The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895): Cinema’s First Myth
The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is only fifty seconds long, black and white, and silent. By far the shortest of the films on our list. And yet, for the audience watching in January of 1896, the visuals projected before them were enough to make them scream and run in terror to the back of the theater. As Maxim Gorky wrote in 1896 on his first impressions of the film, “a train appears on the screen. It speeds right at you - watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones…” Pretty visceral stuff for a film less than one minute long with no sound and no color. And so those first viewers of cinema, in the audience of Arrival of a Train in 1896, ran for their lives as they watched a train on a giant screen come charging towards them.
It is this reaction that has catapulted The Arrival of a Train to legendary status. A story repeated time and time again by film historians and amateur cinephiles alike. And yet, The Arrival of a Train was not the first film. No, the first “motion picture,” Sallie Gardner at a Gallop was made nearly twenty years earlier. In fact, several films had been shot and presented before The Arrival of a Train hit the big screen. Fear and terror? Running to the back of the room? Surely the audience was familiar with what a motion picture was and didn’t believe a train was actually coming towards them? Did they? Could it be the fear and terror rumor is, well, just that - a rumor? Could it be that the story that has solidified Arrival of a Train into cinema history is a lie? A myth?
Auguste & Louis Lumiére
Film historian Martin Loiperdinger certainly thinks so. In his essay, “Lumiére’s Arrival of a Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth” Loiperdinger convincingly argues that there is little to no historical evidence to support the panic narrative. Instead, he posits that the rumors of terror and fear at seeing a train pulling into a station are, what the film industry is best at: stories that serve a purpose. He writes, “the cinema’s first audiences are interpreted as being unable to distinguish between film image and reality. Arrival of a Train thus is not simply used as an icon of cinema’s birth, rather this one-minute film by Louis Lumiére stands as a striking example of the manipulative power allegedly inherent in cinema since its beginning… Reiterated over and over again [the panic rumor] figures as the founding myth of the medium, testifying to the power of film over its spectators.” In other words, Arrival of a Train is not simply a film, but also the embodiment of the idea that is most fundamental to the power of filmmaking: that film can, quite literally, transport us to new places.The idea that at the theater, for a few seconds, minutes, or hours, in a dark room, we believe that what we are seeing on the screen is “real.”
It is easy to imagine the untrained audiences of the nineteenth century fooled by the new filmic technology. As we’ve seen it is a story of mythic proportions. But this phenomenon is not limited to the audiences of the past. Even today’s sophisticated audiences are “fooled.” We still jump in fear during a horror film, or cry when a beloved character dies. We know it’s fake, and that’s okay. In the confines of the theater we allow ourselves to be fooled, willing participants in a magic trick. The alleged power that Loiperdinger speaks of is real, because we allow it to be. As an audience we relinquish control. We aren’t able to stop the train barrelling towards us, and that’s the point. We surrender ourselves to the filmmaker. We forfeit our agency and allow the filmmaker to guide our eyes, to tell us, “look here!”
The action in Arrival of a Train is banal to be sure. Something that audiences of the 1890’s would have seen countless times: a train arriving at a station. And yet Arrival of a Train has personality. The train, dark and steaming, charges forward towards the audience. As it approaches it looms larger and larger in the frame eventually bursting past it. Passengers boarding the train walk towards and past the camera, towards and past the audience, in effect. The film is subjective, meant to not only show reality, but to contextualize it. It is a point of view. The point of view of the Lumiéres.
And thus, what The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station does, why it is so influential, is that the film embodies our willingness to surrender not only to the story, but to the filmmaker. It transports us, not just to a train station, but through a subjective lens: a lens positioned by someone other than ourselves. Through the lens of the camera we are able to quite literally stand in someone else’s shoes. And in the safety of a dark theater we allow ourselves to believe in their story, and that is a powerful thing.