Century Film Project

One hundred twenty five years ago, a curious cross-cultural display was captured by one of the cameramen sent out by the Lumière brothers to capture interesting sights and sounds on their new motion picture camera, for display to curious audiences. This little snippet of film suggests much more to us today than what it shows, but it is a great historical snapshot nonetheless.

A stationary camera looks across a busy corner toward a store front marked “The Divan.” The words “des fees” are beneath. The street is crowded, with people walking in both directions, and a number of people in European garb (Genevans, presumably) line the sides of the street, looking at the passersby. In the foreground, a party of people in robes, fezzes, and other traditional “Arab” clothing parade by. Some of them are playing drums, horns and other instruments. In the background, you can see people walking in the other direction, and if you pay attention, you notice that there are Black people mixed with white. There is a brief lull in which several Swiss men in straw hats and large mustaches stare at the camera, and then a group of native-garbed Africans come past from the other direction. A woman in European clothing pulls a small child past them. Suddenly, the “staged” part of the movie evidently over, the street is filled with white people in European clothing.

As an early film, this would have held much interest for the European audiences it targeted – the scene would be “exotic” and probably was accompanied by a short narration explaining the presence of these foreign people in the city of Geneva, and noting their “otherness” to the crowd. While Switzerland was a less multi-cultural society in the Nineteenth Century than it is today, the presence of the International Red Cross there, and the historical development of the Geneva Conventions, meant that it was a place where many diplomatic missions from around the world would converge. This scene doesn’t seem to represent a random sampling of foreigners walking down a Geneva street, however, it seems staged. Particularly the presence of the musicians in the original party of Arabs seems to suggest a deliberate spectacle, possibly in connection with an international event like a World’s Fair, or possibly the director, Alexandre Promio, set the whole thing up somehow. For us today, simply seeing the street of a European city from 1896 is exotic, with or without the presence of non-Europeans.

Director: Alexandre Promio

Camera: Alexandre Promio

Starring: Unknown

Run Time: 40 Secs

You can watch it for free: here.