While today, it might be mind-numbing to watch. People in 1895, love this 50 second film clip. Generally considered to be among the first motion pictures in modern history, this clip was filmed in La Ciotat, Bouches-du-Rhône, France that show a group of Turn of the Century people are standing in a straight line along the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train. Yeah, that's pretty much it. The film has no story besides that yet the film became popular to watch. Most people today could never understand the fear that gripped the 1895 audience facing the arriving train. Film in a way, the train looks as if it coming right at them. Some audiences' members at the time reacted by jumping or going under the chairs as they saw the train coming at them on screen. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat illustrates the use of the long shot to establish the setting of the film, followed by a medium shot, and close-up. The whole time, the camera was static for the entire film, the effect of these various "shots" is affected by the movement of the subject alone. The train arrives from a distant point and bears down on the viewer, finally crossing the lower edge of the screen. It was great use of film by Louis and Auguste Lumière. If they didn't put the camera where it is, in my opinion, it wouldn't be as good as any other early films. I really glad they didn't film the train by the side. Not only is this one of the first early films, but it also serve as one of the first horror movies. This film also gave birth to documentary film. While it's not a great entertainment film; it's does give great insight of how life was like in Victoria Era 1895. Those female hats in the film are pretty outrageous wild. It's a remarkable piece of history, but it is not the first movie like some critics talk about. Not close at all. What film earns that honor depends partly on how you define movies. Asking what was the first movie ever made is a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's hard to give a definitive reply. If you consider Edison's Kinetoscope shorts to be movies, the first movies were from 1893, not 1895. Some historian claim that the first ever video footage was 1893's New York Fire Brigade footage. There might a film that earlier than that. The earliest celluloid film was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the Le Prince single-lens camera made in 1888 call "Roundhay Garden Scene". Before then, there was 'the horse in motion' from 1878. It's hard to figure out where Lumière brothers' film fits in with the others. It was filmed by Auguste and Louis Lumière by means of the Cinématographe, an all-in-one camera, which also serves as a printer and film projector. Unlike all early Lumière movies, this film contrary to myth, was not shown at the Lumières' first public film screening on 28 December 1895 in Paris, France. The program of ten films shown that day makes no mention of it. Its first public showing took place in January 1896. What most film historians left out is that the Lumière Brothers were trying to achieve a 3D image even prior to this first-ever public exhibition of motion pictures. Louis Lumière eventually re-shot L'Arrivée d'un Train with a stereoscopic film camera and demonstrated it along with a series of other 3D short at a 1935 meeting of the French Academy of Science. Given the contradictory accounts that plague early cinema and pre-cinema accounts, it's plausible that early cinema historians conflated the audience reactions at these separate screenings of the 3D version of L'Arrivée d'un Train. The intense audience reaction fits better with the latter exhibition, when the train apparently was actually coming out of the screen at the audience. But due to the fact that the 3D film never took off commercially as the conventional 2D version did. The 3D film version never went anywhere beyond that point. An example of the screening of the film was depicted in the 2011 film Hugo, no less. Overall: The moving images had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture ever since and allow future filmmakers to advance the science and art to a new level of entertainment.