Le village de Namo - Panorama pris d'une chaise à porteurs

For this shot, roving Lumiere exhibitor and cameraman Gabriel Veyre placed his camera in a rickshaw and had it run, with the children of a village somewhere in Indochina running after.

It's an interesting shot, but although it was called a panorama, it was what is today called a trucking shot. In that era, any moving shot was called a panorama. Its modern meaning of a shot in which the camera was turned, offering the audience a wider field of vision: if not at once, then eventually. It would be in the middle of the next decade that the modern sense of a panorama or pan shot would come into use, most obviously with Billy Bitzer's "Pennsylvania Station Excavation" in 1905.

A shot in which the the camera moved forward or back as this one does is called a trucking shot, referring to the truck on which the camera is usually laid. It is related to the tracking shot, in which the camera is placed on rails. It's generally used on a set where the distance the camera is moved is short and smoothness of motion is more important.

For the moment, this was considered a panorama. Its interest lies in its mimicry of track shots without a physical track and its exotic locale.

I don't think it's known exactly who shot the first panorama, but it was certainly a cameraman from the Lumière team. Promio is generally considered the author of the inaugural Panorama, when in 1896 he discovered that by placing the camera on a gondola in Venice, he could give movement not only to the images in the frame but also to the frame itself (in this case, like someone looking out the window of a train moving from left to right in the direction of travel, from the gondola seeing a curtain of Venetian palaces).

But that same year, another Lumière cameraman shot Panorama pris d'un bateau. Cologne (in this case, moving from right to left, the boat turns, giving the possibility of seeing not only the shore but also opening up to the sea). And there's even a third panorama by an unknown filmmaker: Panorama de l'arrivée en gare de Perrache pris du train, which captures the canonical form of "what is seen from the window of a train," now in the opposite direction, with the images receding in perspective. Without knowing the exact execution dates of these three panoramas, we have no choice but to attribute this important discovery to Promio, in keeping with tradition.

From then on, the technique became a trend: the camera would be mounted on ships, trains, gondolas, elevators, trucks, carts, and any available means of transportation (even a hot-air balloon), and they would film that fascinating lateral movement of the frame, as if from a train window.

I suppose we should assume it was later, although the date is still apparently 1896, when Charles Pathé filmed Voyage dans un train, and initiated a different type of panorama. Now we placed the camera in front or behind (in this case, in front) and we had a completely different movement of the frame, with the camera moving away from or toward the objects in the shot.

According to this, Promio's "Departure from Jerusalem on the Ferry Trail" and American Mutoscope Company's "The Haverstraw Tunnel," both from 1897, were not the originators of the famous "Phantom Ride," as many claim (and in no case would it be the first tracking shot, considering the antecedents noted from 1896). In the first, Promio includes a new variation: the camera placed on the back of a train records not only the landscape (rural or urban), but also people moving forward and waving at the camera. The steady forward movement of the camera and the slower, but also steady, gait of the men makes these figures increasingly distant from the moment they enter the frame.

The most beautiful of these panoramas that we could consider "Phantom Ride" style, is this Village de Namo, Le panorama pris d'une chaise à porteres, by Gabriel Veyre, one of the most beautiful shots in the history of cinema.

We now have the camera mounted on the back of a pickup truck, moving away from a group of Namo residents, adults and children, when suddenly a child starts walking toward the camera, and immediately many more appear, running excitedly. It's a chaotic movement that unfolds beautifully, with the children running, stopping, starting to run again, and laughing nonstop. They cross the frame from right to left and left to right.

Furthermore, the camera no longer maintains a fixed frame, but moves away laterally; there are small movements to the right and left, and with this, it brings the children in and out of the frame.

It's no longer a stable relative movement; now the children approach as they run faster, move away as they stop, appear on the right when the camera pans to the right, and cross from side to side as they run at full speed. It's a totally new and different rythm. In the end, the frame stabilizes, focusing on the first child, who looks at us with amusement and interest as he runs slowly, knowing that he has once again captured the camera's interest.

The narrator of Sans Soleil said at the beginning of the film that he considered an encounter with three children on a road in Iceland in 1965, which he captured on camera, to be his idea of happiness. I think all of us who have seen this unforgettable shot from 1900 in a small village in Indochina can say the same. The narrator also said he had tried to combine it with other shots...unsuccessfully. I don't think Gabriel Veyre had anything like that in mind, nor would it be necessary.

By this time, the Lumière Company's production was in sharp decline; after 1905, their catalogues featured nothing new. The Lumière brothers themselves had given up personally making films years before this subject, "Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rickshaw". Unlike with many of the company's other films, the cameraman behind this innovative early film is known. The filmmaker is Gabriel Veyre, who helped introduce the Cinématographe and, thus, cinema to Mexico City, Cuba, Japan, China and elsewhere. For this film, Veyre was in Indochina.

The film is a panorama shot-scene lasting just under a minute. The panorama film, as coined by Lumière, is a moving-camera shot--usually accomplished by placing the camera on a moving transport, such as a boat or train. Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio is generally credited with having introduced the panorama film in 1896 with "Panorama du Grand Canal vu d'un bateau", where he placed the Cinématographe in a gondola and travelled the canals of Venice. One of the next, most interesting innovations was the "phantom ride" films, where the camera was placed on the front of a moving train. American Mutoscope's "The Haverstraw Tunnel" (1897) is oft credited as the first of these.

Here, Veyre placed the camera in a rickshaw. As he's pulled away, children chase after him and the camera. Unlike other panoramas, and because of the rickshaw vantage point, the camera-work is unsteady. Consequently, this is a beautiful and unique early actuality film, which remains in excellent quality and is available on the highly recommended "The Lumière Brothers' First Films" (1996). Moreover, with its moving, exiting framing and chasing children, the film seems to be an appropriate farewell to the company, filmmakers and the Cinématographe that were most responsible for introducing cinema to the world.