“LArrivée dun train en gare de La Ciotat” (“Train arriving at station”) 1895 The first horror movie ever made (maybe) The history of film began in the 1890s, with the invention of the first motion-picture cameras and the establishment of the first film production companies and cinemas. The earliest movies were mostly seen at temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. Generally they were about a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. The directors were typically the cameras inventors, struggling to learn how to use these new creations of their, so the films lacked no cinematic technique, usually had no camera movement, and is the event was staged, the first step towards narrative cinema, the scenes had flat compositions reminiscent of the stage. Movies popularity were born of their technical novelty, but soon or latter that has to wear-off. Most historians identify 1903s “The Great Train Robbery,” an inventively and dynamically staged twelve-minute Western actioner, as the first true narrative film. Meanwhile, “LArrivée dun train en gare de La Ciotat,” a one-minute-long outdoor scene without any plot or characters, has been named by some as the first horror film (notably those who assembled the list for England’s Channel 4s “100 Scariest Moment” documentary). It predates “The Great Train Robbery,” by eight years. How did that happen? Largely an accident. The film was made by the Lumière Brothers, who were among the most important innovators in the history of cinema, and were part of the inspiration for the fictional Colin McKenzie in Peter Jackson’s mockumentary “Forgotten Silver” (1995). Their short films were on the most prosaic of subjects, documenting what was nearest to them to test the capacity of the technology they were inventing. Though they showed interest in neither the possibilities of film narrative or exploring this as a new art form, there is no denying their artistry. This mini-movie is a good example. Note how familiar the set-up is. The significance of that it the unsurpassable perfection of the composition: 130 years later, when o film shows a train entering a station, it does so in exactly the same as the Lumière Brothers did. Yes, it’s rather obvious, but remember, this was one of the first occasions in the history of the world that it was done, and it still can’t be improved on. This became their most famous film because when they exhibited, and the people saw the train coming straight at them, the power of this new communications technology proved overwhelming. The audience ran from the cinema scraming it terror, fearing they were going to be run over by the picture of the train. Do you know what I love most about this story? It’s not true, or at least not the previous paragraph, the most famous part of the story. It has been called “Cinema’s Founding Myth”. Watching the clip, you see it is from the POV of someone standing on the platform, a familiar experience, so its hard to imagine that the audience, no matter how amazed they were, wouldn’t have thought the train was coming straight at them. Moreover, this near riot was not recorded I any contemporary newspaper, though the film itself was. The real story might concern a different, later, mini-movie. In 1900 the Bothers re-shot the same scene, this time to demonstrate their just invented 3D film technology. That film is now lost, but very likely that shot would likely have been framed differently. Maybe that one made the people run out of the theater screaming. Or maybe it’s a total fiction, we just cling to it because it’s a fine fable about the art that would change the world forever. By the way, most cinema historians consider a different film as the true, first, horror movie. It appeared only a year later than this one, in 1896; “The Haunted Castle,” a three-and-one-half minute sight gag by the Georges Méliès, and even greater innovator than Lumière Brothers. It pre-dates “The Great Train Robbery” by seven years, and has a story, sort of, wherein a shape-changing Mephistopheles in an abandoned castle toys with, and then threatens, two cavaliers with visions of fighting skeletons, a beautiful woman, etc, that he makes appear out of a caldron. Méliès, a magician before he turned to cinema, used the simplest camera tracks to amazing his audiences, and is remembered as the seminal experimenter in Special Effects techniques before the rise of a cinema more solidly grounded in complex narrative, as well as always infusing his films with a delightful sense of humor. “LArrivée dun train en gare de La Ciotat”: youtube/watch?v=v6i3uccnZhQ Some more history on that film: editorsguild/v2/magazine/archives/0508/columns_cutprint2.htm “The Haunted Castle” (1896) https://youtube/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) https://youtube/watch?v=BINBZE5XFR4
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:18:05 +0000
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