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Q. There are several reports about extreme reactions of early cinema audiences that I find hard to believe. It is said that viewers of the first movies were frightened by what they saw, such as moving images of an incoming train.
Bob Seidensticker writes in FutureHype: "[When] the first movies were shown publicly, one presented a scene at the seashore -- no monsters, no invading army, just waves rolling in along a beach. The crowd was terrified. They ran from the makeshift movie theater to escape the onrushing water." While this makes a great story, I wonder if film historians can confirm it. It is cited so often that it feels like an urban myth, allowing us modern people to mock our oh-so-naive ancestors.
Hanno Zulla, Hamburg, Germany
A. Your instincts are correct. I appealed for an authoritative answer from the esteemed film historians David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson of the University of Wisconsin. David replies:
"This is a favorite bete noir of Kristin's and mine. One of my students, Michael Newman, now out teaching on his own, wrote an excellent and thorough blog entry on this sort of myth here: >zigzigger.blogspot.com/2007/02/film-history-fakelore.html
Newman's blog also demolishes several other fondly held beliefs, some of them passed along as facts by such as me. For example, he questions whether (1) "The Great Train Robbery" was the first film to tell a story; (2) D.W. Griffith invented or discovered "film language," (3) "The Jazz Singer" was the first sound film, (4) "Citizen Kane" is the undisputed heavyweight champion of cinematic masterpieces, (5) John Cassavetes (or Sam Fuller, or Andy Warhol) is the "father of independent cinema," and (6) "Jaws" was the first summer blockbuster and its success killed the more authentic auteur cinema of everyone's beloved early 1970s.
