The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1897)

Absolutely amazing

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Blistering performances.

So this is one of the first films ever created. It is a cultural icon and seems to have stuck in the minds of cinema goers since it was screened. Surrounding it is the myth that the first viewers screamed as the train went past, afraid to be run over. But with all that in mind it is literally a train. At a station. So reviewing on the quality of the film alone and its content, I'm giving it a 6, which is really quite generous. I think this film is a must watch for any cinema buff, but you know it's only a minute long. Now I'm just filling in space so IMDb lets me post it. To be honest, I just wrote this review to get the little tick on my profile because it was bugging me.

While today, it might be mind-numbing to watch. People in 1895, love this 50 second film clip. Generally considered to be among the first motion pictures in modern history, this clip was filmed in La Ciotat, Bouches-du-Rhône, France that show a group of Turn of the Century people are standing in a straight line along the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train. Yeah, that's pretty much it. The film has no story besides that yet the film became popular to watch. Most people today could never understand the fear that gripped the 1895 audience facing the arriving train. Film in a way, the train looks as if it coming right at them. Some audiences' members at the time reacted by jumping or going under the chairs as they saw the train coming at them on screen. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat illustrates the use of the long shot to establish the setting of the film, followed by a medium shot, and close-up. The whole time, the camera was static for the entire film, the effect of these various "shots" is affected by the movement of the subject alone. The train arrives from a distant point and bears down on the viewer, finally crossing the lower edge of the screen. It was great use of film by Louis and Auguste Lumière. If they didn't put the camera where it is, in my opinion, it wouldn't be as good as any other early films. I really glad they didn't film the train by the side. Not only is this one of the first early films, but it also serve as one of the first horror movies. This film also gave birth to documentary film. While it's not a great entertainment film; it's does give great insight of how life was like in Victoria Era 1895. Those female hats in the film are pretty outrageous wild. It's a remarkable piece of history, but it is not the first movie like some critics talk about. Not close at all. What film earns that honor depends partly on how you define movies. Asking what was the first movie ever made is a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's hard to give a definitive reply. If you consider Edison's Kinetoscope shorts to be movies, the first movies were from 1893, not 1895. Some historian claim that the first ever video footage was 1893's New York Fire Brigade footage. There might a film that earlier than that. The earliest celluloid film was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the Le Prince single-lens camera made in 1888 call "Roundhay Garden Scene". Before then, there was 'the horse in motion' from 1878. It's hard to figure out where Lumière brothers' film fits in with the others. It was filmed by Auguste and Louis Lumière by means of the Cinématographe, an all-in-one camera, which also serves as a printer and film projector. Unlike all early Lumière movies, this film contrary to myth, was not shown at the Lumières' first public film screening on 28 December 1895 in Paris, France. The program of ten films shown that day makes no mention of it. Its first public showing took place in January 1896. What most film historians left out is that the Lumière Brothers were trying to achieve a 3D image 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 demonstrated it along with a series of other 3D short at a 1935 meeting of the French Academy of Science. Given the contradictory accounts that plague early cinema and pre-cinema accounts, it's plausible that early cinema historians conflated the audience reactions at these separate screenings of the 3D version 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 never took off commercially as the conventional 2D version did. The 3D film version never went anywhere beyond that point. An example of the screening of the film was depicted in the 2011 film Hugo, no less. Overall: The moving images had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture ever since and allow future filmmakers to advance the science and art to a new level of entertainment.

A train arrives at a station. And changes everything.There isn't a lot to really say about L'arrivée d'un train a La Ciotat as a film itself. It's under a minute and shows a train pull up at a busy station. But what it signifies is another thing altogether. When we see that train come closer and closer until it stops in the station, on a surface level we watch a train arrive but it actuality what we are really witnessing is cinema arrive. This short film may not be the earliest movie but it is the first iconic image of the moving picture age.Auguste and Louis Lumière weren't really artists. Their early films don't stand up to the highly imaginative work of George Méliès for example. But they still remain enormously important cinema giants. Not for the content of their films but for the fact that they kicked things off in the first place and produced the first iconic moment in cinema history. And for this reason L'arrivée d'un train a La Ciotat will always be remembered. Everyone who has a love of cinema should really take a minute of their time to pay homage to the first moment in an amazing journey.

"Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" is often called the first film ever made. Actually it's not the first, there are a few others film experiences previous to this, brothers August and Louis Lumière directed others along with this, and if I'm not wrong there is one directed in 1892 but this is the landmark of movies, the fundamental stone of everything we know about cinema. The first short film, the first documentary film and believe me the first horror movie ever made! What is "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat"? It is an one minute film with a steam train arriving at a station full of people. It's filmed on a single take, no editing, no sound and with a grainy image. The major effect it might cause in the nostalgic viewer is to see a fragment of life in 1896 captured on film and realize that the movies were born here with this simple short film. For those who are more exigent it doesn't cause any impact and to these people it's just an image on the screen. And what about those who watched in 1896? The legend says that on the first session where this film was showed people simply just ran away from their seats believing that the train would cross the screen and hit everyone. With these realism so unusual at that time Lumière brothers created here the first horror movie. This is not only my word on the subject, there was a famous magazine that selected this film as being one of the 10 greatest horror films of all time. Okay, it's not shocking and scary now, but after watching it if you remember this story you're gonna laugh about it. I can't believe that this precious gem wasn't included in the book "1001 Movies You Should watch Before Die" and no representants from the 1800's were selected (okay, movies started to be made after 1895 but still needed at least one film in the book). Without this film you don't have anything. You don't have the enthusiasm about movies after all a few filmmaking experiences were made before that but this was the film people talked about it claiming to be as the first film ever made. The first experience of word-of-mouth; this first scary and realistic experience; many things came after this film.Don't be sad thinking that this film is lost and you will not watch it. Go to YouTube and enjoy it, after all it's a public domain. Again, it is a fragment of a different time and it's very important that it was filmed and registered for any audiences in any time. It's the same significance of the Bible for the books, a landmark, a path for which everything was made. Brilliant! 10/10