Director: Auguste and Louis Lumière
Country: France
Award: none
Movement: The Early Cinema
L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) is an 1896 French short silent documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière. Contrary to popular belief, it was not shown at the Lumières' first public film screening on 28 December 1895 in Paris, France: the programme of ten films shown that day makes no mention of it. Its first public showing took place in January 1896 in Lyon. This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into the Gare de La Ciotat, the train station of the French southern coastal town of La Ciotat, near Marseille. Like most of the early Lumière films, L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat consists of a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect of everyday life, a style of filmmaking known as actuality. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot. While the film appears to capture a mundane moment on a train platform, film scholar and historian Martin Loiperdinger has written that the film was likely at least partially staged. He points out that several members of the Lumière family can be seen among the crowd, and that no one on the platform looks at or acknowledges the camera, suggesting that they were instructed not to do so and are thus in some sense acting.
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