This is a wonderful short depicting a snowfight on the streets of a French town. Two of the great masterpieces of European cinema - 'Les Enfants Terribles' and 'Amarcord' - have crucial scenes involving snowfights: this is the source of such a resonant set-up. This is arguably the first film to actually utilise the properties of monochrome, the brilliant white contrasting with the black chaos it contains.
Although the film seems to embody a kind of anarchy, where all distinctions - class, age, gender etc. - dissolve in an egalitarian melee. 'Bataille', as with so many of the Lumieres' films is essentially conservative. Overlooking this alarmingly fluid mass are the fixed realities of place, home, property, and the bare trees, suggesting the inexorable order of nature and society.
The snowfight, therefore, is not an overthrowing of the old repressive social order, but an example of what Bakhtin called the 'carnivalesque', one of those occasions set aside by societies (eg festivals, parades etc.) where the norm is overthown, where the peasant becomes king and vice versa; where there is a break from the norm, a playing at difference of status, before returning to the old routine and social relations. This is visualised in the fixed gaze of the camera, which keeps whole all the fragmentation it observes. Beautiful.
