AllMovie

This curious French film manages to be simultaneously a documentary and a drama. It uses footage from the Lumiere cameras to tell the story of a peripatetic Irishman. Each of the historically valuable short films he uses for this are about two minutes long, because that was the length of film the Lumiere cameras would hold. In this feature-length film, one can see a significant proportion of the early Lumiere films. Louis Lumiere is usually credited as the inventor of the moving picture, although Edison in the U.S. and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany made contributions to the process soon afterward. It is hard to imagine now, but the idea of using film as a way of telling dramatic stories did not arise instantaneously. The short films made by the Lumiere cameras from 1895 to 1900 were used as novelty items, and they almost always recorded real events.