiere films [whose subjects included workers leaving a factory, the demolition of a wall and a snowball fight] were spectacular, every one a narrative that told a story,” Schatzberg said. “I thought, ‘I have tried to tell a story in two hours, and sometimes I failed.’ ”

“It was like acknowledging one’s ancestors,” Penn said. “You get a sense of the extraordinary excitement that people must have felt seeing those first films.”

Several of the segments pay direct homage to the Lumieres while “recording the difference” between life then and now. One hundred years later, Patrice Leconte re-creates “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.” Instead of pulling into the station, however, the train rushes past.

Others are in the spirit of such Lumiere jests as “L’Arroseur arrose” (The Sprinkler Sprinkled). Idrissa Ouedraogo staged a comic scene in which a frightened swimmer rushes from the water only to discover that what he feared was a crocodile is actually a man wearing a rubber mask. A chase ensues.

A recurring image in “Lumiere & Company” is passersby regarding the ancient camera with curiosity. Boorman visited the set of Neil Jordan’s historical drama “Michael Collins,” where the wooden box attracted the attention of actors Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn and Stephen Rea.

“There was this big scene set outside a post office with all these extras in period costume,” Boorman recalls. “My idea was that when my segment starts up, you seem to be looking at a Lumiere film. And then the actors come in and peer at this box. It’s like it’s a time machine.”

Spike Lee filmed his 9-month-old daughter outside his Brooklyn home. He can be heard on the soundtrack encouraging her to say “Dada.” Other segments range from the sublime (Lelouch’s recording of a couple’s rapturous kiss) to the surreal (Penn’s sequence, filmed in Johannesburg, of a bound white man lying on his back beneath a platform, on which reclines a nude pregnant woman).

“They said, ‘Do anything.’ I have no idea [what inspired it],” Penn said. “The image just popped into my head. I was walking down Columbus Avenue and started to describe it to my wife. She stopped and looked at me as if she were dealing with a madman.

“The minute I say anything literal, it will fall apart, but there I was in Africa, the spawning grounds of the human race. That was about the extent of it. I wanted to do something that had the feelings of birth about it.”

Lynch’s contribution, an unsettling tour de force that reportedly cost him about $6,000 and required the construction of six sets, also defies literal interpretation. Suffice to say he packs a lot into 50 seconds, including a dead body, what appear to be mutants flagellating a glass enclosure that contains a naked woman, a couple sitting in a living room and the arrival of the police.

“It’s about premonition,” is all Lynch will allow.

“The difficult thing,” Schatzberg said, “was finding what I wanted to do. Everybody, I guess, had the same problem at first.” (Schatzberg settled on “something that was very New York,” a segment with Sylvia Miles as a bag lady who incurs the wrath of a garbage collector).

Framing each segment is Sarah Moon’s behind-the-scenes footage of the filmmakers at work and ruminating on such questions as “Is cinema mortal?” and “Why do you film?” (Jacques Rivette’s response: “A question like that could only be answered with a long questioning silence”).

Working on the project “was like being baptized by cinema,” Penn said. “You come away from [using the camera] with a kind of reverence. At least I did. I seemed like I was touching the basic source of cinematic life.”

“But the interesting thing,” Boorman said, “is really that the camera hasn’t fundamentally changed. It’s astonishing that a glossy Panavision camera--with all its electronics and bits and pieces designed to make it more expensive--is still a Lumiere camera at heart.”

* “Lumiere & Company” retails for $59.95 and is available in stores or by calling (800) 466-8437.