Partie de boules (1896)
Genre :
Runtime : 1M
Director : Louis Lumière
Synopsis
Friends and relatives playing a game of boules, arguing about who's team is winning.
A little girl sits at a table, holding a container of what appears to be some sort of food. Suddenly there's a flash of movement: a tortoiseshell cat, with long hair and a very furry tail, has leapt onto the table.
While his aide continuously turns the handle of the bellows, keeping hot a small furnace in front of him, a blacksmith is pounding a piece of metal on an anvil, then plunges the shaft into a tub of water, causing a cloud of vapor in the process.
Auguste Lumière directs four workers in the demolition of an old wall at the Lumière factory. One worker is pressing the wall inwards with a jackscrew, while another is pushing it with a pick. When the wall hits the ground, a cloud of white dust whirls up. Three workers continue the demolition of the wall with picks.
Three men are sitting around a table, two of them playing a game of Écarté. When the game is over, a domestic serves drinks.
Pedestrian and horse-drawn vehicles traffic, across the Place des Cordeliers, in Lyon.
A man, holding a baby up in his hands, is standing next to a fishbowl. The baby is trying, in vain, to catch a goldfish with his bare hands.
A father, a mother and a baby are sitting at a table, on a patio outside. Dad is feeding baby his lunch, while mum is serving tea.
Angelic and demonic serpentine dances from dawn of cinema. The dancer is Loie Fuller; the pioneer modern dancer. Recorded in Paris, and hand-colored frame by frame.
A skeleton dances joyously, often collapsing into a heap of bones and quickly putting itself back together.
Wintertime in Lyon. About a dozen people, men and women, are having a snowball fight in the middle of a tree-lined street. The cyclist coming along the road becomes the target of opportunity. He falls off his bicycle. He's not hurt, but he rides back the way he came, as the fight continues.
Several competitors take part in a friendly sack race, with widely varying degrees of success.
Félicien Trewey uses a basic prop to create comical hats and their accompanying caricatures.
The first travelling shot.
Nero, seated on a throne, has slaves summoned. Each drinks poison and dies, the second even though he can see the corpse of his predecessor. (IMDb)
An ostrich pulls a cart carrying young women wearing ostrich-feather hats.
A shot of a street in Lyon, people passing, horses etc
In a grove, a small boy and a small girl are dancing together.
The floods of the Saône river during the first week of November, 1896.
Donald is vacationing at a dude ranch. After all the beautiful women pick the best horses, Donald ends up with the sad sack Rover Boy. But Rover Boy wants nothing to do with Donald.