Number of user reviews: 18
User score: 6.2
The IMDB Canon has thus far consisted of back-room experiments, private curiosities; in the early 1890s, the only people who were aware of film at all were those directly involved in their production or had connections to the people making them. The glamour of stars, the wonders of special effects, the phantasmagoria of the darkened movie theatre; none of these things yet existed, and so, the layman had little reason to pay attention to what was then an unproven technology. All of that changes in 1893. After a few years' worth of research, development, and experimentation, Edison felt that film was ready for the masses, and he was right. 1893 is therefore the last year of its kind, the last year before the medium would flourish and the beginnings of what we now call the film industry emerge. And what was the subject matter deemed most appropriate for the medium's public debut? Manual labor. The picture drawn by Blacksmith Scene is not a promise of escapism, not a glossy world of intrigue and melodrama, but one of sweat, toil, and hard work. For all that film is associated with the Hollywood mode of production, in which film serves as an "apolitical" (scare quotes most definitely intended) distraction from the dingy world of work and stress, Blacksmith Scene presents an entirely opposite vision. Where the film industry would evolve into a rejection of reality, Blacksmith Scene is a reminder of it, for it depicts a world in which there is nothing but labor, in which life is simply the medium through which people do work. The characters--and Blacksmith Scene is generally considered the first film with characters, though earlier entries in this project indicate it's not quite that simple--are not narcissistic wish-fulfilling supermen onto which the audience projects themselves, but precisely the opposite, characters that prompt an audience to think, "I'm glad I don't have to do that for a living."
And they didn't; not quite as shown in the film, anyway, as Blacksmith Scene is not a depiction of what blacksmithing was actually like in the 1890s, but instead a look back on what were, even then, the "old days". Blacksmith Scene is the first period piece on film, a pretense of historicity that, as with all depictions of the past, has ideological ramifications. The film signifies the past through its depiction of social relations; this is a workplace more communal, less rigid than the industrialized factories of the Second Industrial Revolution. It is a time when workers are united in the common pain and exhaustion of the forge, with alcohol the only medicine able to numb the gruelling drudgery of their lives. The film hearkens to a world in which the separation between "work" and "life" was not yet clearly defined, and yet, despite their blase (or perhaps naive?) acceptance of the centrality of work to existence, there is nevertheless a sense that the workers seen here are aware of themselves as a collectivity (e.g., the sharing of the bottle.) This obviously had currency for an audience that was observing daily the agitations of the burgeoning labor movement (at this time, making such ridiculous demands as a 12-hour workday), but I feel there is even more at work here (pun intended.) As with Eadweard Muybridge's experiments, there is a techno-utopian promise within Blacksmith Scene, though in a different way. Both Sallie Gardner and Buffalo Running promised to tame the natural world by making the invisible subtleties of movements visible and thus accessible to human perception, implying that the same technique could be used on virtually anything else that moved, that film could empower human beings far beyond their natural capabilities. But Blacksmith Scene, in contrast, anchors itself in the past so that the present is its own future. It presents an older, even more difficult mode of work, one that an audience is glad to escape, even when they have not escaped at all. For the past is never really past; its bleeds into the present, shapes it, determines it. The only way to steer the present into the future is to learn the past, its trends, its paths, and consciously change them. Blacksmith Scene is the first film that encourages consciousness of the past, and so, if not exactly a socialist manifesto, at least suggests the possibility of film as a tool for change. In that sense, Blacksmith Scene demonstrates an ideological duality; while it can be viewed retrospectively as smug presentism--i.e., "look how far we've come!"--that message is accompanied by a Newtonian counter-impulse, one that asks, "How far is there left to go?" And the answer is, even 124 years on, "a long way yet."
Other connections: Contrary to my claim in an earlier post that Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory was the first commercially-released film, Blacksmith Scene seems to have preceded it by a year, being first shown for paid admission in April 1894, alongside a few other early films from the Edison lab. That's what I get for falling back on received wisdom. Also, despite my perception of the workers in the film all being wizened veterans, one of the actors, Charles Kayser, was only 15 years old, and lived until 1966.
Other most-voted films of 1893: IMDB lists just one other title for 1893, that being Horse Shoeing by William K. Dickson, with 36 votes. This will never happen again.
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