Thierry Frémaux on Why ‘Today, We Can Never Trust Images We See’ — but We Can Trust the Lumière Brothers and ‘Apocalypse Now’

Thierry Frémaux is not just the witty, wry, and sometimes controversial French artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival — he’s also a film historian, director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, and a filmmaker himself.

Frémaux just released his second anthology of restored films directed by Louis Lumière with an assist by his brother and cinematographer Auguste; together, they invented the Cinématographe in 1895, a hand-cranked device that served as camera, developer, and projector. In other words, the apparatus that became the modern movie camera, up until digital technology usurped the role that film cameras played in capturing the first 100 years of filmmaking.

“Lumière, Le Cinéma!” features 130 short films made by the sibling inventors, restored by Frémaux and his Institut team, from street scenes, like the factory workers they turned their new invention on, to street scenes and failed experiments. It’s playing at the Museum of Modern Art starting March 20, and we spoke ahead of time about not only the documentary, but also Frémaux’s thoughts about the current state of cinema, the threats of AI that he’s not scared of, why we can “trust” the Lumières’ images, and why “Apocalypse Now” was the “last biofilm” (he explains what that means below; Francis Ford Coppola also gets a cameo at the end of the documentary).

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

IndieWire: Some people would argue that the basic apparatus of cinema — a camera that then flattens images into two dimensions to be projected on a screen — hasn’t changed much since the Lumière brothers, despite obvious technological advancements.

Thierry Frémaux: I agree. That invention, and it’s what I say in the movie, was ready right away. The process of the invention was longer, and there were a lot of inventors before Lumière. There was not a single inventor after [Louis Lumière] because once he did that, it was done. It was perfectly done. Cinema was cinema, right away. And until today, or until years ago when digital technique came in, cinema was made of the same mechanics as the original [Cinématographe]. But there is something else: There is the technique, but there is also the second invention of Lumière, which is the screening room, being all together watching the images on the big screen, to share the emotion with the world, and that didn’t change [either].

‘Lumière, Le Cinéma!’Janus Films

What’s changing is how we consume them, but a screen is still a screen.

Take a little child of, I don’t know, 12 years old, today, he’s always with his smartphone, watching videos the whole day. If you tell him, Saturday night we’re going to the movies, ah, OK, let’s go! He will be happy to have that. In the Lumière institute, we have like 50,000 students, young people [from] schools, every year. More and more, I do screenings [where] you have 300 young boys and girls quite active and talking before a screening. Once you [make the room dark], nobody talks anymore. They watch the movie. For two hours, they are all alone, thinking by themselves, without any smartphone, just a story they want to know. They want to know the end of the story. The other thing is cinema didn’t change because, for example, take 3D; we had a lot of big movement in 3D in the ‘50s, then another one in this century. But, no, 2D, big screen, one story, even black and white, it’s [still the same].

Cinephilia is at a high point right now, especially with young audiences, as Gen Z is the largest demographic currently contributing to ticket sales. How do we get them interested in the Lumière brothers, which might seem primitive to that audience?

Doing this documentary is leaving something for the future… [to] make things easier to watch Lumière films and to understand who he was and what he was. But I agree that there is a revival movie buff movement coming from the young generation, which is totally different than Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. We have to pay attention to the new form of the movie buff movement. For example, at the time of Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, they used to write reviews; my children, they are 21 and 23, they never read any critic. They read pieces of that on Instagram, on Twitter, and Letterboxd, especially. The vitality, the desire for exchange still exists.

‘Lumière, Le Cinéma!’Janus Films

In the U.S. today, an “old movie” for a lot of younger viewers is a movie from the ‘90s.

My children are more interested in cinema of today than cinema of the past. I don’t know in the U.S., but in the France, you have mainly the idea that the past is the past, and looking to the past makes you someone who’s not really modern. I think the opposite. Knowing the past is really helpful for getting the reality of today, but we’ll see what will happen… I grew up with Cahiers du Cinema, with Positif, I grew up with the love of classic films, black-and-white, Hollywood, film noir. We have to think about what the culture could be for Gen Z today. Take Tony Scott. He was a mainstream filmmaker in the 1990s, but today, this kind of cinema doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it exists on platforms, but in cinema, when people used to see films of Denzel Washington, or Harrison Ford, or Bruce Willis, do we have still this kind of cinema today, a family going on Saturday night, two hours, getting these kind of stories? I don’t know. I grew up in the ‘70s, so my cinema is Arthur Penn, Jerry Schatzberg, Marty Scorsese, Bob Rafelson.

We are at the turning point of what cinema is because of the existence of platforms, AI, digital civilization. We think cinema is the most important thing for education, an understanding of the world, and history, and so on. I never met a cowboy or Indian in my life, but I know perfectly who cowboys and Indians are, and what World War II was, because of film. I’ve learned my world through cinema — through literature as well — but mainly cinema.

This documentary encompasses 130 Lumière films, but not restored as pristinely as they are here. Your film allows you to see so much activity in the background. What was the restoration process?

We know that [Louis] Lumière and his cinematographer [Auguste] shot a lot of movies. We made a catalog, we made lists 30 years ago; we knew we had around 2,000 films. 50 seconds [long], one minute; the films at the end are a bit longer, one minute and 30 seconds. But in 1946, the French historian Georges Sadoul went to see Lumière when he was old. They made a conversation book, but at the end, Sadoul asked Lumière, “Where are the films?” And he said he had them; he preserved the 2,000 films. Today, we have almost the complete collection except six or seven films.

Lumière had those films preserved in 35[mm]. Thirty years ago, we [began] the restoration process, but now we had to do it again with digital technique. In total, we have 500 Lumière films ready. We have 1,500 to go. We’re looking for money to do that.

A restoration is also an interpretation. With the digital process, we can see the film much better today than with a 35[mm] projector in bad shape, so it was also a way to say, here is the real frame, the real speed of this film.

‘Apocalypse Now’©United Artists/Courtesy Everett Collection

What can these films do to counteract attitudes about artificial intelligence or the encroachment of AI?

The more we go to the future, [toward] artificial intelligence and artificial worlds, the more we have to [consider] the reality of images. We have that with Lumière, with Chaplin as well, with Eisenstein as well. Wim Wenders said a wonderful thing: “We can trust the Lumière films.” What was in front of the camera is what was on the screen. Today, we can never trust images we see. Even in a “normal” film, there are a lot of special effects and so on. I’m not even talking about AI.

You know what we used to call in French the “biowine” for natural wine; to me, there is also a biofilm, biocinema, and in a way, the last biofilm was “Apocalypse Now” because Francis [Ford Coppola] had six helicopters from the Philippines army to do the Valkyrie scene, and you can look at the montage, you have six or seven helicopters. Today, a filmmaker would be with the special effects guy, saying, “Six is not enough. Bring four more, five more.” So that scene will not be credible because we know that it was not in the air.

That’s why the film is extraordinary… you feel the risk in filming that, in putting his camera in the helicopter, on the ground, in the air. Now, can we trust the images we see? No. Technically, we can’t. Can we trust the stories they tell us? Yes, we can, I think, because screenwriters, Marcel Proust, had his own brain. No AI could write what Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare wrote, but we have to be very, very careful. Because of Lumière, and because of Chaplin, and because of Keaton, because of Rossellini, F.W. Murnau, I’m not afraid of AI.

“Lumière, Le Cinéma!” opens from Janus Films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Friday, March 20, with more dates to follow. It screens on the Criterion Channel starting May 1.