INVENTORS OF MOVIES CHANGED OUR WORLD.

Byline: Si Frumkin

WE face a dilemma as the 20th century draws to a close: Who will be named the Person of the Century, the individual who most significantly influenced and changed our lives in the last 100 years?

Villains are not excluded. Hitler and Stalin were each Time's Man of the Year more than once. The selection is based on how the individual changed history, how history and the world would have been different if he hadn't been born.

Time magazine has already begun a survey for readers who would like to submit their candidates (wwwtime.com) but the final choice is up to the editors. So far the most submissions have been for Elvis, Hitler and Gandhi - in that order - and of course, there are other candidates: Freud, Einstein, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Edison, Herzl, Ford, Bill Gates, Lenin, the Beatles, Disney, Heffner and all the rest.

My nomination may surprise you. Actually, there are two candidates who jointly gave us what, in my opinion, is the most significant development of the 20th century, one that touches the daily lives of all of us, everywhere on this globe.

My nomination to share Man of the Century honors are the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the inventors of the motion picture.

I have two basic reasons for my vote. One is obvious; the other, less so.

The Lumieres enabled us to realize that a moment in the past is not necessarily lost forever, preserved only in our memories and in static pictures. They presented us with the immediacy and the reality, the truth of what had happened and the ability to repeat the past in all its glory and all its ugliness.

The Lumiere cinematographe, a crude wooden box, was the predecessor of larger-than-life motion pictures in living color and stereo sound, of videos and of graphic monitor screens.

Motion pictures bring us the horrors of war, the rantings of dictators, the heroism of explorers and daredevils, the beauty of our planet from space and a mile below the sea, the artistry of the most talented among us and the horrors created by the depraved and the cruel.

They also hold the sights and sounds of our own lives - vacations, children at play and memories.

We saw sights and heard sounds we would have never heard otherwise. Our lives were shaped by these images. Think about it: What are some of the most vivid memories of your childhood? Aren't many of them from the movies you saw, if you are older, or from the TV series you sang along with or laughed at were moved by?

And the appeal is universal. ``I Love Lucy,'' ``Zorro,'' ``Baywatch,'' ``Seinfeld,'' ``Beverly Hills 90210,'' ``Titanic'' and the ``Terminator'' assortment and Westerns are big in Russia, Japan and Zimbabwe.

Our lives and this century would have been very different if Auguste and Louis Lumiere had not fooled around with that rough wooden box with a lens on one end.

The other reason for my nomination is, I believe, even more important. It has to do with the world that was, in a sense, created by movies. In his book, ``An Empire of Their Own - How the Jews Invented Hollywood,'' Neal Gabler makes the point that much of what we now see as American values was created by Jewish immigrants who built the movie studios.

They had to confront a racist America, where ethnicity and family name mattered a great deal, where money counted more than morality and conscience, where the metaphoric Cossacks could come out of the mist to attack the weak and the helpless.

The movies preached a different message. They aspired to an ideal world of equality and opportunity for all, regardless of race or origin, where the good usually triumphed and the bad won temporarily, if at all.

They showed a world in which the poorest were not locked into the status they were born into and could hope for a better life, in which all expected that children would live better than their parents. And they showed, for all to see, a life of an ideal America that mostly existed only on the silver screen.

America adopted these images and forgot that the real world and the recent past had not been at all like it. The rest of the world saw them, too, and the people wanted some of that ideal. And so, the revolution of greater expectations took place, and the world became more like America because the people wanted it to be.

I believe that this is good. I have lived elsewhere. I know that, compared with life elsewhere, life here is better for women and men, for African-Americans, for the handicapped, for Latinos, for Jews, for gays, for everyone.

If it weren't for the brothers Lumiere, people in American and elsewhere wouldn't know that this kind of life is possible. After all, our ancestors didn't miss air-conditioning, indoor plumbing or air travel. They couldn't conceive of them. They didn't know that such things could exist.

It was the movies that showed the world that there was a better life, and it could be achieved. And the world reacted and changed.

It is for this that I nominate the brothers Lumiere for the title of Men of the Century.