Fête au village (1896) watch online HD

At the bottom of the screen, people walk about from left to right and right to left as whim takes them. In the middle ground, others dance in a circle, hand in hand. People are dressed formally and most of the men wear boaters. At the top of the screen, in the distance, is a mountain with a waterfall. Motion grows more ordered as the point of view moves further and patterns are revealed.

The earliest Lumiere films were carefully composed, as befit the cameramen whose roots were in still photography. More than that, they understood, as few other movie pioneers did, that motion pictures were about motion and blocked off different sections of the screen for different sorts of motion: the random movement at the bottom yielding gradually to linear motion at the top.