1. Note the placement of the apostrophe. I refer throughout this article to “the Lumières,” but one thing that this compilation made very clear indeed was that, as I allude to earlier, the brothers had a large and far-flung network of camera operators who were actually shooting this material. “The Lumières” are thus cinema’s original postmodern (or at least post-structuralist) author, both indispensable as a nexus for understanding the unmistakeable visual unity of this body of work as a whole and yet, as living and breathing individual subjects, often uninvolved in its actual realization.
2. Caroline Zéau, Le cinéma direct : un art de la mise-en-scène (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2020).
3. Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell, and Simon Popple, “Introduction to the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection,” in The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, ed. Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 3; ellipses in the original, which quotes the unpublished correspondence.
4. Originally published by the Parisian press Seghers in 1974; see especially the 1997 revision L’Aventure du cinéma direct revisitée (Montréal: Les 400 Coups, 1997).
5. Guy Gauthier, Philippe Pilard, and Simon Suchet, Le documentaire passe au direct (Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 2003).