Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat 1896

What you see

A camera stands on the platform of a small station in the south of France. The rails cut across the picture on a diagonal. A steam train appears far off at the back right, grows as it comes, and slides out of the picture at the front left, close enough to touch. The waiting crowd steps forward, doors open, passengers climb down. Fifty seconds, one shot, no cut. Then the film runs out.

That is all of it, and in 1896 it was plenty. Everything in the frame is sharp, from about a metre in front of the lens to the hills, so the eye can follow the engine the whole way in. It is one of the first pictures in which something comes at the audience.

Most of the people on the platform are the film-maker's family. The woman in the tartan cape at the right edge is Joséphine Lumière, mother of Louis and Auguste. Their wives, Rose and Marguerite, are there, with three small children and two nannies. A porter pushes a luggage trolley and the stationmaster walks the platform. Almost nobody looks at the camera, which is why the historian Martin Loiperdinger thinks this slice of life was at least partly directed.

Three takes, and the wrong year

The film is usually dated 1895 or 1896. The print everybody knows is from neither.

Louis Lumière filmed the train at La Ciotat at least three times, from the same spot. The first take dates from early 1896, probably from his stay in the town between 16 January and 3 February: a French science magazine printed 32 of its frames that March. A second take is undated. The third was shot in the summer of 1897, and that is the one in the Lumière catalogue as view no. 653 and in every documentary since. The catalogue's editors date it by the ages of the Lumière children on the platform. No version from 1895 is documented, whatever the plaque put up at the station in 1942 says.

It was not at cinema's famous first night either. The first paying Lumière show, at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895, had ten films: workers leaving the factory, a baby's breakfast, a gardener soaked by his own hose, the sea. No train. A train film first turns up on a Lumière bill in Lyon on 25 January 1896, and historians are not certain which station it showed, since the Lumières filmed trains at several.

Did the audience really run?

The story everyone knows: the first audience saw the engine coming, believed it was real and stampeded for the doors. It is cinema's founding legend, and nobody has found it in the record. Loiperdinger went looking in 2004. No police report, no newspaper story and no letter from the Lumières mentions a panic.

What the papers of 1896 do describe is a flinch. The day after the Lyon show, the Lyon républicain wrote that you pull back by instinct as the iron giant bears down on you. That summer the writer Maxim Gorky saw the Lumière programme at the fair in Nizhny Novgorod and filed this:

"It speeds straight at you—watch out! […] But this, too, is but a train of shadows."

Maxim Gorky, Nizhegorodski listok, 4 July 1896

People were startled, and they liked it. The film scholar Tom Gunning compares the appeal to a fairground ride: the thrill came from knowing it was a picture and jumping anyway. The room helped. The screen was under three metres wide, the image flickered, and the projector clattered away among the seats.

The running audience arrived later, as a joke. By 1901 the British film-maker R. W. Paul was selling The Countryman and the Cinematograph, in which a yokel bolts from a filmed train, and Edwin S. Porter copied the gag for Edison in 1902. The earliest telling of it as fact that Loiperdinger quotes is a memoir of 1916. From there it passed into the film histories, and it has been repeated ever since.

One more theory says the audiences that fled were watching Louis Lumière's later 3D remake. He did show stereoscopic films in the mid-1930s, and a 3D train exists. But the flinching is reported in 1896 and the fleeing was in print by 1916, twenty years before any of that.

The machine that made it

The Cinématographe, patented by the Lumière brothers in February 1895, was a box weighing under five kilos that did three jobs: it was the camera, the printer and, with a lamp behind it, the projector. The operator turned a handle twice a second, which ran sixteen frames past the lens. Seventeen metres of film, about eight hundred frames, was the whole show.

Why it matters

It showed what one frame could do with depth. Put the camera beside the track instead of facing it, and a single unbroken shot runs from a dot on the horizon to a close-up, with no editing at all. The historian Georges Sadoul credited the film with the dramatic use of deep focus.

It is the model of the early "view". The Lumières called their films vues: under a minute each, one shot, a piece of the world brought into the room. This one was a favourite from the start. In Lyon it was kept on the bill by popular demand while the other views were changed around it.

It gave cinema its favourite story about itself. True or not, the fleeing audience says something people wanted to believe: that moving pictures were strong enough to be mistaken for the world. Martin Scorsese restages the flinch in Hugo (2011). In 1995 the director Patrice Leconte took an original Cinématographe back to the same platform and filmed a modern train there.

The station is still open, on the line from Marseille towards Italy. In 2020 a "4K, 60 frames a second" version of the film went round the internet. It is not a restoration: software invented the extra detail and the in-between frames. The Lumières' own fifty seconds are sharper than you might expect, and free to watch.