Baby's Dinner

 

Comprised of one shot of Auguste Lumière, his wife and their one year old baby daughter, Andrée Lumière, enjoying a modest breakfast in a rural part of France, Baby’s Dinner (also known as Repas de Bébe and Feeding the Baby), is one of the most famous examples of early cinema – or more specifically, early archival footage, seeing as the film doesn’t involve a discernible ‘narrative’ as such. It is also an example of an early genre of filmmaking known as ‘Child Pictures’, including other infant-orientated titles, such as Babies Playing (1895), Boys Scrambling for Pennies Under the West Pier (1896), Children Paddling and Playing on the Sands (1896), Babies Quarrel (1896), Scrambling Urchins (1896), and many, many others.

Baby’s Dinner might seem extraordinarily simple, even primitive, by today’s standards of technology – the film is, after all, composed of a single shot, and is less than one minute long – however, at the time, it was revolutionary. ‘Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen, and the picture stirs to life,’ wrote the Russian author Maxim Gorky, after having seen the film on 4 July 1896. ‘I doubt my ability to describe it’.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Baby’s Dinner is a good example of how, from cinema’s inception, directors were drawn to the contours of the human face, even though the face in question here – belonging to Andrée Lumière – was a face in which the spectator could not read psychologically defined emotions, but rather the simple wishes of a young child.

Want to know more?

Watch the film here.

Read about it here.