Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Page A

gleaming in the darkness, then the roaring big-headedlion, the list of august names, before the swiftly seamless – voilà! – conveyance-to-elsewhere. She had felt Mr Sakamoto settle and relax beside her and begin to chuckle at the very first scene. Aerospace light flashed down upon them. They were rocketed off at twenty-four frames per second.

    Let me tell you, wrote Mr Sakamoto , about the felicitously named Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, fine fellows with black eyes and handlebar moustaches, who invented, as we all know, the cinématographe – the cinema – in 1895. Their story begins with Antoine, their father, a hale and hearty fellow, a singer and artist, who married at nineteen, and had an energetic appreciation of all things new. He set himself up as a painter of portraits, then as a portrait photographer, in Lyon, France. His son Louis, by the time he was eighteen, had established a factory in the city for producing photographic glass plates. This was an immensely successful business, employing three hundred people and producing fifteen million plates a year, for sale all over Europe.
    In 1894 Antoine was invited to Paris to see a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope machine. This was a kind of large wooden box, with a viewing peephole at the top, by which one person at a time, leaning forward, peering from above, could see tapes of film composed at Mr Edison’s studios. Antoine stood above the box, removed his top hat, and looked deep into its fancy chute of darkness. He saw there a slim woman dancing seductively with veils trailing from her arms. ‘ Mon dieu! ’ Antoine hurried back to Lyon, excited by animated images, and charged his sonswith the task of devising a means by which these films could be projected for an audience, like magic lantern shows. One year later, they had it: the cinématographe , a box on a tripod. Hand-cranked, it both recorded and then projected images into the world. With an ingenious sprocket, a claw for moving film, they had found a device to put framed pictures into motion.
    It would not be unkind to say that the brothers Auguste and Louis lacked the artistic flair of their excitable father. At the world’s first screening, in the Grand Café in Paris, they showed images of their employees leaving the factory and a train arriving at a station, and would continue to film commonplace and even trite occurrences for years to come. They had no notion of story, or of special effect. Each film strip was fifty seconds of ordinary looking. A fixed camera position. Copycat filming. In 1895, however, it caused a sensation. How the café patrons ducked and cried out when the train moved towards them! How they exclaimed with relief and laughed when it stopped on the screen! This small sequence had about it the glow of inauguration. The train pulls up, heaves, pauses before us, and passengers begin in jerky fast motion to disembark. There are women in mutton-chop sleeves and puffy dresses of tulle, and men with hats and waistcoats, almost trotting along. A woman in a hat of extravagant size seizes a girl by the hand and charges towards the camera. One passenger, only one, seems to notice the camera on the platform. He is a sprightly young lad, perhaps only nineteen or twenty. He pauses, scrutinises, bends for a curious moment to examine this unknown box. He edges away, unsure. He is the first man in history screened thus, made self-conscious, selectedfrom the crowd by the return of his gaze. It is a riveting moment. We in the audience love him. We make him the historical vehicle for all that phantasmically follows.

    From the window of her studio, Alice watched the students at their break. They all seemed to be aged between fourteen and seventeen, and were therefore at the vulnerable, gawky age of indistinct character, vague ambition and obligatory fights with parents. As time passed, she began to see them individually, and felt a kind