A Jolt of Pure Joy!
Look at this – a film of a snowball fight shot in 1897 in Lyon by the Lumière brothers…
The Lumière brothers are considered to be pioneers in film. This one spans less than a minute, but it’s a tempest of cultural anthropology, giving the viewer an insight into the French that one wouldn’t get from sitting at a Paris cafe.
Here is the text that accompanies the clip, written beautifully by Sam Anderson:
“If you watch the snowball fight over and over, as I will do for the rest of my life, certain characters begin to stand out.
“Down in the bottom-left corner, a thick man with a strong black mustache fires a cheap shot: a wild fastball, from point-blank range, that barely misses its intended target, a slim man who is busy looking the other way. The slim man turns, cocks his left arm, and wallops the big man on his thigh.
“From that point forward, these two are locked in savage, jolly combat. They reload and pelt each other multiple times, until finally – overtaken, perhaps, by the homosocial energy crackling between them – the big man staggers forward and lunges to tackle the slim man like a bear attacking a deer. But once again he misses: The slim man sidesteps and, grinning, shoves the big man into the snow. The big man pops back up, like a mustachioed snow-zombie, and starts pelting the slim man again from behind.”
Anderson’s favorite character, whom he calls the “protagonist,” is the man in in the bowler hat and long coat.
“He looks as if he has just stepped out of a bank meeting, and yet he abandons himself to this childish street warfare with eager glee.
“While the other fighters stand more or less rooted in place, the man in the bowler covers a surprising amount of ground – he is a free agent, prancing around with lumbering lightness, entering and exiting clusters of people, galloping across the road, following his bliss, attacking willy-nilly with a funky sidearm toss. He seems to take as many shots as he gives, and by the end of the film his black coat is thoroughly dusted with white; you can see the snowballs’ impact blasts as clearly as bullet holes.
“And then there is the bicycle. This is the peak moment of brutality, when the whole group loses its collective goddamn mind. Right from the start, you can see the cyclist coming: a small figure, growing larger every second, gliding smoothly on an angle toward the fray. Before he even reaches the crowd, he starts to take distant fire. And yet he is determined to ride on. When he arrives, all the warring factions turn to unite against him, unleashing a wickedly targeted cyclone. The cyclist takes hard shots to the arm, the face, the back, the neck. Still he pedals forward, hunching his back, spinning his long legs – a stoic hero, intent on gliding through the violence, determined to reach the safety of the other side.
“His legs fly up in the air; his hat lands upside down in the snow. Before he can even get up, the cyclist is pelted again, and someone tries to steal his bike – but the cyclist stands and rips it away, then hops back on, abandoning his hat, retreating, pedaling off the way he came, taking powdery sniper fire as he goes. It is an object lesson in futility, in noble intentions thwarted – one man’s vision destroyed by the sudden madness of a crowd.
“Off in the middle distance, two men stand near a street lamp, watching the mayhem, never moving, like Beckett characters, thinking who knows what.
“On an intellectual level,” Anderson says, “we all understand that historical people were basically just like us…. They lived, as we do, in the throbbing nerve-pocket of the now. They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.”
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