Historical exhibition - The Musée d'Orsay exclaims "Finally cinema!"in Paris

Historical exhibition - The Musée d'Orsay exclaims "Finally cinema!"in Paris

For the museum, everything started with the idea of movement introduced by the acceleration of the world around us.It earns us a nice headache.

Be careful, headache!Since the end of September, the Musée d'Orsay has been offering "finally cinema!"The public expects a good logic to a skillfully told story.She would lead him from the first optical toys to the invention of the Lumière brothers revealed to the public in December 1895.A discovery whose primacy remained long disputed by the Americans due to the "kinetoscope" of Thomas Edison, marketed the previous year (1).Well, not at all!The smallest details of this epic are considered "well known" by Dominique Païni, one of the three curators of the exhibition.A man who directed it is true the French cinematheque from 1991 to 2000.He therefore knows in principle what he is talking about ...

So what subject deals with the event, housed on the ground floor of the museum very close to the "Signac Collector" which I have just maintained?Of "modern spectator".This would have gradually become, in the second half of the 19th century, to understand and appreciate images that move.Men and women would have come to wish what Païni calls a "technological and aesthetic emergency".This is, as you understood, cinematograph.It would summarize (initially without colors) the achievements of urban metamorphosis, scientific knowledge, photography, electricity, mechanical reproduction of images, and so on.The Lumière brothers would have thus been a simple (but brilliant) point of convergence.It must be said that with such a name!

One might think that the "modern spectator", that we are still, would be taken by the hand.The thing had been essential.It was necessary to prevent the public from being lost among the meanders of ideas and presentation rooms.Such is not the case, however.Everything starts from the myth of Pygmalion, reported by Ovid.The legend of the sculptor fallen in love with his statue, which he suddenly wanted to animate.This is an idea of Paul Perrin, curator for painting at the Musée d'Orsay.He probably saw the opportunity to present some paintings, including the famous Jean-Léon Gérôme executed in 1890.The concept is nonetheless cerebral.Highly cultural.The average visitor must therefore be much above said average to understand.The exhibition, the third commissioner of which is the specialist in the photo Marie Robert, will also storm culture all the way.

The public is constantly tossed from one subject to another.Better to have historical benchmarks.He will have to put everything in context.And "finally cinema!"Wide breaststroke ... Judge rather!There is gradually (but a little as pell-mell) the rapid transformations of Paris started under Napoleon III.The city, which until then seemed immutable, changes all the time, generating strong social modifications.It’s "the parish priest" according to Emile Zola.For Paul Perrin, she thus becomes "a landscape in itself, a spectacle which constantly solicits the eye of the passer -by.»There is the light, which will soon become electric.The crowd of passers -by on the new boulevards.Department stores, which makes it possible to show the triptych of Félix Vallotton on "Le Bon Marché".This idea of a visual celebration will peak during universal exhibitions: 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 and especially 1900.Fifty million visitors for the latter!

La preuve indiscutable

Far from the cities perpetuate the movements of nature.The world is animated.He is lit by the sun.Everything can be observed and quantified, from the stars to microorganisms.Scientific result can now be shown and disseminated by this revolutionary invention that constitutes photography from 1839."She is considered a reliable means of reproduction in the face of the excesses of human imagination and the limits of drawing," recalls Marie Robert.This is all the more since the technique progresses at full speed.The endless exposure times of the beginnings succeeds an increasingly instantaneous image.She approaches cinema.The latter is never at its beginnings that sixteen fixed plans projected per second (we will then go to twenty, then to twenty-four when the film becomes speaking).

After having walked a lot the visitor, who will have seen impressionist paintings as well (including four "Rouen cathedral" signed Claude Monet) giving the image of the ephemeral as of the classics of the 8th art (the photo, therefore), the visitorcan finally arrive at the cinema itself.An everything except intellectual medium."It was first of all a show reserved for the rear-cafes of cafes, fairgrounds or department stores," explains Marie Robert.In other words, popular entertainment.It is gradually that he will try to win the bourgeois classes by approaching painting or by looting literature.To do this, he will have luxurious rooms, designed like theaters.It will also be necessary for him (but here we apparently get out of the framework of the exhibition) to structure oneself financially.Pathé and Gaumont will thus become "vertical trusts" ranging from production to diffusion.The transfer will be effective around 1908.

Is it because we are in a museum dedicated to fine arts?The cinema itself paradoxically remains the poor parent of "finally cinema!"There are many projections on kinds of bed sheets during ceilings.An undoubtedly evocation of the humble beginnings of what nobody still considered as an art.These unstable screens receive a strangely blurred projection.It is not flattering for pioneers that are the light, Méliès or the very professional filmmakers working in the studios Pathé or Gaumont.The young screens then showed clear images.

The route stops more or less there.The public comes out a little confused.He had to eat too much in a short time.And then the visitor vaguely feels that everything happened above his head.It's not just the screens to float in the air.The thing does not seem new to me in Orsay, where the excess of ideas are fortunately compensated by the quality of the works.I felt exactly the same feeling when I left a few months ago "the origins of the world".Wouldn't it be possible to make it simpler, more factual, more accessible, more didactic?Such presentations meet commercial success, certainly.But it seems to consider that people are walking here in onlookers.A bit like on the big boulevards in the 19th century!

(1) No need to specify (this is why I specify it) that the name of Edison does not appear anywhere on the walls of the exhibition.

Pratique

"Finally cinema!"Musée d'Orsay, 1, rue de la Légion d'Honneur, Paris, until January 16, 2022.Such.00331 40 49 48 14, www site.museum.fr Open Monday to Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday until 9:45 p.m..

Born in 1948, Etienne Dumont did in Geneva studies that were not very useful to him.Latin, Greek, right.Failed lawyer, he branched off towards journalism.Most often in cultural sections, he worked from March 1974 to May 2013 at the "Tribune de Genève", starting by talking about cinema.Then came the fine arts and the books.Other than that, as you can see, nothing to report.

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