The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Louis Lumière at the family station in La Ciotat: a train enters on the diagonal, grows, stops; passengers step down and walk the platform. Fifty seconds. The Catalogue Lumière lists more than one take; the familiar print (no. 653) was shot in the summer of 1897. Martin Loiperdinger found no contemporary report of a stampede. The founding story is later: writers converting the locomotive's increase in size into a panic the Grand Café never recorded.