Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the audience fled in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
This film was not included on the tern-film program screened at the Grand Café in December 1895. Though shot in the summer of 1895, it was not screened until 1896. Technically, it was not one of Louis Lumière's earliest films: Of the roughly 60 films that Lumière shot, he had already completed about 25 between March and the end of summer. French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, however (also a former head of the Lumière Institute in Lyons), calls it "the first masterpiece," citing Lumière's keen sense of photographic composition, particularly the use of movement along the diagonal to enhance the impression of depth. In deference to the widely circulated anecdote about panic among the film's first audiences, Tavernier also calls this film "the first horror movie," but any factual basis to the anecdote itself remains highly problematic. Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that "movies are the train, not the station," suggesting that the film becomes "cinema"--a "moving picture"--only when the viewer engages imaginatively with the characters who have been moving with the train rather than identifying with the characters waiting on the platform. Where, for example, have the travelers come from? Did they have adventures there? Why have their adventures brought them to the station at La Ciotat?
Generally considered to be among the first motion pictures in modern history (although more an experiment from the Lumière brothers to use their 'invention' of film, it shows a train arriving at a passenger station--and that's it).
Included in the Toronto International Film Festival's Essential 100, movies every cinephile should see.
The arrival of the French brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiére in June 29th in New York has dealt Thomas Alva Edison a hard blow, for the first time the American public was able to see Arrival of a Train in Ciotat Station and the comic gem The Waterer Watered both highly appreciated by the public.