Film Theory: kingdom of the shadows.

Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies

The Lumiere Cinematograph

Maxim Gorky

Source: Translated by Richard Taylor, in Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, eds, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988, pp. 25-26. (Originally published as ‘I. M. Pacatus’, ‘Beglye zametki. Sinematograf Lyum’era’, Nizhegorodskii Listok, 4 July 1896)

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Yesterday I was in the kingdom of the shadows.

If only you knew how strange it is to be there. There are no sounds, no colours. There, everything – the earth, the trees, the people, the water, the air – is tinted in a grey monotone: in a grey sky there are grey rays of sunlight; in grey faces, grey eyes, and the leaves of the trees are grey like ashes. This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement.

I must explain, lest I be suspected of symbolism or madness. I was at Aumont’s café and I was watching the Lumieres’ cinematograph – moving photographs. The impression it produced was so unusually, so original and complex, that I can hardly convey it in all its nuances, but I can attempt to convey its essence.

When the lights go out in the room in which the Lumieres’ invention is being shown, a large grey picture suddenly appears on the screen: it is ‘A Paris Street’, the shadow of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all of them frozen into immobility. All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey. You do not expect anything new in this all too familiar scene because you have seen pictures of Paris streets many times. But suddenly a strange flicker passes across the screen and the picture comes to life. Carriages come from the back of the picture towards you, straight towards you, into the darkness where you are sitting. From somewhere in the distance people appear, looming larger as they approach you. In the foreground there are children playing with a dog, cyclists rushing around and pedestrians crossing the street, picking their way among the carriage. It is all moving, all alive, all speeding about. It all moves into the foreground and then disappears somewhere.

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All this happens in a strange silence in which you cannot hear the rumble of wheels, the sound of footsteps or of speech. There is nothing: not a single note of the intricate symphony that usually accompanies people’s movements. Slightly the ash-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind and the grey silhouettes of the people glide silently along the grey ground as if condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all life’s colours.

Their smiles are lifeless, although their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is silent, although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life surges, a life devoid of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours, a grey, silent, bleak and dismal life.

It is terrifying to watch but it is the movement of shadows, mere shadows. Curses and ghosts, evil spirits that have cast whole cities into eternal sleep come to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick is being played out before you. It is as if he had cast a spell over the entire street, compressing its multi-storied buildings from their roof-tops to their foundations to minute size. He has compressed the people to correspond, depriving them of the power of speech and merging all the colors of the earth and the sky into a monotonous grey.

In this disguise he has pushed his grotesque creation into a niche in the dark room of a restaurant. Suddenly there is a click, everything vanishes and a railway train appears on the screen. It darts like an arrow straight towards you – watch out! It seems as though it is about to rush into the darkness where you are sitting and reduce you to a mangled sack of skin, full of crumpled flesh and splintered bones, and destroy this hall and this building, so full of wine, women, music and vice, and transform it into fragments and into dust.

But this too, is merely a train of shadows.