1 The Cinéma du Peuple: issues of analysis’scale in the working-class movement in France in the early 20th century Luiz Felipe Cezar Mundim 1. Nicole Brenez, in the preface to the book Cinéma et Anarchisme en France, written by Isabelle Marinone, evokes the passage in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in which Adorno and Horkheimer talk about the character of the eminent role of laughter as a fraudulent means to mislead the happiness in the cultural industry and, therefore, in the cinema. The Frankfurt School asserts that “Fun is a medicinal bath, which the industry of pleasure prescribes incessantly” and also that “in the false society, laughter attacked happiness – as a disease – dragging it to the unworthy totality of that society” 1 . Following the path of totality, these authors found out in the definitions of mass and spectator the contribution to the studies that should be conducted under the critical theory of culture. However, we cannot forget that cinema is also capable of producing offensive laughter which, according to Nicole Brenez, “leads to outbursts of true joy in the concrete world ravaged by injustice, individualism and conformity” 2 . It is about what you want to see or, more specifically, the strategies of research on cinema and history, and not just about movies. In other words, it is a matter of scale of analysis. Although cinema has been created in the middle of commercial exploitation, it does not set its achievement only in a commercial manner and in the film spectating. The historicity of the public’s domestication for the cinematic spectacle exposes the historical alternative to other types of cinema control. Besides the architectural and the language’s singularities in early cinema, it is remarkable the relation between the public and the cinematic spectacle. It’s known that the major public was made by workers, seeking for distraction in such places like vaudevilles. And it’s also notable that the workers’ struggles organized through the union mobilization in France were progressively structured in the same period in which the cinema was being established. 1 ADORNO, T. W. e HORKHEIMER, Max: 1985. pp. 131-132. 2 BRENEZ, Nicole. 2009. p. 13.