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Lumière! Le Cinema! @ Savoy Lumière
Phoenix Theatres Savoy 16 + IMAX
232 Burwash Ave.
Savoy, Illinois
(217) 530-4671
Category
Hours
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This French documentary is an engrossing, definitive look at the birth of cinema. It’s also about the very filmmakers Savoy Lumière is named after.
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 films 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 micro-documentaries 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.