Le village de Namo - Panorama pris d'une chaise à porteurs (1900) User Reviews

Goodbye, Cinématographe

[Cineanalyst · 25 January 2009]

By this time, the Lumière Company's production was in sharp decline; after 1905, their catalogues featured nothing new. The Lumière brothers themselves had given up personally making films years before this subject, "Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rickshaw". Unlike with many of the company's other films, the cameraman behind this innovative early film is known. The filmmaker is Gabriel Veyre, who helped introduce the Cinématographe and, thus, cinema to Mexico City, Cuba, Japan, China and elsewhere. For this film, Veyre was in Indochina.

The film is a panorama shot-scene lasting just under a minute. The panorama film, as coined by Lumière, is a moving-camera shot--usually accomplished by placing the camera on a moving transport, such as a boat or train. Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio is generally credited with having introduced the panorama film in 1896 with "Panorama du Grand Canal vu d'un bateau", where he placed the Cinématographe in a gondola and travelled the canals of Venice. One of the next, most interesting innovations was the "phantom ride" films, where the camera was placed on the front of a moving train. American Mutoscope's "The Haverstraw Tunnel" (1897) is oft credited as the first of these.

Here, Veyre placed the camera in a rickshaw. As he's pulled away, children chase after him and the camera. Unlike other panoramas, and because of the rickshaw vantage point, the camera-work is unsteady. Consequently, this is a beautiful and unique early actuality film, which remains in excellent quality and is available on the highly recommended "The Lumière Brothers' First Films" (1996). Moreover, with its moving, exiting framing and chasing children, the film seems to be an appropriate farewell to the company, filmmakers and the Cinématographe that were most responsible for introducing cinema to the world.

Truck Shot

[boblipton · 8/10 · 25 August 2014]

For this shot, roving Lumiere exhibitor and cameraman Gabriel Veyre placed his camera in a rickshaw and had it run, with the children of a village somewhere in Indochina running after.

It's an interesting shot, but although it was called a panorama, it was what is today called a trucking shot. In that era, any moving shot was called a panorama. Its modern meaning of a shot in which the camera was turned, offering the audience a wider field of vision: if not at once, then eventually. It would be in the middle of the next decade that the modern sense of a panorama or pan shot would come into use, most obviously with Billy Bitzer's "Pennsylvania Station Excavation" in 1905.

A shot in which the the camera moved forward or back as this one does is called a trucking shot, referring to the truck on which the camera is usually laid. It is related to the tracking shot, in which the camera is placed on rails. It's generally used on a set where the distance the camera is moved is short and smoothness of motion is more important.

For the moment, this was considered a panorama. Its interest lies in its mimicry of track shots without a physical track and its exotic locale.