Film
Overthink
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The Myth of the Famous Lumiere Brothers Train Pulling Into the Station at La Sotate
The myth of the famous lumier brothers train pulling into the station at la sotate is a myth. The idea that people ran screaming from the room, which i've definitely heard and then passed on to my students, turns out to be just speculation from thinkers in more recent decades about how they probably reacted in panic because they'd never seen anything like this before. So yes, it is a myth in the sense that we don't know if people literally got up from their seats and started running, as a lot of accounts of the origins of film indicate. But as a myth, i think this story makes perfect sense in its context and also of its context.
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