Cinema on the move. The currecy of the Lumière Brothers. Session for students

Today, in a world packed with immediate, fully urbanised pictures, it might be hard for us to remember that it was only just over a century ago - with the second industrial revolution and the birth of modern cities - that cinema appeared, a new language to understand this new world, and of which we are the heirs. 

The Lumière brothers' operators, dedicated to travelling all over the world with their camera, gradually explored the formal and syntactic possibilities of this new language. And from the world they brought not just pictures, but a point of view, a framing, an angle from which to view life as it passes before the camera. The camera's eye reflected better than any other the disruptive space and unpredictable movement of the new city. And with it a new reality, which needed to be told in a new language in order to be analysed and explored.

In a single film shot of the streets of Paris, taken by the Lumière brothers' cameramen, we can see the bourgeois walking alongside the worker, the working women coming out of the factory, the beggar and the aristocrat sharing the same urban space, but with this perhaps something rather more radical: the hypothesis that the roles can change in a moment, that at bottom their destinies are highly unstable. For viewers at the time, a shot like this was able to illustrate the new social realities better than any novel on the subject.Over the last century, from the Paris of the Lumière brothers to the futuristic city of Blade Runner, the grammar of film and the view of the camera evolved in time with the urban space they portrayed, because film, both when acting as a dream machine and when it documents reality, was born to be seen and understood by its inhabitants. 

The session "El cine en marcha. La actualidad de los Lumière" [Cinema on the Move: The Currency of the Lumière Brothers] —accompanied by the showing of extracts from their film work — aims to awaken secondary students' interest in film history, its origins and the evolution of its language. And with this for them to join Punto de Vista, an event that connects the artistic and poetic side of film with its documentary vocation of portraying reality.

Practical information. Thursday 30th March at 11.00am at the Filmoteca de Navarra. Aimed at schools for upper and lower secondary students. Schools interested can contact produccion@puntodevistafestival.com.