Many people still mistakenly believe this film was the first motion picture, although it didn't form a part of the Lumière brothers' historic December 1895 Paris screening and wasn't shown until January 1896. Its fame is largely due to the urban myth associated with it, that when it was first shown, audience members screamed, ducked, fainted and ran on the supposition that the approaching train would burst through the screen into the auditorium. While these accounts have been contested, it's likely that the sheer verisimilitude of the cinematic illusion, even in flickering monochrome without synchronised sound, did have an awe-inspiring effect on early audiences.
More recent films are also associated with questionable tales of extreme audience reactions, but these are usually works that set out to shock and horrify, like The Exorcist or Alien. For the Lumières, the primary interest was capturing and exhibiting slices of everyday life, though they were clearly already thinking about how to do this most dramatically. So the camera is placed as close as possible to the edge of the platform and behind the point where the front of the train will eventually stop. Thus the locomotive approaches on a trajectory that appears dangerously close to the viewer — the people awaiting the train are all standing safely back from the platform edge on the other side of the camera — and the front of it occupies the maximum possible screen space before disappearing out of the frame.
Nonetheless, the people are of at least equal interest to the train itself, which comes to a stop with plenty of running time left. At the start of the film the crowd is clearly visible but static, lined up like a military parade. When the train stops everything suddenly bursts into life with embarking and disembarking passengers and greeters moving in all directions. Like factory gate scenes, arriving trains became a stock subject of early film for similar reasons — they both provided timed events that could guarantee plenty of human movement. The station platform, though, also has the opportunity to match one modern technology with another, the real movement of the railway echoed in the illusory movement of film.
More recent films are also associated with questionable tales of extreme audience reactions, but these are usually works that set out to shock and horrify, like The Exorcist or Alien. For the Lumières, the primary interest was capturing and exhibiting slices of everyday life, though they were clearly already thinking about how to do this most dramatically. So the camera is placed as close as possible to the edge of the platform and behind the point where the front of the train will eventually stop. Thus the locomotive approaches on a trajectory that appears dangerously close to the viewer — the people awaiting the train are all standing safely back from the platform edge on the other side of the camera — and the front of it occupies the maximum possible screen space before disappearing out of the frame.
Nonetheless, the people are of at least equal interest to the train itself, which comes to a stop with plenty of running time left. At the start of the film the crowd is clearly visible but static, lined up like a military parade. When the train stops everything suddenly bursts into life with embarking and disembarking passengers and greeters moving in all directions. Like factory gate scenes, arriving trains became a stock subject of early film for similar reasons — they both provided timed events that could guarantee plenty of human movement. The station platform, though, also has the opportunity to match one modern technology with another, the real movement of the railway echoed in the illusory movement of film.