Lumiere

It's almost too perfect that the Lumiere Brothers got into filmmaking in the very early years. Lumiere is French for "light", an essential quality in creating a photograph or moving picture.

I found a few of their shorts on YouTube today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s&feature=related

I love watching these candid views. You aren't looking at pumped-up, undernourished, botoxed, surgically altered, overly-tanned mannequins dressed up (in modern fabrics sewn by modern machines) to look like the people of 1895. You're looking at 1895 as it really was. A train pulls into a station, and people get on it. A boat arrives at a dock, and the passengers disembark, with some of the men smiling and tipping their straw hats to the camera. A group of men sit at an outdoor table, having drinks. A young boy plays a trick on a man who is watering his garden.

These are the images of 115 years ago, before World War I blasted that sort of life away forever.