How It Feels to Be Run Over: Early Film Accidents

In "The Essence of Laughter," Charles Baudelaire asks why we burst out laughing when witnessing another's physical accidents, such as the "sight of a man falling on the ice or in the street."¹ The poet speculates that such laughter—"an involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze"—is produced by the collision between competing senses of "infinite grandeur" and "infinite misery"; an "unconscious pride" born of a sense of superiority, as well as a fundamental insecurity regarding our frailty and exposure to forces beyond our grasp and control.² The laughing spectator's haughty proclamation "Look at me! I am not falling!" is haunted by the thoughts for the moment or this time.³ Baudelaire qualifies his hypothesis by noting: "The man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired, by habit, the power of rapid self-division and thus of witnessing the phenomena of his own ego as a disinterested spectator."⁴ The essence of Baudelaire's laughing philosopher—the acquired ability to perform a rapid and mirthful auto-analysis, to face the self as other in a split second, and to think the unsublimated copresence of contradictory forces and ideas—is distilled by spectacular scenes of an unexpected fall and falling apart occasioned by the accident.

Avital Ronell's compact reading of Baudelaire's essay cites the ability to laugh at oneself accidentally falling as the constitutive moment of philosophical consciousness. Observing that the ironic dislocation of the falling philosopher shuttles between primal scene and curtain call, Ronell writes, "The moment savagely accelerates the history of the self and its fall: to laugh at oneself is to laugh at oneself dying from an improbable position or on the other side of a life that has disjoined by dint of the sudden slip in consciousness."⁵ The Baudelairean philosophical disposition that Ronell situates "on the other side of a life" suggests an epistemology of the accident (and the lines of theoretical thinking it inspires) characterized by an improbable experience one might also call spectral or, four decades after Baudelaire's essay, filmic.⁶

The proliferation of motion pictures and the technologies of early film presented both a discursive antidote (an antiphilosophy) and amplification (a potential for mass reproduction) to this Baudelairean philosophical disposition.⁷ Early demonstrations of the kinetoscope, the phonoscope, and cinematograph—featuring moving images of people sneezing, kissing, eating, proclaiming je vous aime, leaving work, and doing serpentine dances—inspired a flurry of enthusiastic descriptions of the essence of this new invention as constituted by its capacity to capture the accidental and by its death-defying effects.⁸ The Belgian writer and poet Théo Hannon, writing in the 13 November 1895 issue of La Chronique (Brussels) as Hannonyme, defined the cinematograph through its uncanny, democratizing power to archive and immortalize anybody and everybody:

Beings we have known and loved, who, according to the routine civil state, are no longer of this world never-the-less act, look at us, talk to us and by a miracle, an authentic one, relive a short instant of their past. . . . [T]he genius of man will do what the vital force was impotent to do: we will relive the entirety of our acts, our words. And even stranger, we will appear to ourselves.⁹

Echoing Hannonyme, a review for the first public Lumière screenings in Paris, published in the 30 December 1895 edition of La Poste, rhapsodized that with the widespread dissemination of this invention "death will have ceased to be absolute."¹⁰ This recurrent trope indexed a technologically mediated loosening—or, as Louis Georges Schwartz compellingly argues, a transvaluation¹¹—of the distinct ontological limits between life and death, presence and absence, substance and ethereality. The "energetic denial of the power of death"¹² lodged in these impressions of ontological security promised by film's ability to archive passages of time, however, relied upon the fiction of an essential stability undermined by the everyday reality of early film, which was punctuated by...