Carmaux, défournage du coke

This short Lumiere actuality film features a block of coke (some kind of coal) being drawn out of an oven. Workers approach. Some are hosing the block to cool it, and others use long tools to tear the block apart. The subject of this film is lots more interesting than other times and it is pretty interesting watching. Once more it is a moment in time, which makes it worth seeing for anyone. The film can be found in the DVD set called "The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema" by Kino.

Worthwhile as one of numerous examples of the good photography in most of the early Lumière movies, this short feature also provides a look at a rather interesting scene. As brief as the footage is, it provides quite a good view of what is going on.

The composition is very good, and almost perfect. The vantage point is well-chosen so as to allow an angle that allows the viewer a clear, complete look at the block of coke as it comes out of the smelter. The picture also captures many other details. You can see what everyone on the ground is doing as the coke comes out, and more than that, it catches the activity on top of the furnace as well, with carts being taken back-and-forth. The very top of this part of the scene is just cut off, but otherwise, it's quite a fine job of setting up the camera field.

The process itself may not seem all that exciting, but it's rather interesting when you realize what they are doing (as other commentators have explained). This short feature provides a sharp visual image of the process, and it works well.

Carmaux: Drawing Out the Coke (1896)

The Lumiere Brothers are behind this actuality film that captures a day on the job as some workers are pushing coke out of a smelter and into the yard where water is poured on it. I've always enjoyed watching films from this era because it gives you a view of what life (and in this case, work) were like back in the day. We get to see how things were done, what people were wearing and so forth. If you want an acurate look at this job in 1896 then here you go. There's nothing ground-breaking here but it's still fascinating to watch today.

This approximately 35-second long Lumiere Brothers short (Lumiere No. 122) shows a handful of workers attending to a block of coke (a processed form of bituminous coal designed to produce fewer sulfur and other fumes when burned, making it ideal for uses such as stoves and furnaces) as it emerges from an oven at the open coal mine in Carmaux, France, a town near the Tarn River in the south of the country.

While this Lumiere Brothers actuality surely has less staging than most of their other documentary shorts, it is also far less interesting aesthetically. The primary attraction here is historical. We get to witness a historical coal mining process, which appears surprisingly "messy", first-hand, at an important, historical French mine. It's interesting to note that carts full of coal are being walked across the top of the oven while it's surely still hot (the coke is just emerging and is steaming). Bituminous coal must be burned at a very high temperature to produce coke.

One aspect that captivated me for its mystery was just how the coke is moved through the furnace door to the waiting workers. Also note how even though the workers have long, forked "poles" to help break up the block of coke, they approach it very cautiously and try to quickly move away. There must have been a chance that pieces from the crumbling block would ricochet off the ground back towards the workers; maybe there was also a tendency for some "shattering" from the drastic, sudden change in temperature. No one ever said that coal mining was easy.

In the twenty-first century, 'coke' has a number of meanings and most have been the subject of films. I had to go to Webster's Dictionary to find out that the coke filmed in this movie is the product of coal that is "heated in ovens to remove gasses thus transforming it into coke which burns with intense heat and little smoke and is used as an industrial fuel". Carmeiux is close to Lyon, so Lumiere did not have to go far to document this process.