Baby's Meal - Repas de Bébé (1895) FULL VIDEO

 

 

Baby's Meal - Original Title: Repas de bébé (1895)

Director: Louis Lumière

Release Date: June 10, 1895 (Lyon)

                       December 28, 1895 (Paris)

Country of Origin: France

Cast: Auguste Lumière, Mrs. Auguste Lumiere, Andrée Lumière

Auguste Lumière centers attention on his infant daughter while attempting to feed her with a spoon during a first-ever public film screening at the Salon Indien in Paris on December 28.

Auguste and Marguerite Lumière, the baby's happy parents, are seated at a table. The mother is filling her cup with coffee while the father uses a spoon to feed the infant. Despite encouragement from both parents, the infant does not eat the biscuit that the father feeds him. The father goes back to using the spoon to feed the infant.

At a dining table in the lawn outside a home are Auguste Lumière, his wife Marguerite, and their daughter Andrée. With a silver tea service, a bottle of cognac, and elegant attire, the scenario suggests the culture of a bourgeois household. While Mama makes and consumes a cup of tea, Papa spoon-feeds their infant twice. They both adore the youngster and converse with her all the time. The baby then appears to offer the biscuit to someone off-camera after daddy delivers it to her. Auguste gives Béché a third spoonful as the movie comes to a close.

Repas de bébé (also called Le Repas de bébé, Le Repas (de bébé), Le Déjeuner de bébé, Baby's First Meal, Baby's Breakfast, Baby's Lunch, Baby's Dinner, Baby's Tea Time, The Family Breakfast, A Baby's Meal, Feeding the Baby, and Feeding Baby) is a short black-and-white silent actuality film from France that was shot in 1895.

Le Repas de bébé (catalogued as Vue no. 88), one of the brothers Lumière's first recordings, is an uncut single take that lasts less than a minute. The image was taken between March 22 and June 10, 1895, according to the company's catalog, which identified it as "Un papa fait avaler son αjeuner à un bébé" (a father serves lunch [or breakfast] to a baby).

On December 28, 1895, the film was a part of the Lumière Cinématographe's first commercial showing at the Salon Indien, Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. It was the seventh of ten films, each lasting seventeen meters.

This film was produced in a 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, just as other Lumière films from 1895 to 1905. Louis Lumière used the recently developed Cinématographe, a square box-shaped camera that doubled as a film projector and developer, to take pictures of the family trio. The company's films, which were typically chopped out of still-image and video copies, featured characteristic rounded corners.

The 1895 short film Repas de bébé (also known as Feeding the Baby or Baby's Breakfast), directed by Louis Lumière, is recognized for several pioneering achievements in the birth of cinema: 

Birth of the "Home Movie": It is widely cited as the first "home movie" in history. Unlike other early films that focused on public spectacles or industrial work, this film captured an intimate, domestic scene of Auguste Lumière and his wife Marguerite feeding their infant daughter, Andrée.

Establishment of "Actualités": The film helped pioneer the actualité genre—unfiltered footage of real-life events. It demonstrated that everyday, mundane activities could be compelling when captured in motion.

Early Use of Depth and Background Detail: Early viewers and critics, including filmmaker Georges Méliès and writer Maxim Gorky, were famously captivated not just by the primary subjects, but by the swaying leaves of the trees in the background. This highlighted cinema’s unique ability to capture random, natural motion that still photography could not.

The First "Sequel": Some historians consider it one of the earliest examples of a cinematic sequel. The characters—Auguste and baby Andrée—had appeared in another Lumière film shown just moments earlier in the same program, titled Fishing for Goldfish (La Pêche aux poissons rouges).

Part of the First Commercial Screening: It was one of the ten short films featured in the world's first commercial public film screening on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris. This event is traditionally regarded as the birth of modern public cinema.