video of 1897 snowfight - 52 seconds of joyful carnage

[Demovictory9]

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The video shows 52 seconds of joyful carnage: a gaggle of antiquated French people hucking compacted snow at one another’s faces with terrifying ferocity. Although it’s hard to get an accurate head count in the chaos, there is something like 15 of them: men in suits and hats and women in long puffy sleeves, their skirts protected by aprons. The combatants start on either side of a stately tree-lined street, but soon they end up all scrambled together. It’s like one of those big battle scenes at the end of a superhero movie — a gracefully choreographed free-for-all, a ballet of annihilation. Fighters swivel and dodge and stoop down to reload; alliances form and disband; heads disappear in explosions of snow. Brave fighters suddenly fall.

If you watch the snowball fight over and over, as I will do for the rest of my life, certain characters begin to stand out.

Down in the bottom-left corner, a thick man with a strong black mustache fires a cheap shot: a wild fastball, from point-blank range, that barely misses its intended target, a slim man who is busy looking the other way. The slim man turns, cocks his left arm and wallops the big man on his thigh.

From that point forward, these two are locked in savage, jolly combat. They reload and pelt each other multiple times, until finally — overtaken, perhaps, by the homosocial energy crackling between them — the big man staggers forward and lunges to tackle the slim man like a bear attacking a deer. But once again he misses: The slim man sidesteps and, grinning, shoves the big man into the snow. The big man pops back up, like a mustachioed snow-zombie, and starts pelting the slim man again from behind.
My favorite character, and the closest the film has to a protagonist, is a man in a bowler hat and a coat so long it flaps around his legs like the cloak of a levitating wizard. He looks as if he has just stepped out of a bank meeting, and yet he abandons himself to this childish street warfare with eager glee.

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And then there is the bicycle. This is the peak moment of brutality, when the whole group loses its collective goddamn mind. Right from the start, you can see the cyclist coming: a small figure, growing larger every second, gliding smoothly on an angle toward the fray. Before he even reaches the crowd, he starts to take distant fire. And yet he is determined to ride on. When he arrives, all the warring factions turn to unite against him, unleashing a wickedly targeted cyclone. The cyclist takes hard shots to the arm, the face, the back, the neck. Still he pedals forward, hunching his back, spinning his long legs — a stoic hero, intent on gliding through the violence, determined to reach the safety of the other side.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/magazine/snowball-video-fight.html?action=click&algo=als_engaged_control_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=460277226&impression_id=9f0c1441-207a-11eb-8794-d5c4482c5a82&index=1&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=927070989&surface=home-featured&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending

[House of Roberts]

1. That poor fucker on the bicycle.

What was he thinking?

[CloudWatcher]

2. And did he ever get his hat back? n/t