Démolition d'un mur

1896 film by Louis Lumière

1895 (1895)

CountryFranceLanguageSilent

Démolition d'un mur (Demolition of a wall) is a 1895 French short black-and-white silent film directed and produced by Louis Lumière and starring his brother Auguste Lumière, along with two other men.

Synopsis

Démolition d'un mur (1896)

Another single-shot Lumière Brothers film, this time showing the demolition of a wall in the grounds of the factory.

Production

It was filmed by means of the Cinématographe, an all-in-one camera, which also served as a film projector and developer. As with all early Lumière movies, this film was made in a 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1.^[1]

Release and legacy

The Lumières were known to project Démolition d'un mur in both forward and reverse motion. A urban legend attributed this to an inadvertent discovery in which the film strip was rewound in the projector while the light was still on.^[2]^[3]

Bill Brand's 1973 structural film Demolition of a Wall is organized around six frames of the wall collapsing in the Lumières' film. It associates each of the frames with a musical note played on a piano and presents every permutation of the six frames, starting in chronological order and ending in reverse chronological order.^[2]

Current status

Given its age, this short film is no longer subject to copyright protection and is available to freely download from the Internet.

References

^ "Technical Specifications". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 8 April 2007.
^ ^a ^b Fraser, Jake (2021). "Turning Back Time: Friedrich Kittler, Reversibility, and Media of Time Axis Manipulation". CR: The New Centennial Review. 21 (1). Michigan State University Press: 37–69.
^ Stoneman, Rod (2022). "Perspective Correction: Early Film to the Avant-Garde". In Webber, Mark (ed.). The Afterimage Reader. The Visible Press. pp. 209–210. ISBN 978-0-9928377-6-1.