ABSTRACT
Since that December day in 1895, when paying customers seated in the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris watched ten short projected motion pictures made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the histories of European cinema, modernism, and modernity have been intertwined. The first film on the programme, La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, and the more celebrated Lumière short released in 1896, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, depict scenes drawn from modern life: workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon and a train drawn by a steam locomotive arriving at the station in the coastal town of La Ciotat. In the decades that followed the public triumph of the Lumières in a small venue on the Boulevard des Capucines, the new medium of cinema not only represented modern life, it also helped shape it.
