5 Cinematic Snow

In addition to the historical coincidence of the International Cloud Atlas, psychoanalysis, X-ray technology, and cinema, the late nineteenth century also boasts a less transformative though arguably defining way of packaging weather. The year 1878 marks the first historical record of the snow globe (in Paris); and in 1900, Erwin Perzy of Vienna began to mass-produce and distribute an enhanced reproduction of miniature and glass-contained snowfall. ¹ In the years before and after what plausibly might be cinema's peak of snow-globe appearances—the early 1940s, as the Oscar-winning Kitty Foyle (1940) and Citizen Kane (1941) feature titular protagonists with similar sentimental attachments to these handheld snowy landscapes—cinematic frames have similarly captured, contained, and created controlled environments within which snow contributes to and constitutes atmosphere.