A 50-second film by the Lumiere Brothers, one of the first films ever shown to a paying audience. A train arrives at La Ciotat station.Obviously this film is not significant for its plot, or action scenes or character depth. This is an iconic film in the history of cinema, significant because it was made. Only a handful of films had been made to that point and Auguste and Louis Lumiere, pioneers in the art and technology of film, used all their knowledge and expertise in making this film.It may not seem much today but we wouldn't have the blockbusters of today if it wasn't for people like Auguste and Louis Lumiere and films like 'The Arrival of a Train'.

This a famous short film from the Lumiere brothers . Or is that infamous ? The film itself shows a train arriving at a train station La Ciotat , a guard walking up to the train that has now stopped and passengers getting in to said train and is every bit as unremarkable as it sounds But ...... there is a legend that people were so startled and frightened by this short piece of film that let out loud gasps and screams with embellishment over the decades that people fainted or ran out of cinemas screaming and wailing like banshees certain they were going to be squashed by a runaway train hurtling at the speed of light Let's put this myth to bed and point out that the camera angle isn't head on with the train . Even if you were dumb enough to think a train is approaching behind the screen it'll miss the audience But Theo in those days audiences were far less sophisticated weren't they ? Were they ? You got any proof ? Let's remember an Orwell quote : " Each generation imagines itself more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it " What's been the most successful movies in terms of box office for the last ten years ? Ones featuring comic book superheroes ! I rest my case

Among the preserved films in the "Saved from the Flames" DVD collection was this early August and Louis Lumiere clip that simply depicted a train arriving with the passengers getting off unaware they're being filmed with their faces about to be immortalized for future film archivists. According to legend, first-time audiences fled their seats (if not the theatre) thinking the train was going to come after them! While I've no doubt some truth was in that statement concerning less sophisticated viewers, I'm also sure many of them were aware it was just a moving picture projection and just sat down for some entertainment. Anyway, this 1-minute short is worth a look as historical artifact.

On December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien Du Grand Café, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière transformed the industry of entertainment when they did a demonstration of their new invention. The brothers projected a series of images on a screen, but those images were nothing like a normal slide-show, those images were moving as if they were alive. While the idea of motion pictures wasn't new to the audience (Edison's Kinetoscope was a popular entertainment), the devise's ability to project them on a screen was something they had never seen before. 10 short films of barely a minute of duration each were shown that day, and the invention proved to be an enormous success for the brothers, so immediately they decide to keep making movies in order to improve their catalog. One of those new movies would become the first iconic image of the new art."L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat" (literally, "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat") is without a doubt, one of the most famous films in history, as its image of a train arriving to the station, passing very close to the camera as it slows its speed, quickly became an iconic scene of the new invention. While initially conceived as just another one of the brothers' many "actuality films", it's clear that director Louis Lumière knew exactly where to put his camera in order to get the best image of the event as the film shows he had a good idea of the use of perspective (many consider it a study about long shot, medium shot and close-up). As a side-note, this is the film that originated the classic urban legend about people running away scared from the arriving train, thinking it was a real locomotive what was appearing on the screen. While this famous tale has been debunked by historians as a fake story, it's existence is another testament of this movie's importance and continuous influence on the younger generations. Among the many different art-forms that we can find today, cinema is perhaps the one that better reflects the modern society that arose after the industrial revolution of the 19th Century; because, as painting and sculpture did before, it has become a keeper of the most representative icons of our history. "L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat" was not the first movie the brothers screened, and it definitely wasn't the first movie ever made, but despite those details, the image of the arriving train represents the first icon of cinema, and literally, the arrival of a new art form. 9/10