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L'Arrive d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

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Wikipedia article




'L'arrive d'un train en gare de La Ciotat' (translated from French into English as 'The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station', 'Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat' (US) and 'The Arrival of the Mail Train', and in the United Kingdom as 'Train Pulling into a Station') is an 1895 French short documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumire. Contrary to myth, it was not shown at the Lumires' first public film screening on 28 December 1895 in Paris, France: the programme of ten films shown that day makes no mention of it. Its first public showing took place in January 1896. It is indexed as Lumire No. 653.Landmarks of Early Film, The Blackhawk Films Collection, 2016 Flicker Alley

Synopsis



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This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into the gare de La Ciotat, the train station of the French southern coastal town of La Ciotat, near Marseille. Like most of the early Lumire films, 'L'arrive d'un train en gare de La Ciotat' consists of a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect of everyday life, a style of filmmaking known as actuality. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot.

Production



This 50-second movie was filmed in La Ciotat, Bouches-du-Rhne, France. It was filmed by means of the Cinmatographe, an all-in-one camera, which also serves as a printer and film projector. As with all early Lumire movies, this film was made in a 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

Contemporary reaction





The film is associated with a well known rumor in the world of cinema. The story goes that when the film was first shown, the audience was so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly at them that people screamed and ran to the back of the room. Hellmuth Karasek in the German magazine 'Der Spiegel' wrote that the film "had a particularly lasting impact; yes, it caused fear, terror, even panic." However, some have doubted the veracity of this incident such as film scholar and historian in his essay, "Lumiere's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth".'The Moving Image': Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 89118) Others such as theorist Benjamin H. Bratton have speculated that the alleged reaction may have been caused by the projection being mistaken for a camera obscura by the audience which at the time would have been the only other technique to produce a naturalistic moving image.

3D and other versions



What most film histories leave out is that the Lumire Brothers were trying to achieve a 3D image even prior to this first-ever public exhibition of motion pictures. Louis Lumire eventually re-shot 'L'Arrive dun Train' with a stereoscopic film camera and exhibited it (along with a series of other 3D shorts) at a 1934 meeting of the French Academy of Science. Given the contradictory accounts that plague early cinema and pre-cinema accounts, it is plausible that early cinema historians conflated the audience reactions at these separate screenings of 'L'Arrive dun Train'. The intense audience reaction fits better with the latter exhibition, when the train apparently 'was' actually coming out of the screen at the audience. But due to the fact that the 3D film never took off commercially as the conventional 2D version did, including such details would not make for a compelling myth.

Additionally, Loiperdinger notes that "three versions of 'L'Arrive d'un train en gare de La Ciotat' are known to have existed".Patrick Keiller, Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film in 'The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble', Beaumont, M. and Freeman, M.J. eds., (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p 72 According to 'Luvre cinmatographique des frres Lumire', the Lumire catalogue website, the version most found online is of an 1897 reshoot which prominently features women and children boarding the train.[https://catalogue-lumiere.com/faq-movies/ 'Luvre cinmatographique des frres Lumire' (The Lumire Film Catalogue)]

Current status



(shown here in 2010) commemorates the film.

The short has been featured in a number of film collections including 'Landmarks of Early Film volume 1'. A screening of the film was depicted in the 2011 film 'Hugo', and in the intro sequence for the 2013 video game 'Civilization V: Brave New World'. The scene of the train pulling in was placed at #100 on Channel 4's two-part documentary 'The 100 Greatest Scary Moments'.

References




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