#Lumière2018
by Serge Kaganski 

Posté OCTOBER 15, 2018

For a long time, Lyon was for me, the Parisian, a sad little stopover city, an obliged obstacle on the road to my holidays. To get from the capital of France to Provence, one could not escape crossing the capital of Gaul with its unpleasant revolving door of travelers in transit: the traditional traffic jams of Fourvière, the charmless banks of the Rhone south of Perrache, and the industrial landscape and the murky smells of the petrochemical zone towards Oullins, Pierre-Bénite, Feyzin, a sort of New Jersey on the Rhone. It was only after passing the city of Vienne that we could finally feel the embracing warmth of the sun, cicadas and holiday resorts, that we could get in the mood to hum Nino Ferrer’s "It feels like the south.”

Of course, we knew that the city of “Gones” had plenty of beautiful and good things to offer: the “bouchons,” as in local restaurants, not the other meaning of the word, traffic jams - of the tunnel, the Croix-Rousse hill, the quenelles, the one-two of Serge Chiesa and Fleury Di Nallo, the alleys of the old quarter of Saint-Jean, the rosette sausage... and then it was the city of the eternal Guignol and the Lumière brothers! Yet this abundance of goodies and promises had never succeeded in making us slow down, much less stop, in our hurry to join the lush meadows or the big blue.

If I know Lyon a little better now, I owe it to the Institut Lumière and its festival of the same name - oh so enlightening - and I owe it of course to the boss Thierry Frémaux, who has been for me on many occasions the inspirer of initiative, orientation table and local food guide. I first came to visit Thierry and Lyon in the prehistoric times of the Institut Lumière - it must have been in 1991, there was still no theater, let alone the festival, just the Lumière villa and its collections, supervised by Bernard Chardère or Raymond Chirat, venerable watchmen of Lyon cinephilia. We did not have time to really visit Lyon, Thierry was driving too fast for that, and then we spent most of the day examining the present and the future of the Institut and watching some wonderful Lumière “vues,” which were not as accessible as today.

It was finally thanks to the Lumière festival that I really stayed in Lyon and discovered its beauty beyond Place Bellecour. Between two screenings of classics taken in at the monumental movie heritage HQs, between a lunch with Michael Cimino and a master class by Wong Kar-wai, between a giant screening at the Halle Tony Garnier and a visit to the legendary portraits of Bob Dylan by Jerry Schatzberg, I walked the streets of Saint Jean and the traboules of the Croix-Rousse, I savored the quenelles of Chez Abel at the Arch of Ainay and admired the tiles of the city at sunset from the Fourvière (when the capital of Gaul takes on a Roman-like glow)...

In short, Lumière for me illuminated Lyon, and probably also enlivened this city, so often described as bourgeois and self-absorbed. The traffic of the Fourvière tunnel is still there, the industrial zone too, but the Lumière festival protects us and offers us only the best of the city: its historic districts, its cinemas, its temples of culture, its (gastronomic) bouchons ... And I realized their slogan speaks the whole truth: “Good films, good food, good friends,” absolutely! Thank you, Lyon, thank you, Lumière, thank you, festival... and may the party begin!