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User score: 6.9
Here it is, one of top contenders for being the canonical "first movie ever", the grand debut of the wildly successful Cinematographe that would soon make film into a lucrative business. As Edison did two years earlier across the Atlantic, the Lumiere brothers decided that low-born laborers were the ideal image to be reflected back onto a public audience. Yet, despite this similarity, Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory feels even more radical, more daring. I believe this difference to be due to the Lumieres' disposal of artifice: where Blacksmith Scene featured actors pretending to be workers, Employees features actual workers--and female workers, at that!--who ostensibly have no foreknowledge of being recorded. This is about as far away from "the movies" as this project will come, their reactions to the camera indicating their utter lack of planning, or even consent to be filmed (another first for cinema: enforced method acting.) The Lumieres had every intention of capturing "real life" exactly as it was, hence their coinage of the term "actualité" to describe films such as this (though, the existence of multiple versions of the film call into question just how "real" it actually is--were there multiple takes, or did the Lumieres film them on separate days, or what?)
There are two opposing interpretations of the Lumieres' focus on the working class, and its consequences for the development of film. The first is to interpret Employees as the birth of social realism in film, a method for increasing class consciousness and effecting action by utilizing film's power to enlargen, embolden, and perspectivize the social relations underpinning everyday life. See how the workers are eager to leave the frame, is this the leisurely stroll of a bougie bureaucrat? No! Who could think that walking speed could signal a group's socioeconomic status so well? What a showcase of industrial capitalism, and its acceleration of workers' lives, its ever-escalating demand to speed up, speed up, speed up! Faster! Faster! Not fast enough! FASTER! No longer does an audience have to actually work at a factory to see its influence on workers' behavior; film promises to transport them there, to shove the reality in their face. When the masses receive a proper education on the plight of the factory slave, change is inevitable, revolution a step away! Or so goes that line of thinking (note my indication of irony through the use of exclamation marks--a troublesome association of excitement with naivete, as if stone-faced cynicism is somehow wiser--but that could fill another post by itself.) The converse argument, though, sees the technological power of the new medium lying not with the workers, but with the owners and their middle-class collaborators, who pay admission to peep into the lives of the poor from the safety of a comfy theatre. This phenomenon would be known later as "class tourism", that exploitative, voyeuristic behavior whereby the bourgeoisie simulate the travails of the hungry and destitute, perhaps spurring them to guilt, but never to action. Such often accompanied by appreciation of the "aesthetic" or some other mystification, which is used to distract from the work's social import.
Some call Employees the first documentary film, but I object to this label, if only because it is so much more of a document than later films in that genre (cf. "reality shows".) There is no narration here, no editing, no cuts, no text, no interviews; the director truly attains a near-invisibility here, his only intervention being to point the camera at a particular location and record it exactly as it happens. This rawness is the source of the film's aforementioned dilemma, wherein it can be viewed as either revolutionary or conservative. This is a tension that will not be resolved anytime soon, or ever. The debate over the proper purpose of film--i.e., whether its purpose is to allow flights of fancy or to inspire change in the world--is one that I previously discussed in Vol. 1, for Passage de Venus, but feels much more potent here. Perhaps it is the multitude of people present--this is a real sense of a class acting collectively, not even comfortably in the past (i.e., Blacksmith Scene), but in the here and now, and in far greater numbers than in previous films. It is a sharp reminder that these are all real people, with their own hopes, obligations, and dreams, too busy living their lives to worry about some guy shooting a film. It is both unsettling and empowering to know both that there are others in the world, and that one is indebted to them. While they work (and this is a present tense for as long as the film exists), I sit here and write a blog post, recording my thoughts for (almost) no one but myself. But this nagging feeling of unfulfilled obligation need not be a call to arms. Viewing the Lumiere brothers need not lead to mass strikes. But that is a response to a strawman; my actual argument is less radical. I argue that if one does not want to don a rhetorical hairshirt and acknowledge the selfishness of most film viewing--after all, no revolution was ever started by sitting on one's ass and watching a movie--then one should at least be aware of the ideological work being done through one's consumption, to at least make that consumption active and critical.
Other connections: Although often called the first commercially-released film, Edison had actually already screened Blacksmith Scene and a few others films in 1894 for a fee. However, the Lumieres' films marked the first time that films were projected onto a wall, rather than viewed through a peephole, and so invented the techno-economical model upon which the film industry would operate.
Other most-voted titles of 1895:
2. Tables Turned on the Gardener (Louis Lumiere | 3,096 votes)
3. Baby's Dinner (Louis Lumiere | 2,051 votes)
4. Annabelle Serpentine Dance (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 1,402 votes)
5. The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Alfred Clark | 1,259 votes)
6. The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon (Louis Lumiere | 1,091 votes)
7. Barque sortant du port (Louis Lumiere | 776 votes)
8. Transformation by Hats (Louis Lumiere | 769 votes)
9. The Sea (Louis Lumiere | 741 votes)
10. Cordeliers' Square in Lyon (Louis Lumiere | 617 votes)
116 titles listed for the year altogether.
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