Bring on the cinema!, Exhibition, Musée d'Orsay, Paris: 28 September 2021-16 January 2022

The exhibition "Bring on the cinema!" is deliberately synchronous and thematic, and does not attempt to present a chronology of inventions. It brings together the French film production of the years 1895-1907 with the history of the arts, since the invention of photography in the early 1900s, through several major themes such as the passion for the spectacle of the city, the desire to record the rhythms of nature, the dream of a "heightened" reality through the reproduction of colour, sound and relief or through immersion, and finally the taste for history.

At the beginning of the 20th century, cinema was a form of appropriation of the world, of bodies and representations; it is the product of an urban culture fascinated by the movement of people and things and eager to stage the concept of "modernity".

The first projections of "animated photographs" by the Lumière brothers in Paris in 1895 were in fact the culmination of a long line of visual devices and attractions (from the panorama to wax museums, morgues, aquariums and fairs) that reached its apogee at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Born of a tradition of image circulation, these first films, still imperfect, are the heirs of diverse practices, whether artistic or scientific, learned or vulgar. Many of the proposals or questions formulated by 19th century artists that preceded their arrival, foremost among which was the fantasy of "integral realism", which cinema prolongs, recycles, questions and soon surpasses. In this exhibition, the apparent mobility of the world or of the passage of time is questioned and analysed. In this sense, Jean-Luc Godard was right to point out that cinema was invented by the 19th century.

The exhibition brings together nearly 400 works, objects and films, both anonymous and signed by names well known to the general public, ranging from Pierre Bonnard to Auguste Rodin, not forgetting Gustave Caillebotte, Loïe Fuller, Léon Gaumont, Jean Léon Gérôme, Alice Guy, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Jules Etienne Marey, Georges Méliès, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Charles Pathé or Henri Rivière. Film lovers will be served!