One of my Favorite Movies is 30 Seconds Long

Happy accidents from 1895

One of my favorite films is only 30 seconds long. No one would describe it as particularly exciting, but I love it nevertheless. There’s no plot to speak of, no payoff or grand meaning. No “point” at all, as my former students would sometimes complain.

The film in question is one of ten shorts that were on the program of the first ever public film screening, in Paris, 1895. Produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière, these films are like tiny little documentaries, capturing life as it unfolds. But even that notion can be misleading, as the brothers weren’t shy about staging quasi-real happenings for the camera.¹

Beyond marking a historic first, this particular screening birthed the apocryphal story that on that evening the paying crowd mistook the image of a moving train on screen for a real one and ducked for cover as it barreled toward them.² This same story is recounted in Martin Scorsese’s delightful paen to proto-cinema, Hugo (2011):

But the film from that collection that most stirs me is far less exciting than speeding trains — though it might be more inherently cinematic. Repas de bébé, often translated as Baby’s Lunch or Baby’s Dinner, depicts Auguste Lumière sharing a meal with his wife and their son on a patio. There’s no conflict, no stakes. It’s just a little home movie, in essence.

Riveting stuff, right?

I’ve screened this tiny film dozens upon dozens of times for my Film History students. I selected it initially as a representative example of the Lumières’ reality-focused approach to contrast with the whimsical flights of fancy of their contemporary, Georges Méliès, the subject of the aforementioned Scorsese film.

My students tended to regard this film as a historical curiosity, an artefact of a medium that had yet to find its more plot-centric self. This is no doubt why students often groaned when I assigned for homework that they watch it at least three more times in preparation for a one-question quiz on the film for the next class.

That question: How many people appear in Baby’s Lunch?

Easy enough, right? Husband and wife and baby makes three. Not quite. Teaching this film so many times, I had begun to take note of the margins of the frame, where I one day happened to notice something I had never seen before: the presence of a fourth person.

Go ‘head. Watch it again. I’ll wait.

Did you see it? If you train your eye just over the woman’s right shoulder as she fills her cup, around the 8-sec. mark, you will ever so briefly see a the head of a man walking on the path in the background, from screen-right to -left, before disappearing behind the wall.

Don’t feel bad if you missed it. I’ve asked dozens of peers and colleagues who, like me, have seen this movie countless times if they’d ever noticed the man in the background, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone else who had. Nor have I seen him noted in any of the scholarly literature on early cinema generally and the Lumière Brothers particularly.

This isn’t to suggest that I have some superior eye, mind you. I’m sure you’ve found such details in other works that I’ve failed to notice, too. What I’m hoping to accomplish is to flag a certain kind of cinematic pleasure that is located outside the standard focus of plot and performance. I know it sounds ridiculous to say this, but when I watch Baby’s Lunch, I get such a thrill out of seeing the man pop into and out of view. There among the banal nothingness of this movie is the suggestion of something else, of life within and beyond the edges of the frame.

I also delighted in my students’ reactions to this discovery. When I directed them where to look, some instantly saw him while others did not, even after two or three repeat viewings. Some even accused me of gaslighting them, so fleeting is this moment with Person #4. I recall one young woman who likened Baby’s Lunch to “The Dress” imbroglio of 2015, that is, as an object that makes one doubt their own perception in light of others’.

Another student described the man in the background as an “Easter egg.” Sure it’s something for sharp eyes to detect, but an Easter egg is by definition placed within a shot for the hopes of it being found. In the case of Baby’s Lunch, I suspect the filmmakers had no intention of including this man — likely a stranger — in their little motion picture. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if they, too, had never noticed him at all — in a film of their own making!

The split-second appearance of this unknown man in a 30-sec. home movie from 1895 became for me on object lesson in realist film theory. The camera, the thinking goes, is a mechanical device that captures whatever transpires before it indiscriminately, whereas a painter, as a counterexample, must look at the world, interpret it, and translate it to the canvas. While there might exist errant strokes or flaws in the resulting painting, every thing visible is there as a result of the artist’s efforts.

But as the German critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer once put it, cinema has an inherent “affinity for the contingent,” an intimate relation with the accidental and happenstance. No matter the filmmaker’s aims for a shot or a scene, there is always the possibility of something more than she intended in the final product. No matter how tightly a filmmaker seeks to control for every variable, there will also be something stray, something possible but not likely, that makes its way to the film strip.

So while initial and subsequent audiences may have failed to see Person #4 in Baby’s Lunch, many did notice the other bits of excess reality. Consulting newspaper stories from that 1895 screening, one historian notes that reporters “made repeated reference to incidental details like smoke, waves and, especially, ‘the trembling of the leaves through the action of the wind.’”³ It should be noted, these are all details that in a other arts like theatre would only be incorporated into the fold if they served the plot or contributed to the work’s verisimilitude. Intentional, still.

Baby’s Lunch is as simple as it gets — what could be more humdrum? —, but it’s absolutely flush with perceptual detail. We can’t see the wind, but we can see the effect of it: how it makes the trees in the middle- and background flutter, how when it gusts it throws the child’s bib into his face and tousles the mother’s hair.⁴

It’s not just in proto-cinematic home movies either. I recently discovered a YouTube video in which a viewer spots something unusual and accidental in big-budget blockbuster Jaws (1975):

Moments such as these can activate the viewer’s latent, more forensic eye to scan the margins and note the details, to see the full richness not just of cinema but of life generally. I love Baby’s Lunch because it reminds me just how much the movies have to offer us, even in their margins, where the insignificant can be nonetheless delightful.

What about you? Do you have any little filmic details that stand out, that you wait for when re-watching a film?

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Postscript

Were I still teaching film history, I would almost certainly pair Baby’s Lunch with Jacob LaMendola’s fascinating short documentary Long Shot (2017). It follows an innocent man accused of murder as his attorney makes a last-ditch effort to corroborate his client’s alibi of being at a baseball at the time of the murder by scanning raw footage from the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was shooting on location in that stadium that same night.

The marginal detail, indeed.

Long Shot is streaming on Netflix. It’s only 40 minutes long and totally worth your time.

1. Movie exhibition existed before the Lumiere Brothers in the form of nickelodeons. The brothers’ key innovation was that their camera doubled as a projector, making whole-room viewing possible.

2. Check out Tom Gunning’s brilliant history on early film spectators, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment.”

3. See Nico Baumbach, “Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema.”

4. Keathley argues persuasively that cinephilia (“love of cinema”) is the result of a fetishization of marginal cinematic detail. See his 2005 book Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees.