Five Minutes of Pure Cinema
About Five Minutes of Pure Cinema
Henri Chomette's short has no characters and no story. Objects and landscapes are put through acceleration, double exposure, and printing in negative. He treated that as pure cinema: the action is the film itself. The French title is Cinq minutes de cinéma pur.
Cast & crew
More about Five Minutes of Pure Cinema
Chomette shot the film in 1925 and released it in 1926. It is 35mm, black and white, and silent. The original length is 100 meters, listed as 5 minutes. It reuses effects from his earlier Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse, which the Comte Étienne de Beaumont had commissioned. The Centre Pompidou acquired a copy in 1976.
Themes
Making
The short recycles devices from the Beaumont commission and drops the excuse of a subject.
Reviews
Prosper Hillairet, in a note carried by UbuWeb, describes a run of visions that exist only because of the lens and the moving film, and ties that sensation to what Germaine Dulac called visual emotion.
Technique
The picture is made of acceleration, double exposure, and negative printing. Those operations are the subject.
Preservation
The Centre Pompidou acquired the film in 1976. The original length on the Cinémathèque française restoration list is 100 meters.
Notes
- A UbuWeb copy is timed at 6 minutes against the 100-meter, 5-minute listing.
- The Cinémathèque française restoration catalog is the source French Wikipedia cites for the 100-meter length.
- Georges Chaperot wrote on Chomette in the Revue du cinéma of 1 August 1930.
- There is no acted scene and no intertitle plot.
Influenced by
- Henri Chomette's Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Cinq Minutes de cinéma pur (1926).webm)
- UbuWeb