Comment les pauvres mangent à Paris
R: Unknown. D: Unknown. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1910
Print: British Film Institute
German titles
Piano: Günter A. Buchwald

“Charitable organisations and dedicated journalists decried the misery of the slums in industrial cities. ‘Slumming’ was the term used to describe tourist outings or philanthropic day-trips to witness the poverty. Those who eschewed direct confrontation could visit magic lantern shows or the cinema: the photographic and film industries provided a constant supply of new material covering diverse issues of the ‘Social Question’. (…) Comment les pauvres mangent à Paris / How the Poor Dine in Paris (FR 1910) (…) is the first film reportage about the ‘clochards’ of Paris: it is difficult to distinguish the extras acting in the film from the real homeless people.”
Martin Loiperdinger / Ludwig Vogl-Bienek
The Bioscope

“These kinds of films were predecessors of documentary films proper and were, at that time, labelled as ‘actuality films’ (or, as the Lumière Brothers called them, les actualités). However, the argument that can be made for pre-cinematic magic lantern slum shows, can also be made for such early cinematic slum actualités because, as Gunning has emphasised, in this early period ‘actuality films constituted the main product of the cinema rather than fiction filmmaking, and the motion picture camera itself remained the focus of attention.'”
Igor Krstic: Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums. Edinburgh University Press 2016, p. 62

>>> SOCIAL DRAMA

>>> EARLY DOCUMENTARY FILMS II (Urban Life)