A team of perhaps twenty horses pull a truck with boxes in it in this Lumiere short from 1897.
The Lumieres were beginning to produce pieces set in distant lands, some spectacularly far away in Egypt and Palestine. However, they were still filling in their catalogue with views like this, which the ordinary members of their audience might see on the street. What was the fascination? To the modern eye, when a large team of horses is just as exotic as Jerusalem in antique ruins, both become studies in composition and movement. The Lumieres understood composition as did none of the other early workers in motion pictures -- they came out of photography, not out of stage magicianry or technology. They also had an understanding of motion and its psychology that their contemporaries lacked. They could show several different sorts of movement engagingly: concurrently, as in "Laveuses sur la Rivière" or consecutively, as they did here.
There is a peculiar sense of tension as one set of objects gives way to another: the pairs of harnessed draft horses, rank after rank, repeated almost cyclically and seemingly endlessly, until they are replaced by the wagon, which rolls on, leaving an almost empty street, with people walking around at random, order replaced by chaos.
To the modern audience this may seem as much a commonplace as horses pulling wains struck the audience in 1897. However, reduced to its basic cinematic value and for the first time, it is another of the debts we owe to people from the century before the last one.
The Lumieres were beginning to produce pieces set in distant lands, some spectacularly far away in Egypt and Palestine. However, they were still filling in their catalogue with views like this, which the ordinary members of their audience might see on the street. What was the fascination? To the modern eye, when a large team of horses is just as exotic as Jerusalem in antique ruins, both become studies in composition and movement. The Lumieres understood composition as did none of the other early workers in motion pictures -- they came out of photography, not out of stage magicianry or technology. They also had an understanding of motion and its psychology that their contemporaries lacked. They could show several different sorts of movement engagingly: concurrently, as in "Laveuses sur la Rivière" or consecutively, as they did here.
There is a peculiar sense of tension as one set of objects gives way to another: the pairs of harnessed draft horses, rank after rank, repeated almost cyclically and seemingly endlessly, until they are replaced by the wagon, which rolls on, leaving an almost empty street, with people walking around at random, order replaced by chaos.
To the modern audience this may seem as much a commonplace as horses pulling wains struck the audience in 1897. However, reduced to its basic cinematic value and for the first time, it is another of the debts we owe to people from the century before the last one.
