Lumière and Company (1995)

Director(s): Theodoros Angelopoulos, Vicente Aranda, John Boorman, Youssef Chahine, Alain Corneau, Costa-Gavras, Raymond Depardon, Francis Girod, Peter Greenaway, Lasse Hallström, Hugh Hudson, Gaston Kaboré, Abbas Kiarostami , Cédric Klapisch, Andrey Konchalovskiy, Spike Lee, Claude Lelouch, Bigas Luna, Sarah Moon, Arthur Penn, Lucian Pintilie, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jerry Schatzberg, Nadine Trintignant, Fernando Trueba, Liv Ullmann, Jaco Van Dormael, Régis Wargnier, Wim Wenders, Yoshishige Yoshida, Yimou Zhang, Merzak Allouache, Gabriel Axel, Michael Haneke, James Ivory, Patrice Leconte, David Lynch, Ismail Merchant, Claude Miller, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Jacques Rivette.

Cast: Max von Sydow, Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Huppert, Neil Jordan, Liam Neeson, Lena Olin, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, Pernilla August. 88 min. France/Denmark/Spain/Sweden. Documentary.

The 100th anniversary of inventing cinema. Forty directors are asked to film, using the original Lumière cinematograph, by three rules: 52-second sequence only, no 'synched' sound, no more than three takes. In between, directors are asked: 1. Is cinema mortal? 2. Why do you film? 3. Why accept this project? Look at the directors - the results are obviously fascinating, and in some instances, the behind-the-scenes more so. Some cleverly escape the rules (Haneke films a TV broadcast), some inject their own famous style (Lynch has a puzzle), and as expected, Kiarostami's the most mind-bending. All and all a treat.

Trivia: To film his own segment, John Boorman had visited the set of Niel Jordan's Michael Collins, which is why Neeson, Quinn, Rea, Rickman and Jordan himself are all present in his segment.

Mo says: