Since the Middle Ages the town of Vevey has celebrated the region's best winegrowers during a parade.  From the end of the 18th century the parade became a show on the market square.  While the 1889 festival was photographed, the 1905 event […] was filmed from the spectators' stands, with its back to Lake Leman.

Today there remain at least two copies of the film of this event.  The one we see here is a nitrate tape coloured by hand (probably with a stencil) dropped off at the Swiss film archives then restored in 1993.  Initiated by the Brotherhood of Winegrowers that organised the festival, this restoration required twenty one hours to repair the perforations and splicing to print a coloured internegative on a prototype device absorbing the film's shrinking then a positive copy calibrated.

This copy presents very strong similarities with a film left at the British Film Institute – NFTVA (Joye collection) on the same subject.  These two tapes were maybe two results of the same filming work by the operator Urban & Co, which we know obtained the exclusive rights to film the event in return for 300 francs at the time.  However this didn't prevent the cameraman Félix Mesguich also filming the show.  Going to Vevey in August 1905 with the same aim on behalf of Raleigh & Roberts, the Paris agency of Warwick (London), he recounts in his memoirs* how he defied the exclusive rights granted the Urban & Co by creeping under the stands to haul up his tripod, apparently without anybody knowing.  And Mesguich added: "At the sound of the music, I succeeded in printing a complete box of 120 metres in this way. And Bob's your uncle!  In the evening on taking the express train back to Paris, my film parcel was carried off by a ticket collector on the sleepers.  The copies were distributed immediately, while thanks to his exclusive rights the Urban Trading Co. representative conscientiously continued his work on the banks of Lake Leman".   To our knowledge the Mesguich film has never been found.

Roland Cosandey, Ciné-Bulletin, 7/1994

*Tours de manivelle. Souvenirs d’un chasseur d’images, Grasset, 1933