A train from hell and the culture of brothels: What Gorky saw at the cinema

Abstract

The article examines two pieces of journalism by Maxim Gorky published in early July 1896, where the aspiring writer shared his impressions of a visit to one of the first film showings in Russia. These texts are an important source for studying viewers' reception of early cinema, in particular due to their description of the Lumière brothers' film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station as “horrifying”. At the same time, the author addressed wider social and cultural issues, and it is the non-cinematic context of Gorky's writings on cinema that the present article focuses on. The first section analyzes the connotations of Gorky's references to the cinema as “the kingdom of shadows”. Towards the latter half of the 19th century it became habitual in European literatures and visual arts to depict the life of the lower classes as the world of “shadows” or “spectres”. In his other writings, Gorky openly expressed his dissatisfaction with this representational cliché, and his articles on cinema can be viewed as a further exploration of this theme, drawing attention to the viewer's position with regard to the shadowy spectacle of poverty and privation. The image of the (cinema) audience pictured by Gorky is examined in more detail in the second section of the article. Gorky's texts on cinema are analysed as an episode in the history of images which illustrates the mutual influence of the visual and the verbal.