In the beginning, movies had no idea what movies were supposed to even be. At the very dawn of the 20th century the medium was an experiment, which meant that everything produced within it was even more of an experiment. Pictures were now moving and what was that supposed to mean? No one knew and so one could say it didn’t really mean anything at the beginning, so filmmakers simply made pictures that moved. What more can you say about the Lumieres’ mythmaking L’Arrivée d’un Train? It’s one long shot of a train arriving at a station. A picture that moved.

The legend is that audience members at the L’Arrivée d’un Train screening in January 1896 were terrified. A 1994 piece in Der Spiegel recalls, “it caused fear, terror, even panic.” The camera was placed right near the track and so the train, hovering above the crowd even larger than life, looked to be in imminent danger of tumbling right off the screen and crushing them all under several tons of hot iron and fire. Keep in mind that trains were also near their beginning as a technology—terrifying countryside scouts of the industrial revolution.

Trains and film were a natural pairing, explains the British Film Institute’s Christian Hayes: “In the train, cinema found a technology to rival its own wonders, and early train films are often records of one modern technology marveling at the other.”

The Lumieres’ single shot of an arriving train was quaint compared to what came next: “phantom rides.” For several years beginning in 1897, cinema was ruled by high-speed ghost trips along the world’s railroads. These were single shot, very short (just a couple of minutes) films shot from the perspective of the very front of a train. They were shot by actual cameramen going all-in for the cause, strapping themselves and their gear to the front bumper of the train engines. Passing through a tunnel was the dominant cliche of the films.

From the train’s very front, “the film would appear to be moving by aid of an invisible force,” writes Hayes, “hence the name ‘phantom ride’ by which they soon came to be known.” The first of these is below, The Haverstraw Tunnel, released by the American Mutoscope Company, the United States’ first movie production outfit.  A piece in the Worcester Telegram had this to say of one showing: “[t]he famous Haverstraw tunnel picture makes the hit which has been usual with its presentation since the pictures were first put on, and the audiences leave the theater with a feeling that they have seen something unusually fine, which really is the case.”

The phantom ride “genre” saturated theaters for the next several years, eventually becoming mutating into possibly the world’s first virtual reality platforms. The films moved from theaters to amusement  parks, where audiences were surrounded by fake railroad coaches designed to shake with the help of crews and featuring sound effects and wind machines.

These were known as Hale’s Tours of the World, a product patented in 1904. Both forms of the phantom ride phenomenon declined quickly. By 1899, phantom rides bad become multi-shot and by the release 1910’s nearly 15 minute A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway from Baker St to Uxbridge and Aylesbury, it was clear the medium film has raced ahead of the genre. A multi-shot extended phantom ride just became dull and, let’s face it, how long can you hope to hold an audience with a camera strapped to the front of a train?

@everydayelk