Text 1

When the 50-second-long film Arrival of the Train—which depicts what its title says, a train pulling into a station—was first shown publicly in 1896, spectators, naïve to the new medium of film and seeing a train appearing to come directly at them, leaped from their seats and fled the room. This moment marks a major cultural shift: a new way of representing and seeing the world had arrived with that train, and nothing would ever be the same.

Text 2

The fact that there is no contemporary evidence that the first audience of Arrival of the Train was alarmed has not stopped the story from becoming canonical, even among film historians. But that phenomenon itself is highly revealing. Our belief that the coming of film was transformative is so strong that we invented and keep retelling a founding myth that divides cultural history into a (naïve) “before” and (sophisticated) “after.”