Number of user reviews: 6
User score: 6.7
The Lumieres return again, but unlike in The Arrival of a Train, Bataille de neige focuses on the actions of humans, rather than machines. The film still contains signs of industrial urbanity--the snowball fight clearly takes place on a city street--but this is not the picture of order and power that The Arrival was. On the contrary, Bataille de neige is a Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a breakdown of social class and propriety, and a chaotic and spontaneous revolution against urban technocracy. Note the lack of contemporary technology in the film; the one reminder of modern machinery is the cyclist, who is quickly pelted and thrown to the ground. This is not a space in which humans submit to the implacable trundle of industrial innovation; no, this space is a return to the basic, the primitive, even the savage; there is nothing here but bare hands in snow, flinging the snow at each other in a blatantly, or should I say, defiantly unproductive fashion.
Yet, the Lumieres' vision of mass rebellion is reactionary. The action of the collective is ineffectual, mutually hostile, and violent; as soon as the old hierarchy is overthrown, chaos reigns. This is not a world in which the spontaneous action of the proletariat (or even the petit-bourgeoisie) will ever lead to anything but senseless slaughter and mayhem. These workers need to keep being cogs in the industrial machine, you see, or else they would be lazy or criminal or both. The only factor stopping Bataille de neige from being a factory-owner's nightmare is the weapon of choice used, that being snow. And what better way is there to show the uselessness of protest than to demonstrate that, even when given the chance to rise up against their masters, the protesters choose a mildly-discomforting ball of slush as their means of attack? This is not revolution so much as bacchanalia (not that a nineteenth-century conservative would see any difference); furthermore, its "spontaneity" is a complete illusion. The snowball fight is, of course, staged, and this artificiality only highlights its Bakhtinian hue--for carnivalesque is always contained chaos, rebellion permitted within a particular time and space, thereby neutering its ability to threaten the established order. And this is the paradox behind any "anarchic" film, for as soon as anarchy is scripted, it is no longer anarchy; it is instead a bounded aesthetic using the dead signifiers of counterculture, a contradiction along the lines of "pop punk" (granted, punk has always been pop) and Che shirts from Walmart.
It would be easy to label such recuperation as a feature of capitalism, but this would be misleading, as Bakhtin originally applied his ideas specifically to medieval carnival, wherein serfs would be granted a few days a year for drinking and whoring before returning to the back-breaking grind of feudal farming. Bataille de neige should thus be viewed as a symptom of power. It is a common misconception to think that, as state power grows, individual freedom of expression shrinks. In reality, power works in exactly the opposite way: the more power a state has over its subjects, the more freedom it gives those subjects to express themselves. Hence why every authoritarian loves social Darwinism, and hence Nietzsche's appropriation by fascists. This dynamic is, of course, closely linked to the development of technology; observe the parallel course of Moore's law, wherein the number of transistors on a chip (and thus computing power) doubles every 18 months, and Zimmerman's law, in which the government's power to spy on its citizenry also doubles every 18 months. We are freer now than ever to entertain ourselves, freer than ever to shun reality in favor of a comfortable cocoon of fantasy, mediated via the various screens that many of us now spend most of our lives looking at. Likewise, it is easier than ever to express one's self; you could, for example, start your own blog (for free!), or your own Youtube channel (for free!), and be instantly accessible to people around the world. And while these services are, indeed, "free", in the sense that you don't have to pay money for them, they are very costly in another sense, i that they involve the complete surrender of privacy to whichever organization hosts them, and exposure to surveillance by whoever wants to mine data from them. I do not know what the end result of this escalating freedom-surveillance dialectic will be, but I do know where its starting point on film was: the Lumiere brothers, and their successful synthesis of spontaneity, their incorporation of anarchy into order, their transformation of political upheaval into depoliticized aesthetic.
Other connections: Since this film is considerably less famous than the previous two Lumiere films in this project, there aren't any good anecdotes relating to it. Also, the performers' identities appear to be unknown.
Other most-voted titles of 1897:
2. Seminary Girls (James H. White | 623 votes)
3. Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Alexandre Promio | 520 votes)
4. Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (James H. White | 472 votes)
5. The Bewitched Inn (Georges Melies | 453 votes)
6. Admiral Cigarette (William Heise | 358 votes)
7. The Miller and Chimney Sweep (George Albert Smith | 345 votes)
8. Chicago Police Parade (Alexandre Promio | 336 votes)
9. Niagara Falls (303 votes)
10. Partie de cartes (Leopoldo Fregoli | 299 votes)
IMDB lists 1,327 titles for the year altogether.
No comments:
Post a Comment