The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1897)

Undescribable Perfection

Strong and Moving!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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

This movie is 50 seconds long,but it's over 110 years.I can't say that it's good movie or one of greatest or even not normal.But it's watchable.This movie(1895)is 27 years older than Nosferatu. The Arrival of the Mail Train is of course to people like Paris Hilton life's most boring 50 seconds.But even Paris should watch this.Thanks brothers Lumière's that you create the world of film. There is no acting in there.This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a steam locomotive into a train station in the French coastal town of La Ciotat. Like most of the early Lumière films consists of a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect of everyday life.6.5/10

"Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" was certainly not the first documentary ever made, but a short piece of cinema that is still fascinating because of the stories of the first time it was exhibited, when terrified spectators thought the locomotive was going to crush them; and because it contains in itself many possibilities of film expression: most notably, by the movement of people and things inside the frame, the different visual ways to register human bodies and objects: a single shot that changes in seconds from establishing shot, to medium shots and close-ups, and even suggests a travelling and a dolly in. Remade many times, including one in 1995, by Patrice Leconte, in the anthology film "Lumière et compagnie", also shot at La Ciotat.