Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière à Lyon) (1984) User Reviews

Lights, lights and... more lights.

[Pjtaylor-96-138044 · 5/10 · 10 September 2023]

It's hard to judge 'Motion Picture (Employees Leaving The Lumière Factory) (1984)' by any of the standards I apply to the movies I watch. It's really just an experiment, a museum piece, a curio that's far more interesting in concept than it is in execution. Taking undeveloped frames from its eponymous iconic Lumière brothers' silent film and projecting them in sequence, the flick is essentially just a series of flickering lights and dancing shadows that sometimes vaguely resemble the silhouette of film stock. It's somehow longer than the original short it builds upon, and it's hard to engaged with on any meaningful level. The most it gets out of you is a "oh, that's cool... I guess?" and, even then, that's only when you realise what the film actually is. I don't want to come down too harshly on the experience, primarily because it's an original experiment that has some genuine intellectual value, but I can't say that I enjoyed this in the slightest. This is really only for those who truly love the technicalities of film projection.

No motion.

[morrison-dylan-fan · 1/10 · 5 June 2015]

After finding director Peter Tscherkassky's Ballett 16 to be an interesting short,I was happy to find another short by Tscherkassky from the same year.

The plot:

Projecting a frame from the film La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière,50 unexposed film strips are piled on of each other,and are covered by the projecting image.

View on the film:

Opening with the frame from La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière, Tscherkassky keeps away from giving the rest of the movie the slightest image clarity,which leads to the film looking like someone just poking the lens of a camera with their fingers for 3 minutes,which without a soundtrack being their to divert attention away from the images,leads to this being an idea that should have been stopped in motion.

Pure And Wasted Garbage

[Rodrigo_Amaro · 1/10 · 28 April 2011]

This is such a cynic exercise coming from someone who call himself an artist, and a low point of what such person can possibly do. First of all there is no film, there's no images, no sound, only blurry images, allegedly taken from "La Sortie Des Ouvriers De L'usine Lumière à Lyon" from Lumière brothers mixed with a new film.

I know, there's worst things than this but short films even if they take a couple of minutes of our lives it is to show something good, interesting at least images and sounds, but this one shows nothing, and it wasted three minutes of my life. One might wonder, what could I possibly do in three minutes? Read a few pages of a great book, watch something good or bad on TV but better than this pointless garbage, make something more useful.

Tscherkassy made other artsy-confusing-interesting works such as "Outer Space" but this one is very bad, and it almost says that if you have a film, a camera and nothing in the brain you can be an artist, a filmmaker. Things don't work this way. Artists must have responsibility, have something to say to its audience, otherwise it's just a lousy rebel with a camera in the hand, no idea in the head and lots of money to spend. I can't say that I watched something here, it's just blurry, fuzzy, grainy and ridiculous glimpses of light and darkness. 1/10

First time I review

[bgisbert · 10/10 · 18 September 2019]

Really, if you can't see (whether you like it or not) the genius behind the concept of this film how this is some kind of full circle in the history of cinema, you are blind. Tscherkassky put's this really bold concept. It's no entreteinment, is conceptual film. Go look for Kubelka, maybe this makes more sense after reading about flicker film (not agressive, just a suggestion) Really, this is just film fun, and a really nice conceptual art. Don't rate it 1/10 only becouse it lacks Tscherkassky usual cinematic pyrithecnics.