Statue Victor Planchon - Boulogne-sur-mer

This statue of Victor Planchon was inaugurated in 2012. The man is holding a film reel in his hands.

Since mid-December 2012, the bronze and stainless steel statue, designed by the Boulonnaise artist Sylvie Koechlin , has stood near the Espace Lumière , on the edge of the Rue Nationale. Its closest neighbor is none other than Marilyn Monroe , the film icon also immortalized by the artist.

Planchon worked closely with the Lumière brothers to offer them flexible film , which until then had been produced exclusively by the American company Eastman. Planchon was the first European to produce this essential element for the invention of the Lumière cinematograph and it was in his workshops in Boulogne , in the Capécure district, that he developed and produced the film.

Victor Planchon was the inventor of the plan film and then of the flexible film , a technological breakthrough that seduced the Lumière brothers and led to the development of the seventh art. A genius inventor to whom cinema owes much according to experts.

This former pupil of the Lavoisier school in Paris, who in his youth drove his mother to despair by conducting experiments in his bedroom, soon developed a business in the production of photographic glass plates for his own use and for a few friends. While Georges Eastman was developing his photographic film (Kodak) on the other side of the Atlantic, Victor Planchon was not to be deterred and turned his research to replacing gelatin-bromide glass plates with a flexible medium . He chose self-stretched film with a thin metal edge, patented in 1890. This was nothing less than the invention of flat film, which is still used today in large-format silver photography.

The growing reputation of his plan films in the photographic world soon reached the Lumière brothers , who had developed a high-quality emulsion for which they sought a reliable support. After asking Planchon to apply this emulsion to the famous film prints, Auguste and Louis Lumière asked him in 1894 to think of a film strip to improve Edison's kinetoscope principle for reproducing moving images. Months of research and numerous tests were needed, and finally Louis Lumière wrote in December 1895 of a film that approached perfection: "The images we have obtained with our kinematograph are wonderfully transparent and much better than the films we have had at our disposal up to now. The emulsion is pure, intense and fast".

Cinema was born . And Victor Planchon had actively participated in it during his stay in Pas-de-Calais, in particular in Boulogne-sur-Mer. The following year, in 1896, in order to expand his business, he went to Lyon to open a new factory, where he also began to produce photographic equipment (notably the Plavik brand), artificial silk and many other products of his own invention, for which he registered no fewer than forty patents in France and abroad . The Lumière brothers were visionaries and good communicators and wanted to show their cinematograph in several major cities around the world before marketing it. So, on March 8, 1896, the sixth paid public film screening in the world was held at the Rancy Circus on Place Frédéric-Sauvage in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Willem Vandenameele