Cinema is only a couple of years old; its capabilities are still being discovered, its possibilities limited by what you can put in front of the camera in a single, static shot.
The best short-shot films by Lumiere and his talented followers are as brief as haikus. This is one of the most poetic ever shot by Alexandre Promio (the best-known and most interesting of these early filmmakers, along with Gabriel Veyre).
There is a compositional talent that distinguishes these works from any of their contemporaries.
These are not just small comic anecdotes depicted in front of the camera, but exquisitely photographed moments of reality, in which we are also confronted with a representation of the passage of time that will leave its mark on a few unforgettable classic shots (I always think of the unforgettable ending of The Third Man, which inaugurates the long final shot that brings a film to a close) before being "rediscovered" by more modern filmmakers.
In this case, a picture-postcard view: the Sphinx of Gizeh before the Pyramid of Cheops is the quintessential image of the permanent, almost eternal, that sees civilizations passing by at its feet century after century. The framing is beautiful, in three-shot distance, with the pyramid in the background silhouetted against the sky, the Sphinx in front looking to the right, and a half-ruined wall in the foreground on the right offsetting the shot.
And moving from left to right, in the same direction as the unforgettable gaze of the Sphinx, are the men and camels, travelers and tourists, tiny and transient.
In short, a wonderful shot that could be the crowning glory and final shot of an Antonioni film.
