Director: Louis Lumière

Synopsis: A boat leaves a port as members of the Lumiere family look on.

Barque sortant du port is an early Lumiere film shot to demonstrate their invention’s adeptness at capturing motion in a way the photographic camera never could. This pleasing little film has a certain charm about it. This isn’t because of any story – all we see is three men rowing a boat past a jetty upon which a group of women stand – but because the motion here isn’t the hurtling rush of a train entering a station or a bustling crowd of workers leaving a factory, but the rhythmic, almost mesmerising, rise and fall of the boat in the waves and the motion of the waves themselves. Definitely one of the better of the Lumiere brothers early films.

(Reviewed 28th May 2009)