A video uploaded to YouTube has triggered a fervent debate among cinephiles, techno-geeks and filmmakers on different social media platform...
A video uploaded to YouTube has triggered a fervent debate among cinephiles, techno-geeks and filmmakers on different social media platforms. The video, a 4K high definition, upscaled ‘restoration’ of the short film Train Arriving at the Station at La Ciotat (popularly known as “Train arriving at the station”) – shot by the “fathers” of filmmaking – the Lumiere brothers.
The 50-second-long film is the best know among the constellation of over 1,400 actuality films produced by Auguste and Louis Lumiere between 1895 and 1896. These films marked the formal beginning of film history. In Train arriving at La Ciotat, a train is shown arriving at a station in France, capturing a group of men, women and children, some disembarking and others embarking to continue their journey. Given that the movie camera was an unknown animal, the people appear strangely oblivious to the filmmakers and their filming. Lumiere’s violated the actuality code by directing the passengers. This film absorbed generations of cinephiles trying to imagine how it may have impacted viewers, who’d never seen a cinematic representation of reality before and for whom people and things only moved in real life.
