Abstract

I intend to talk shortly about the first film produced by Cinéma du Peuple, in January
1914, entitled Les Misères de l’Aiguille (Miseries of the needle), with the main
participation of Musidora, her first work in cinema. The film show the problems of the
urban women in French working-class, and presents a new representation of the female
even by the working-class movement in the early 20th century in France.

Title: Les Misères de l’Aiguille of the cooperative Cinéma du Peuple in France: a

feminist experience in the early cinema

Luiz Felipe Cezar Mundim1

The Cooperative Cinéma du Peuple, which emerged from the approach of

the French militants to the cinema since 1909 – when the process of cinema
industrialization in France was already advanced –, lasted from October 1913 to July
1914. Transmitted beyond 1914, the experience of the Cinéma du Peuple, the first
organized attempt of the working class to own the cinema, established a new way of
intervention outside the hegemony of the cinema business. The research that gave rise to
this communication has sought to demonstrate the hypothesis that the public – category
of analysis in alternative scale to mass or spectator – showed, with the experience of
the Cinéma du Peuple, that they are not, in a natural and irrevocable way, prisoner of
the commercial films and the interests of the distributors. We intend to present, from the
analysis of this cooperative’s films, the early development of a particularly perception
from the working class movement to the Institutional Mode of representation.
It is important to notice, beyond the receptivity the films had, the filmic
constitution that defined them, through a proposal for analysis based on the idea of
artistic representation of the working class movement. In order to do so, the approach to
the subject of the militancy art, the construction of imaging representations of the
working class movement since the advent of the Third Republic, has served as the
foundation of homologies between the films from Cinéma du Peuple and the drawings
produced by the militant press. The films, being three of them found up to now (Les
Misères de l'Aiguille, first film produced by the Cooperative; Le vieux

1
Phd in History from the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne and the Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Sul.
 2

Docker; and La Commune, last and best known), and the drawings of artists such as
Maximilien Luce, Delannoy, Bernard Naudin and Georges Bradberry produced for the
journal Les Temps Nouveaux, correspond to the major sources of this brief presentation.
The option for this newspaper, run by Jean Grave, is justified by the fact that it gathers
these artists who played an important role in the debate about the painting
and that helped with the other libertarians newspapers that used graphics, also
brought into their designs the thematic and aesthetic aspects that most closely identified
themselves in the filmic representation of the Cinéma du Peuple. The emphasis that we
will have to this communication is the case of Les Misères de l'Aiguille, first film
produced by the cooperative, and perhaps one of the first films in the world with the
stated intention of representing themes of the feminism activist at that time.
The film was released on January 18, 1914. Raphaël Clamour (1885-1943), a
well-known artist of the theater, who was always amongst the militant environment,
made the screenplay and the realization of the movie. Clamour, who worked with the
actress Jeanne Roques (1889-1957), invited her to participate in Les Misères. Jeanne
Roques was already successful in the theatrical scenery and in cabarets, as the Bouffes
Parisiens, under the stage name of Musidora (from the Greek "the gift of the muses"),
taken from the novel Fortunio to Théophile Gautier, and assumed the primary role of
the character Louise in the film, a seamstress of a clothing store in Paris. 2
In a document found by Jean-Paul Morel in the archives of the Social History
Institute of Amsterdam, we can check out the synopsis that was present in the program
offered to the public at the premiere session of Les Misères:

Les Misères de l'Aiguille

Great social drama, edited by "Cinéma du Peuple"

The “Cinéma du Peuple” wanted, in its debut, to present to the public a social
drama that interests the women.
No matter what one says, the woman finds herself in the present society in a
situation of great inferiority towards the man. It is rightly said that the woman
is exploited doubly: exploited as a producer and often exploited in her home.
There are more than 300 thousand women in Paris who are forced to rent his
arms at degrading prices. Every morning, thousands of “Louise” disembarks
in large stations of Paris, coming from the suburb. They are all spilled in the
shops and ateliers of capital.
We wanted to emphasize through Cinema all the miseries of modern woman,
that one who suffers a bit everywhere for starvation wages.

2
LACASSIN, Francis. Musidora. Anthologie du cinéma no. 59, Paris, November 1970. ‘Supplément à
l’Avant scène du cinéma’ no.108, 1970. p. 445. About the trajectory of actress, one of
the most celebrated of silent movies, therefore she would come to be highlighted in the films of Louis
Feuillade especially with Irma Vep, see also : CAZALS, Patrick. Musidora, la muse bibb. Paris, Éditions
Henri Veyrier, 1978; GIRAUDET, Françoise. Musidora: Un certain regard. Rennes, f. Giraudet, 2012.
 3

The “Angel of the home”, so much praised by the poets, no longer exists!
There remain only unfortunates mistreated by fate. Our feminism consists,
above all, in elevating woman, placing her in her true place in society,
to make her equal to man in all social actions.
We want, above all, that the woman is interested in the social issues that may
one day transform the material and moral condition of all the oppressed.
If all ‘Louise’ were willing to think about their unhappy fate, they would no
longer be deadly isolated; they would gather in organizations of social
defense. If all the militants who want to liberate the woman help us, the cause
of women’s emancipation will have taken a big step, and the “Cinéma du
Peuple” will not regret the effort he has made to edit Les
Misères de l'Aiguille. (...)3

The program was written by Lucien Descaves, who had been vice-president of
the Ligue française pour le droit des femmes, association founded in 1882 by
Léon Richer wich had Victor Hugo as the first president of honor. The choice of
inaugurating a series of films that should talk about the various categories of work, with
the figure of a seamstress woman with the name of Louise, in tribute to Louise Michel,
draws the attention. There was a clearly feminist agenda the Cinéma du Peuple, in
addition to the theme of the categories of labor and tribute to the heroic
dead. Something that was little discussed in the documentation: the presence of two
women in the group, Henriette Tilly (Chairwoman of the Comité Feminin, certainly one
of the major feminist groups in Paris at that time, with a revolutionary stance as the
other anarchist collectives, and with an affirmative tendency) and Jane Morand,
individualist anarchist, has contributed to the definition of the agenda of women as
theme of the films.
Talking about the movie, it remains one copy only, preserved in the French
Cinematheque. The 225 meters total 13 minutes, which by all, seem to cover the entire
original copy. When we watched it for the first time, the impression we had is of a great
precarious technique, which we imagine to be due to the possibilities of the cooperative.
However, to go beyond the sensation of first contact, we asked ourselves: How the
director must have thought the realization of the scenes and sequences? And how the
feminist ideas permeate the film?
The filmic reference, although commercial, also refers to the first narrative
films, in which prevailed non-continuity between scenes; the exaggeration in
performances, referring to the theatrical spectacle; the fixed camera without depth of

3
Les Misères de l'Aiguille - Grand drame , édité par le " Cinéma du Peuple ". In: MOREL, Jean-Paul. "
Lucien Descaves : pour le " Cinéma du Peuple " ", 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt fifteen [En ligne], 64
| 2011, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2014, consulté le 14 septembre 2015. URL:
http://1895.revues.org/4394
 4

field and without linear chaining of shots, something which, to a large extent, was
already being adopted by major commercial films of the time.
The initial sequence of the story takes place in the shop where Louise would
work. An external long shot opens (the camera will always be fixed during the entire
film), which shows us Louise walking down the street with another older woman when,
called by her companion, stops in front of a clothing store that has a vacancy
advertisement attached to the window. With a cut for a medium shot, we can read the
advertisement “hiring an apprentice, immediate gain” and we have the information that
that type of work can only be filled by a woman, and without training. Apparently,
Louise is resistant to enter the store to learn about the vacancy, but her friend convinces
her. In the store, the owner receives a couple of bourgeois customers, and presents the
model of a dress for women from a manikin worker from the store. The scene reports
the frivolousness of the type of trade in question, which contrasts with what comes next.
The sequence ends with these customers going out of the store and the entry of Louise
and her friend, who convinces the owner of the store to receive our hero as a seamstress
learner. In this first sequence, it is possible to notice an option for a more direct
approach to the subject, without proposing formal symbolism. We note that women are
not only the theme, but also the central representation of the film.

Frame 1: initial scene of Les Misères de l’Aiguille4

The Actress Musidora as Louise, looks at the camera. Louise resists the job offer announced.

Even though women traditionally were present in popular struggle of the first
half of the 19th century in militancy of the French working class movement, they began

4
The film can be found online at the following address:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBcBCvaaH6U .
 5

to be accepted only as nurses or waitresses and, if they were carrying weapons, they
would have to dress as men, which was highlighted both in 1848 and in 1871. Their
artistic representation in the beginning of the 20th century, therefore, rarely put them in
a position of leadership. In the republican classical iconography, ahead of the
manifestations or parades, they freeze as symbols, in Marianne, the latest way to
transform a woman into an object, representing the “people”. In the working class
movement, the woman is almost never alone; she shares the tasks and the misery of the
family. She is, above all, the mother of the family, taking in his arms a baby, and around
her other children to feed. She is the one who feeds, who comfort and play with the
children. The image we have of her is quite traditional and, if it were not for modest
interiors of homes where they are represented, they could be any woman in another
class.5

Images 1 and 2: Traditional Examples of drawings of militancy in the newspaper Les

Temps Nouveaux representing women

12. Dis leur qu'ils ne tuent pas les papas dans les
grèves. Georges Bradberry, Les Temps Nouveaux -
Supplément littéraire, 05/05/1906. Facing of
innocent play with his soldiers of lead, the climate of 13. Without title (a mother and two children).
violence of the years 1905-07 is invoked: then the Charles Angrand, Les Temps Nouveaux,
numerous bloody strikes, the army is guilty for being 27/06/1914.
on the side of capitalism against the workers on
strike. The mother is at home taking care of the

5
For those aspects of the representation of women in the arts, see: DARDEL, Aline. Op. Cit. p. 133 ;
AGULHON, M. Un usage de la femme au XIXe siècle : l’allégorie de la République. In : Mythes et
Représentation de la Femmeau XIXe siècle, Romantisme. Paris, Champion, 1976; CHENUT, Helen.
Anti-Feminist Caricature In France: Politics, Satire And Public Opinion, 1890–1914. Modern &
Contemporary France. Vol. 20. Is. 4. 2012. Pp. 437-452; RIOT-SARCEY, Michèle. Les femmes et la
gauche en France : entre discours émancipateurs et pratiques de domination. In: BECKER, Jean-Jacques
et al. Histoire des gauches en France. La Découverte, Poche/Sciences humaines et sociales. 2005. p. 362-
378.
 6

children, while the husband is the one who makes

the strike.

The movie seems to be different from this tradition, at least that is what the text
of the program had promised. Of course, we have indications of conformity of the
working women to family life, as in the sequence that follows the initial scene,
however, always with something that tends to feminism. Despite the lack of intertitles,
which were supposed to be part of the original film, we imagine that by being employed
in the store, Louise has provided some income for her home – which is modest, but
comfortable – in which she arrives with her son and with some groceries. Among the
acquisitions, a small toy horse, with which Louise puts the child to play. At this moment
we have the traditional representation, the woman is solely responsible for the children.
In the meantime, the father comes in, who plays as excited with the child as the mother,
something that does not exist in the drawings, and rare in the family portraits of
commercial films. Would it be an indication of the emancipated woman inside the
house?

Sequence 1: Familiar scene of Les Misères de L'Aiguille

1. Louise plays with her son. Traditional image in 2. The father arrives and plays effusively with the
artistic representations of the working class child.
movement in the period.

There are not enough elements to support such idea from this scene. However,
the film continues and we notice more details of a representation of the woman who
seeks to differentiate herself from the traditional. Louise refuses to submit physically to
 7

her boss, as we see in the following sequence to that of the familiar environment. She
walks into the office of her boss, probably called by him, who starts to harass her, even
trying to kiss her neck, to what she replied with a slap.
In the midst of the precarious working conditions to which women were
submitted during the second industrialization, in the urban space the portrait was no
better, where work predominated in the domestic environment and in the shops, marked
by innumerable abuses of employers. In the census of 1906, there were 7,693,712 active
women, and even if many domestic workers were not counted, they should represent
13% of the total of these workers.6

15. Louise reacts with slap to the harassment of the boss. The scene, as others in the film, places the
woman in active position against oppression, rare representation back then, even in the militant
environment.

The long days of work, the low wages, and the loneliness often resulted in
diseases and in prostitution. In the case of Louise, the simple fact of reacting to an abuse
of the boss is significant and distinguishes herself from other traditional representations.
The reaction of Louise, however, should not have gone without response. The Boss,
upset, pushes her out of the office, episode that would bring consequences for her home.
The husband, secondary figure in the plot, also suffers the miseries of the world
of work. Based on the logic of classical factory exploration, the next sequence is in a
typographic production line. We see the foreman coming on the scene, through the
background. He gives the task to the employees, as they type sitting at the machine:

6
Data from Marie-Hélène Zylberberg-Hocquard, quoted in ALMBERG, Nina. Les Cameras du
Peuple. Cinéma et mouvement ouvrier à la Belle Epoque. Mémoire presented pour le master de
recherche. Mention: Histoire. Directrice de memoire: Claire Andrieu. Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris
(Sciences Po) - Ecole Doctorale. 2010-2011. 124.
 8

first still in the background, delivers a sheet of paper to one of the workers, not without
gesticulating in a threatening tone; and then turns to the second, in the foreground, and
passes the task to him, leaving no doubt about its watchdog role.
The same logic of moving within the frame repeats in the next scene. Also in a
long shot, we have the salon with typographic machines all the depth long. A young and
possibly inexperienced worker bends down to pick up something in the corridor
between the machines, when the foreman reveals himself from the background toward
him, and scolds him harshly, punching and kicking him.
Another worker, certainly the character “militant”, intercedes and threatens to
harm the foreman, who summons him to direction. All the other fellow workers go then,
in protest, and only one stays and continues his work normally. This must Louise’s
husband. The husband, a jaune (Sheepskin) uninterested by solidarity struggle of the
workers, one day will suffer the consequences of his aloofness to the collective struggle.
In the following sequence we see Louise doing her job at home. Purchase the
fabrics she needs on the street, goes back home and begins her work of sewing. We now
see that the house seems to be more modest, smaller, possibly a mansard. The place
where she sews is also where the child and the husband sleep. He, in turn, is sick and
probably unemployed, given the characteristics of the new residence. Louise, tired, falls
asleep. From the editing one tends to imagine that she is dreaming, but, we believe that
it is only an attempt to create a narrative in parallel. In half of the frame there is a scene
with her boss and a woman, living well, that may stroll through the city in a horse-
drawn carriage, and go to a nice restaurant, but not before they encounter a beggar who
asks for help.
The scene intends to expose the social contradictions between the working
family, poor and without luxury, with the life of the boss, in which there are plenty time
left for the practice of small pleasures. The highlight of the scene comes from the
representation of domestic work undertaken by Louise. As previously stated, the
contents of this type of work was quite significant. Its informal character, however,
hindered the full view of its implications in the relation of women exploitation. Perrot,
when talking about the proletarianization of the urban woman before the domestic work,
emphasizes the role of the sewing machine in this relation:

Initially an object of desire on the part of women, who saw the means of
reconciling their tasks and perhaps gain time – Singer makes many hearts
 9

beat –, the sewing machine thus became the instrument of his servitude: the
factory at home. In this case, it is preferable the other one.7

The subtlety of the domain of sewing work at home kept similarities with the
paternalism in the management of textile work during the nineteenth century, a key
sector of the first industrialization. The autonomy of the workers in the family
environment, in which the obligations of production is transferred to the relationship
between parents and children, aided in the concealment of industrial textile
exploitation.8

Images 5 and 6: The household textiles job: the family in the 19th century and the
woman with her sewing machine at the beginning of the 20th century.

16. “Dessin composé par Bernard NAUDIN, pour le programme de nos représentations des
‘Tisserands’”. Les Temps Nouveaux, 14/03/1914.

7
PERROT, Michelle. A mulher popular rebelde. In: PERROT, Michelle, 1988 a. pp. 198-199.
8
PERROT, Michelle. Os operários e as máquinas na França durante a primeira metade do século XIX.
In: PERROT, Michelle, 1988 b. pp. 25-34.
 10

17. In her poor home, Louise falls tired on the sewing machine. In the background, also sleep her
husband ill and her son.

In a drawing of Bernard Naudin for Les Temps Nouveaux in 1914, the reality of
textile domestic workers from the 19th century is portrayed to disclose the play Les
Tisserands of Gerhart Hauptmann, represented for the first time in Paris in May 1893 at
the théâtre libre.9 It was shown a drama of misery in 1840. In the drawing, the father
rests visibly exhausted on the loom, flanked by a mother with a child, both with
countenances of suffering. The scene is very similar to the tableau de Les Misères in
which Louise works at the sewing machine and lies over it, overcome by fatigue.
The husband does not resist the disease and dies at the end of the sequence. At
this moment, there is a turning point in the film. Desperate, Louise grabs the rope from
the clothesline above her son’s cradle, takes the child in her arms, and goes out to the
street. There is a cut to an external very long shot, with the camera positioned on the
beach of stones, where we see the river and, in the background, a bridge. Louise comes
from the background of the frame, dazed, but resolute of what she is about to do.
Alternately, we see the exit of workers from a meeting (so it seems) at some Bourse du
Travail, or Maison du Peuple, next to the riverbank where Louise is heading at that
moment. Among the people who leave, we see with difficulty (due to deterioration of
the film) the militant coming toward the camera holding hands with a child. They both
pass by the beach, and see Louise, about to throw herself into the river tied to her son.
They then prevent her from committing suicide, and take her to the lingerie cooperative
“L’Entraide”, thus ending the copy of the film that has reached the present day.
The sequence does not show any special prominence, and confirms what the
schedule on the first day of exhibition related among the goals of the film: “If all
‘Louise’ were willing to think about their unhappy fate, they would no longer be deadly
9
DARDEL, Aline. Op. Cit. p. 289.
 11

isolated; they would gather in organizations of social defense.” The idea of feminism
thus fitted the communist-anarchist ideal, a tendency more prevalent than the
individualistic anarchism of women that militated in the group. More than among their
women companions, the struggle for women’s emancipation would come by the mutual
aid of class, not of gender.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGULHON, M. Un usage de la femme au XIXe siècle : l’allégorie de la République.

In : Mythes et Représentation de la Femmeau XIXe siècle, Romantisme. Paris,
Champion, 1976.

ALMBERG, Nina. Les Cameras du Peuple. Cinéma et mouvement ouvrier à la Belle

Epoque. Mémoire présenté pour le master de recherche. Mention: Histoire. Directrice de
mémoire: Claire Andrieu. Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) - Ecole
Doctorale. 2010-2011.

CAZALS, Patrick. Musidora, la muse bibb. Paris, Éditions Henri Veyrier, 1978.

CHENUT, Helen. Anti-Feminist Caricature In France: Politics, Satire And Public

Opinion, 1890–1914. Modern & Contemporary France. Vol. 20. Is. 4. 2012.

DARDEL, Aline. Catalogue des dessins et publications illustrées du Journal

Anarchiste « Les Temps Nouveaux » 1895-1914. Thèse de Doctorat de troisième cycle
en histoire de l’Art. Université de Paris IV. Directeur de thèse : Bernard DORIVAL.
1980.

GIRAUDET, Françoise. Musidora: Un certain regard. Rennes, f. Giraudet, 2012.

LACASSIN, Francis. Musidora. Anthologie du cinéma no. 59, Paris, November 1970.
‘Supplément à l’Avant scène du cinéma’ no.108, 1970.

MOREL, Jean-Paul. « Lucien Descaves : pour le « Cinéma du Peuple » », 1895. Mille

huit cent quatre-vingt quinze [En ligne], 64 | 2011, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2014,
consulté le 14 septembre 2015. URL : http://1895.revues.org/4394
 12

PERROT, Michelle. Os Excluídos da história: operários, mulheres e prisioneiros.

Tradução de Denise Bottmann. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. 1988.

RIOT-SARCEY, Michèle. Les femmes et la gauche en France : entre discours

émancipateurs et pratiques de domination. In: BECKER, Jean-Jacques et al. Histoire
des gauches en France. La Découverte, Poche/Sciences humaines et sociales. 2005.