Final Year Studio - Research - The Lumieres - Arrival of the Train La Ciotat

Video courtesy of http://uk.youtube.com/

Throughout the past one hundred years the medium of film has a had a close bond with the depiction of trains and railway transport and communication tehcnology. This affair started with a film in 1895 when the Lumieres, two brothers of photographic development fame , second only to Kodak, started making movie cameras. The idea originated from their father seeing a Kinetoscope in Paris and telling his sons 'You can do better." Over the years they trialed and developed machines that evetually and successfully started caputring movement, their first movie being that of workers leaving the Lumiere camera factory. With this the idea came the notion that thanks to film, memory itself was no longer elusive, changing our relationship with memories forever. For example watching an old film you may realise that today all the cast have passed on, but to you at that moment in time they are very much live, singing and dancing.

The real effect of the moving image wasn't felt until 1895 when the Lumiere's, 'Arrival of the Train La Ciotat' was shown to an unexpecting audience. Above is this short film which seems very mundane by today's standards but back then it provoked a feeling of fright as the audience jumped back out of their seats as if they were going to be run over by the train. One factor for this was the point that unlike traditional art mediums that still distanced the viewer from interacting with the piece, the moving image actually 'simulated the visual experience of mental states - images of memory, dream and fantasy.' After the introduction of the moving image our mind had to change and is still changing as with the implementaton the computer, it has to learn new ways in which to interact with aesthetic information.