In these frenetic days, in which so much stuff, and so much more unsavoury stuff, is endlessly being thrown around, The New York Times has resorted to viral videos and the nostalgia of the urban snowball fight of yore. Not exactly today’s weapon of choice on the streets of Lyon or anywhere else I would suggest. So were my first thoughts…
But, the author of the article, Sam Anderson, manages to retrieve his piece from my harsh verdict; both with some very nice observations and imagined narrative of the content, but more importantly with his reflections on our complicated relationship with the past and our exaggerated sense of the importance and uniqueness of our present.
…On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. […]They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.
[…] to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. […] We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. The current moment will melt away like snow crust on a moustache…
Sam Anderson, in “The New York Times Magazine“, Nov. 5 2020
The original black and white version included in the Lumière catalogue can be found here. On a technical level, the colorisation and a smoothing process makes the participants, indeed, look more like us – which of course they really did. This was something I actually thought about quite a lot a couple of years ago on seeing some excerpts from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary film he made in remembrance of the end of the First World War, and in which he took archive footage from the time and, with all the technical wizardry available to him, transformed the subjects from blurred images of long ago to (mostly) young men who one may very well come across today – on the bus, at the pub or football, or most anywhere. I remember thinking, irrespective of the objections raised by purists, the familiar visages that were exposed with such technical finesse do create a powerful bridge between all the years of the century passed. Again – they were just like us! Beyond that of community and comradeship, there is little comparison between the respective fights on the winter streets of Lyon and on the fields and in the trenches of the Somme, but what they do share, are the threads of time that bind each inextricably with our present and all the presents to come.