14, BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES

RF Lucchetti
Edited by: Marco Auerélio Lucchetti

Cinema, the Seventh Art, was born in winter. And in Paris, winter is dark and dreary. It comes with a sharp, cold wind that creates whirlwinds. It also comes with a light rain and... persistent. The facades of the houses become darker, the water splashes on pavements. Only the trees remain luminous, and their last leaves cover the ground. of the large, silent avenues and of boulevards trembling.
O Boulevard des Capucines has its old trees with round patches and whitish trunks.
CThe wind pours the dead leaves from the branches, a golden rain.
It is December 1939.
War broke out.
The large shop windows soften the light at the end of twilight.
Manuel Villegas López, the renowned Spanish writer, critic, and historian, pauses before the enormous building, checks his watch. His imagination goes back… back…
Until December 1895.
The historian moves closer to the building. He sees the number 14. And he reads the inscription on the marble: “"Here, on December 28, 1895, the first public session took place..." "Animated photography, using the cinematographic apparatus of the Lumière Brothers."”
“"Cinema has no monuments that describe its history."”, Villegas thinks López. He owns this building, but it represents the life of the Cinema. Here there was the Grand Café, in whose basement, in the Salon Indien, the world's first cinema was installed.
AThere seemed to be thirty-three curious onlookers, each paying one franc. It was on an afternoon like this, grey and cold, under the fine, persistent rain, under the rustling of the trees shedding their leaves.
Villegas López shrinks into his thick overcoat. His sad gaze wanders through time, as if wanting to find the image of that afternoon so that it could be the happy thirty-fourth. “"curious"”.
The Grand Café no longer exists. In its place, eight or ten large, brightly lit shop windows have sprung up, wrapping around the corner of Rue Scribe. Above them, in bronze letters, is the sign: “"Cook Agency"”. And in the shop windows, advertisements for travel. Palmeiras: “"Tahiti and the paradise islands of Polynesia."” Mountains, lakes: “"Visit Norway."” The pyramids of Egypt and the snowy peak of Mount Fuji… Multicolored flags of international expositions. The luxury cabin of the latest ocean liner and the newest model of passenger plane. A train at full speed seems to want to jump out of the poster. “"Travel around the world with Cook Agency."”
In that first movie screening, ten films were shown, each slightly longer than a minute. The Arrival of a Train at the Station e The Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory These are two of the most famous of them.

A scene from The Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

These films remained in theaters for several months – the first tickets brought in thirty-three francs; three weeks later, they were bringing in two thousand five hundred francs daily, without any advertising. They were documentaries and reports, or rather,  “trips"”; and the Lumière brothers named their invention “"the great traveler".
NBack then, cinema aimed only at this: being the great traveler. And carefree passersby entered the first cinema with the same illusion, with the same dream with which, on this cold December afternoon of 1939, passersby pause before those shop windows full of travel posters. In the same place, the same window to the world.
Manuel Villegas López glances at the shop window once more and begins to walk. These are the final days of 1939; but the Spanish historian feels as if he is back in that distant end of 1895.
Little by little, the figure of Villegas López begins to get lost amidst the other people who are hurrying by. boulevard wet.
It rains, and the wind pours down the golden branches… a shower of gold…