Train Pulling Into A Station

On 28 December 1895, in the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard de Capucines in Paris, a small, invited crowd paid a franc each to witness the first ever publicly projected film. Shot by brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere earlier that same year, it ran for just under a minute and depicted a locomotive pulling into Marseilles Ciotat Station. According to legend, so amazed were the audience by this strange new technology that as the train drew near they dashed from the screen, frightened for their lives. Directors have been trying to provoke the same reaction ever since.

Within days the story had flashed round the world and by 1898 the Lumieres presided over a catalogue of almost 1,000 films. Most of these weren't actually movies as we understand the term now, but snippets of reportage shot by a growing band of photographers using Louis Lumiere's newly invented Cinematographe - a combined camera, projector and printer. By 1900 the brothers had opened cinemas across Europe and America, and already critics were complaining about the commercialisation of the industry. Plus ca change...

It's worth remembering that film, for the Lumieres, was essentially a tool for recording reality and though L'Arrivee D'Un Train A La Ciotat sent that first audience running, it was George Melies who really explored the medium's imaginative possibilities - his 1902 fantasy film A Trip To The Moon demonstrates the speed with which the technology evolved. The rest, as they say, is history, but even now it's impossible to witness these first faltering steps in the story of cinema without being struck by the enormous significance of the Lumieres achievement.