Louis Lumière stood his camera on the platform at an angle to the track: the train starts as a speck at the far right, comes straight at the lens and passes it at the lower left. One shot, about fifty seconds. Head-on it would only grow; side-on it would only slide past; at an angle it does both. But there is no record that anyone ran: no police report, no press report, nothing in the Lumières' letters. The film historian Martin Loiperdinger looked, and called the panic cinema's founding myth. And the version everyone knows was shot in the summer of 1897.

The platform, the train, the people and the screening room are our own models, built and lit in code.

One camera, one angle, and a story that ran faster than the train. Would you have flinched?

Sources: Martin Loiperdinger, "Lumière's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth", The Moving Image 4:1 (2004).
Music: our own, played on GarageBand instruments. Sounds: made by us.