On December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien Du Grand Café, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière transformed the industry of entertainment when they did a demonstration of their new invention. The brothers projected a series of images on a screen, but those images were nothing like a normal slide-show, those images were moving as if they were alive. While the idea of motion pictures wasn't new to the audience (Edison's Kinetoscope was a popular entertainment), the devise's ability to project them on a screen was something they had never seen before. 10 short films of barely a minute of duration each were shown that day, and the invention proved to be an enormous success for the brothers, so immediately they decide to keep making movies in order to improve their catalog. One of those new movies would become the first iconic image of the new art.
"L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat" (literally, "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat") is without a doubt, one of the most famous films in history, as its image of a train arriving to the station, passing very close to the camera as it slows its speed, quickly became an iconic scene of the new invention. While initially conceived as just another one of the brothers' many "actuality films", it's clear that director Louis Lumière knew exactly where to put his camera in order to get the best image of the event as the film shows he had a good idea of the use of perspective (many consider it a study about long shot, medium shot and close-up). As a side-note, this is the film that originated the classic urban legend about people running away scared from the arriving train, thinking it was a real locomotive what was appearing on the screen.
While this famous tale has been debunked by historians as a fake story, it's existence is another testament of this movie's importance and continuous influence on the younger generations. Among the many different art-forms that we can find today, cinema is perhaps the one that better reflects the modern society that arose after the industrial revolution of the 19th Century; because, as painting and sculpture did before, it has become a keeper of the most representative icons of our history. "L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat" was not the first movie the brothers screened, and it definitely wasn't the first movie ever made, but despite those details, the image of the arriving train represents the first icon of cinema, and literally, the arrival of a new art form. 9/10
