Littau, Karin

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42Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat(1895–1897)FilmAna_042_063  4/26/05  8:33 PM  Page 4243ContextFilm history does and does not start with the Lumière brothers’ inven-tion of the Cinématographe. Auguste and Louis Lumière did not givebirth to pictures in motion, since optical effects of movement in theform of shadow plays and magic-lantern shows were already wellloved entertainments before the nineteenth century. Nor did they in-vent the movies, because the public could already, even if only on anindividual basis, watch films by peering through Thomas Alva Edi-son’s coin-operated peep box, the Kinetoscope. Rather, the Lumièreswere the first to project a strip of film on a screen large enough to beseen by an entire audience, and therefore instituted film viewing as acollective experience. The screening on December 28, 1895, at theSalon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris, will remain forever recordedin our history books, because from then onward audiences were will-ing to pay regularly for this new form of entertainment.1On that day, the way in which the world was seen both changedand did not change. There had never been a technology that could soaccurately produce an illusion of reality. Although these moving pic-tures were in black and white, what they simulated was not only lifeas it could be seen beyond the walls of the Grand Café, but also thesensation of movement as it could be felt in the hubbub of thenineteenth-century metropolis. On the other hand, those who lined upthat day on the Boulevard des Capucines were already seeing theworld protocinematically. This is because they were accustomed tobig-city living, which had become as fast and intoxicating as the speedKARIN LITTAUSilent Films and Screaming Audiences1The first-ever film screening to an audience—namely, invited scientists at the So-ciété d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale—took place on March 22, 1895.FilmAna_042_063  4/26/05  8:33 PM  Page 43of the onrushing impressions about to burst onto the screen. The cin-ema, with its restless succession of living pictures, was the very em-bodiment of a modern existence in flux. The Lumières’ invention of atechnological apparatus that combined camera, printer, and projector,and their most famous film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, must there-fore be understood in the larger context of modernity, which hadbrought unprecedented changes to everyday life.The Cinema Was on Its Way Long before 1895Everything associated with the modern age—industrialization, mobil-ity, and consumerism—and everything this entailed, from overpopu-lated urban centers, machinery working around the clock, thedeafening noise of trains, to shopping as a new form of addiction,were all factors in shaping a sensibility that had become, according toFriedrich Nietzsche in 1888, “immensely more irritable” (47). Duringthe early years of the railways, nervous energies overcame the traveleras the train swallowed up the miles at an inhuman pace, just as theanxious air traveler in our own age seems to expect with every un-usual vibration that disaster is waiting (Schivelbusch 160–61). The fearof technology out of control, of accidents and collisions, were just astangibly felt at street level. Writing about the burgeoning nineteenth-century metropolis, the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin found that“moving through traffic involves the individual in a series of shocksand collisions” to the extent that “at dangerous crossings, nervous im-pulses flow through him in rapid succession” (132). Even pushingthrough the jostling crowds, the urban stroller felt at some risk, be thisa potential pickpocket’s hand too close for comfort, ramming theelbow of a stranger, or, as Émile Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)describes it, being swept away by a current of shoppers, which thenew department stores pulled in as if “sucking in the population fromthe four corners of Paris” (241; ch. 9). When Nietzsche gives his diag-nosis of modernity, it is befitting therefore that he also gives a flavor ofthe new pace of life by emulating its tempo and rhythm in the frag-mentary nature of his style:the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever:cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms,tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the44LittauFilmAna_042_063  4/26/05  8:33 PM  Page 44

Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat (1895-1897): Silent Films and Screaming Audiences

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Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat (1895-1897): Silent Films and Screaming Audiences

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