Barque sortant du port
P & R: Auguste and Louis Lumière. Fr 1895

“Each time the small boat appears to make headway, the surf rolls it back. The boat never reaches the open water. This film is unlike La sortie des usines Lumière, in which the closing of the factory’s doors creates a discrete event of the decanting of the workers. (…) Yet the film must also have seemed similar to the magic lantern slides that were so common in that even some of the most sophisticated could achieve only the simplest, cyclical movements and articulations, and from which the characters could seldom leave. Barque sortant du port seems to connect the magic lantern slide with the most sophisticated of modern loop technologies, and indeed it could go alongside film and video works by Andy Warhol, Douglas Gordon, Bill Viola, or Jane and Louis Wilson. Like the exercises in patience and stamina produced by contemporary video and digital performance Barque sortant du port seems to emphasize the sensation of experience, the feeling of the moment that will pass but is suspended by photographic means.”
Damian Sutton: Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time. University of Minnesota Press 2009, p. 83/84

Depart de Jerusalem en chemin de fer
P & R: Louis Lumière. Fr 1896

TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 196