As a child, I was fascinated by the idea of being thrown back in time. I especially loved those stories where a time-traveller goes back and convinces the primitive population of his obvious divinity with only the few artefacts of modern life that he happened to have on him.

Cigarette lighters. Cassette players. Unlikely knowledge of the next solar eclipse.

I couldn’t help thinking of those poor cavemen when I read this paragraph in a recent piece on cinema and horror in The Guardian:

“It seems obvious now that one of the inherent functions or opportunities that always faced the movies was scaring the living daylights out of us. When the train came into the station in the Lumiere brothers’ early film programme, some in the audience ran out of the theatre screaming. They thought the engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them!”

Everyone’s heard this story, over and over again. In 1895, Louis Lumière showed his short film Arrival of the Train and terrified the audience, causing them to shout, scream, and leap from their chairs in panic. This wasn’t a documentary; it was black magic.

Writing for The Moving Image journal in 2004, Martin Loiperdinger says that as the crowd’s reaction has been told and retold, it has become “the founding myth of the medium, testifying to the power of film over its spectators.” He concludes:

“Paradoxically, Arrival of the Train has come to represent both the modernity of Louis Lumière’s first documentary films, their visual power to shock audiences, and a precursor of Direct Cinema. However, neither attribute really stands up to film historical analysis.”

So maybe the crowd weren’t frightened after all, and a few excited ooohs and aaahs have been exaggerated, purple-monkey-dishwasher-style, into something more memorable. I can see why we want to believe. It’s not only an object lesson in cinematic oomph; it also lets us feel superior to those primitive audiences, sitting in the dark, screaming endearingly at the flickering images before them.

In a subsequent issue of the same journal, Ray Zone writes about a fact that seems like something everyone but those cavemen and me must’ve already known.

Why is it never mentioned, he wonders, that only two months before this infamous screening of Arrival of the Train, “a runaway locomotive at the Montmartre Station in Paris broke through a second story wall and plummeted down into the street”?

This allows the crowd their own history, rather than requiring them to be blank-faced witnesses of oncoming modernity. Maybe they weren’t thinking: oh god, this Lumière wizard has conjured a train from thin air that now rushes forth to kill us one and all!

Maybe they winced and thought: too soon.