Demolition of a wall
| 1900 | France | 2’
About the film
Four or five men wield pickaxes and other tools to demolish a wall, which eventually collapses. Yet just as the workers seem poised to pause from their labor, the wall is miraculously reconstituted. By the conclusion of the film, it has returned to precisely the position in which it first appeared.
This work by the Lumière brothers stands as a canonical example from the period, composed in a single take that captures the dynamism of everyday life. At the same time, it departs from the majority of the Lumières’ productions by explicitly engaging with the manipulation of temporality, presenting an event both in forward motion and in reverse. In 1896, this effect was achieved by cranking the cinematograph forward until the reel reached its end, and then reversing the mechanism while projection continued, thereby producing the illusion of temporal reversal.
