''L'arrivée 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 Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as ...

documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière. Contrary to myth, it was not shown at the Lumières' 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 Lumière No. 653.

Synopsis

This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a

steam locomotive A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, oil or, rarely, wood) to heat water in the locomot ...

into the

gare de La Ciotat Gare de La Ciotat is a Train station, railway station serving the town La Ciotat, Bouches-du-Rhône department, southeastern France. It is situated on the Marseille–Ventimiglia railway, and is served by trains between Marseille, Toulon and Hyère ...

, the train station of the French southern coastal town of La Ciotat, near Marseille. Like most of the early Lumière films, ''L'arrivée 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 In philosophy, potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his ''Physics'', ''Metaphysics'', '' Nicomachean Ethics'', and ''De Anima''. Th ...

. 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-Rhône, France. It was filmed by means of the Cinématographe, an all-in-one camera, which also serves as a printer and film projector. As with all early Lumière movies, this film was made in a

35 mm format 135 film, more popularly referred to as 35 mm film or 35 mm, is a format of photographic film used for still photography. It is a film with a film gauge of loaded into a standardized type of magazine – also referred to as a casse ...

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 ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...

'' 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". 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 Lumière Brothers were trying to achieve a

3D image Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

even prior to this first-ever public exhibition of motion pictures. Louis Lumière eventually re-shot ''L'Arrivée d’un 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'Arrivée d’un 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 3D films are motion pictures made to give an illusion of three-dimensional solidity, usually with the help of special glasses worn by viewers. They have existed in some form since 1915, but had been largely relegated to a niche in the motion pict ...

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'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat'' are known to have existed". According to ''L’œuvre cinématographique des frères Lumière'', the Lumière catalogue website, the version most found online is of an 1897 reshoot which prominently features women and children boarding the train.

Current status

Les frères Lumiéres quai de la gare de la Ciotat france

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

External links

*
Original film (Lumière No. 653)
on The Internet Archive
L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat - Relief 3D
a stereoscopic/3D film of the 1934 Lumière reshot.
The Lumiere Institute, Lyon, France

''L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat'': an interpretation
at th
Cinemaven blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, L' 1895 films French black-and-white films French short documentary films History of film French silent short films Documentary films about rail transport History of rail transport in France Films directed by Auguste and Louis Lumière French 3D films 1890s short documentary films Black-and-white documentary films Documentary films about France Articles containing video clips 3D short films One-shot films