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Life inside an Image (MUMA)

by
ABR Arts 11 November 2016

Life inside an Image (MUMA)

by
ABR Arts 11 November 2016

The birth of cinema is conventionally linked to the Lumière Brothers’ inaugural public screening of their first film at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris in December 1895: a forty-six second sequence showing Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. But a compatriot inventor, Louis le Prince, had been experimenting with developing stereoscopic cinematographic cameras in the years 1888–90, well in advance of the Lumière’s publicised invention. Assembling apparatuses with multiple lenses as well as single-lens cameras, Le Prince managed to produce three eight-second films. Le Prince, however, mysteriously disappeared on a train between Dijon and Paris on 16 September 1890, an unfortunate denouement which consigned him to the dustbin of history. All that remains of his filmic experiments is a twenty-frame fragment depicting a view of Leeds Bridge. We know this because the contemporary artist Matthew Buckingham has made Le Prince the subject of his own film False Future (2007), one of several screening in MUMA’s current exhibition, Life inside an Image.