our selection of 5 beautiful books to celebrate the 7th art

1. “The Light Adventure” by Thierry Frémeaux

Ed. Actes Sud/Institut Lumière, 480 p., 53 euros.

At the head of the Lumière Institute in Lyon, Thierry Frémeaux watches over a national treasure with his teams: the 2000 “Lumière views”, filmed between 1895 and 1905. A vivid memory of cinema, this body of short films, already valued through restorations, a museum, a rich programming, is now enhanced by this beautiful album.

To compose it, Thierry Frémeaux chose 800 still images taken from his two magnificent documentaries released in 2017 and 2025. He comments on them one by one, through short informative texts.

From its birth, cinema has been a window open to all worlds: that of children, soldiers and even workers. From La Ciotat to Paris via the mines of Carmaux and the fields of the Hautes Pyrénées, these snapshots show the “France that works” and the one “that has fun” at the turn of the 19th century.

Very quickly, the Lumière brothers and their operators will film beyond France, near Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kyoto, Mexico or Boston for example. Faced with so many discoveries, the author of this book tirelessly reaffirms that “from its birth, cinema is not a story of images but a story of shots. A shot is valuable for its visual intensity and its movement, even when it is fixed: the frame then speaks of its value, strength and clarity. Exciting.

Our opinion : PPP

To celebrate the invention of the cinema, the Lumière Institute is organizing a screening-show of restored Lumière films on December 12, at the Grand Rex (Paris).