The Train Panic Nobody Saw

The story as it is told

Paris, December 28, 1895. In a basement room of a café, a paying crowd takes its seats in front of a white screen. The Lumière brothers have invited them to see something nobody has seen before: photographs that move.

Then a steam locomotive appears on the screen, far down the track, and comes straight at the camera. It grows. It fills the frame. People shriek, duck, and run for the exits, convinced that the engine is about to burst through the screen and into the room.

What we can confirm

The first paid show was real. On December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, the Lumière Cinématographe gave its first public paid screening. The Institut Lumière lists the ten films that made up that programme: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon, La Voltige, La Pêche aux poissons rouges, Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon, Les Forgerons, Le Jardinier (l'Arroseur arrosé), Le Repas (de bébé), Le Saut à la couverture, La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon and La Mer (Baignade en mer). Each runs under a minute. The train film is not on the list.

The most vivid early description of the train comes from Russia, six months later. Writing as "I. M. Pacatus" in the Nizhegorodski listok of July 4, 1896, Maxim Gorky described a Lumière show at Charles Aumont's venue at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. "Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you," he wrote, and then: "watch out!" He imagined it "turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones." His very next line takes the fear back: "But this, too, is but a train of shadows." Gorky was describing an impression. He reported no stampede.

In 2004 the German film historian Martin Loiperdinger, of Trier University, looked for the panic in the record. His article "Lumière's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth," in The Moving Image (vol. 4, no. 1), concluded: "Contemporary reports of panic reactions among the audience cannot be found. The repeatedly reiterated anecdote that the contemporary audience felt physically threatened and therefore panicked must be relegated to the realm of historical fantasy." He traced the story through later journalism and standard film histories, which repeated it as known fact.

Loiperdinger made a second point. He argued that the famous "documentary" was partly staged. In his reading, people on the platform are "extras in a performance staged by Louis Lumière," instructed not to look at the camera, and some are Lumière family members (as summarized in the International Documentary Association's review).

The Lumières also protected the brand name in the United States. The Library of Congress holds the US trademark registration for "Cinématographe," No. 29,394, registered to A. Lumière & Ses Fils of Lyon on December 29, 1896.

The facts

• First paid public show Dec 28, 1895, Salon Indien du Grand Café; ten films listed, no train film. Institut Lumière, "La première séance publique payante" (archived 2008), web.archive.org
• Gorky's review, Nizhegorodski listok, July 4, 1896, signed "I. M. Pacatus"; quotes above. Leda Swan translation in Jay Leyda, Kino (1960), pp. 407 to 409, reproduced by Luke McKernan, Picturegoing, picturegoing.com
• Loiperdinger's conclusion and "historical fantasy" quote; staged-extras argument. Ray Zone, review in Documentary (IDA), documentary.org ; article record and opening pages, Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu (DOI 10.1353/mov.2004.0014)
• US trademark "Cinématographe," No. 29,394, registered Dec 29, 1896. LoC, loc.gov

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

All sections · Silent and Early Film