Adieu Belle Époque

20 November 2022

The century came to an end in 1896. Revolutionary discoveries, inventions, art movements and new political realities and parties are creating a new world. The Belle Epoque and the Fin de siècle also show the surge of the cinema. The famous Cinématographe of the brothers and the cinoscope are not the only relevant personalities (see also Chaplin’s World).

François-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke (1848–1922) made films of Switzerland to show at the Swiss National Exposition in Geneva in 1896. His pavilion was perhaps the world’s first cinema.

He was an inventive media pioneer and Switzerland’s first colour photographer, but for a long time, he was forgotten. His oeuvre, which presented Switzerland’s Belle Epoque, seemed lost.

This exhibition brings his films and photographs back into the limelight. Hisbiography from that phase of his life, when he toured Switzerland with his Cinématographe Lumière, sheds light on what reality then looked like for most Swiss, two generations after the founding of the Swiss Confederation in 1848. 

It is also a piece of Swiss media history. Some fifty of his films were recently rediscovered in a Paris archive. Thanks to modern image-processing technology, these can now be shown to the public once again – for the first time since 1898! 

Not only are they moving documents of an era that disappeared five generations ago but still reverberates today, but they are also the ground-breaking work of a man who was the world’s first pioneer of early cinema to have a command of all the fields that together make up the medium of cinematography today: chronophotography, automation, the chemical industry, banking, lobbying and marketing, entertainment and the Showbusiness!

(Source and further information: museum Tinguely, Basel).