Poultry-Yard

While surely one of the blandest of the early Lumière features, "Poultry-Yard" is still pleasant footage to watch, with a nostalgic feel to it. As a still photograph, it probably would have worked much better: the composition is good, as is usual with the Lumière movies, and in a still photo the reflective, evocative feel would be more noticeable and more important than the lack of any significant action.

The subject is simple, showing two young girls feeding a large number of domesticated ducks, with an occasional chicken or two also in view. While it's a familiar scene without anything particularly imaginative to it, it is the kind of picture that, in almost any era, usually brings to mind a wistful feeling of bygone eras and of bygone ways of life. As far as that goes, this short feature does so fairly well.

This is an approximately 45-second long Lumiere Brothers actuality (Lumiere No. 14) showing two girls, one about five years old, one about ten, feeding ducks. An older woman walks by in the background, exiting the frame on the right within 15 seconds.

Early shorts of bird feeding on farms were popular. The Edison Company did a "remake" of this film entitled Feeding the Doves, also from 1896, and eventually both the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and the International Film Company made similar films. Removed from these films in time as we are, it's perhaps difficult to say why such a seemingly mundane movie would be popular or attractive enough to bother emulating. This film isn't particularly appealing aesthetically in terms of visual composition, and there isn't much going on in terms of action.

However, when you put the film in historical-cultural context, it might make a bit more sense. The Industrial Revolution had hit western countries hard in the mid 19th Century. By the end of the 19th Century, profound cultural changes had taken effect. There were mass migrations from the agricultural "hinterlands" to urban environments. But there were still plenty of people alive who could remember what things were like prior to the impact of the Industrial Revolution. So films like Poultry-Yard were probably attractive for symbolizing the "good old days", they were tokens of a more bucolic, agrarian, (extended) familial way of life.

Unfortunately, in the early 21st Century, it's difficult for a film such as this to have the same impact on anyone. Removed from its particular cultural milieu, it doesn't even have much historical significance on its own. We mostly notice its relative blandness, making this one of the less successful Lumiere Brothers films at this point in time.

Basse-cour (1896)

This Lumiere Brothers film takes place at a poultry yard where we see a group of women throwing some feed to the chickens. This film clocks in less than a minute and like most actuality movies there's no plot or anything like that. What you do get to see is a moment in time when this woman was simply doing her job and a camera was there to capture it. I enjoy watching these movies simply because they captured a moment in time and I always wonder what the people in the film would think about someone watching it a hundred and twenty years after it was made. This is certainly nothing ground-breaking but it's quite interesting.

This is another of the many documentary shorts made by the Lumiere Brothers. It's a simple but popular scene from early cinema of girls feeding poultry and ducks. The reason I say popular is because poultry-yard scenes of people feeding birds was extremely popular back in the day. The Edison Company remade this film as a 20 second effort called "Feeding the Doves" but I think I prefer this one to that despite the fact it's pretty bland and not much happens onscreen. Maybe, as another reviewer has pointed out, this could've worked better as a photograph instead. That said, it is an extremely well-photographed and pleasant little scene which is still interesting to watch even today. And, in the end, you can't criticize this short because it wasn't telling a story. Just two kids doing their job, and Lumiere was there to document it. It is a bland subject but the least it can do is show us this moment in time, and that's what it does.