This short subject, whose title translates as 'The baby's first steps', has been jokingly referred to as "the first suspense film" by Bertrand Tavernier, and its easy to see why. When I try to teach students the basics of how early films were constructed around the technical limitations of the Lumiere Cinematographe, I always show them this film. To summarise, a young child walks falteringly along a path from the background to the foreground (the image contains a diagonal composition in depth typical of the earliest Lumiere films - think of the famous train arriving at a station), aiming to reach her doll, which has been placed at the end of the path, providing a quest-based micro-narrative. What this illustrates is the way these pseudo-documentaries were not randomly-shot travelogues and actualities. The distance the baby has to walk (guided by a nanny) has obviously been measured to allow her 'journey' to be completed within the (approximate) 50 second time-limit placed on the duration of films by the camera's capacity. But she only just makes it. The scene has been manipulated in many ways and is less a picture of Parisian infantile life at the end of the 19th century and more a study of how situations had to be manipulated and fictionalised to fit them into the restrictive set of technical options on offer.
