The relatively short chronicle of plastic film is packed to the gill withurban legends , both truthful and false , so it should n’t occur as a surprisal that one of the first - ever motion picture screenings is also the generator of pic ’s most long - stand legends . On Jan. 25 , 1896 , the Lumière crony screened their inadequate cinema " L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat " ( " Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station " ) at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris . It was n’t the very first showing of a motion picture , but near enough – the Lumières shield 10 similar shorts just a month originally .
There were only a smattering of people in the existence who had seen a motion picture at this point , and it was probably the first clock time for everyone in this particular audience . And , so the story goes , they did not take it sitting down . On the contrary , they expose into a affright , screaming and running for their life sentence as the locomotive engine on the sieve seemingly headed directly toward them .
" L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat " is standardized to the Lumières ' other pic in that it is silent , very unretentive ( just 50 seconds ) and depicts a aboveboard , everyday scene . The films are all one continuous , unedited shot , film on acinematographe , which is a compounding photographic camera , printer andprojector . In this film , the camera is limit up on the station political program and records an approaching geartrain , which passes intimately to the left of the photographic camera and finally stop to unload and reload passengers .
It ’s probably a good wager that everyone in the audience had witness an actualtrainpulling into a place . It ’s also safe to take for granted that the crowd was n’t a crew of hayseeds – this was most likely a advanced , urban group . But the shock of see this moving image on ascreenwas apparently so great that mass took leave of their senses .
This write up of chaos at the cinema has been around so long that it ’s often have as an bona fide fact . But some film historians – notably Martin Loiperdinger and Tom Gunning – take to have found no citation of panic in any firsthand accounts of that showing . There was by all odds astonishment , they say , but no grounds that mass seek to escape the construction . Another plastic film historian , Ray Zone , did n’t of necessity believe the total - pandemonium version but did point out that the audience could have been involve by the fact that a runaway engine had crashed at a Paris post only a couple of months before .
This probably untrue caption has many use , say Loiperdinger and Gunning . It yield us a sense of how far our culture has get in a fairly curt prison term ; cinema is now second nature to us , but it was utterly shocking not much more than a century ago . We can also chuckle that this seemingly cultured consultation was on the spur of the moment taken back to a near - primitive state of matter . But even if it ’s an magnification , the idea behind it probably is n’t too far off the mark .
