P3D L'Arrivee du Train

[Ray Zone <r3dzone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On June 21, Dale Walsh wrote:

>Considering another potential fallacy, I just saw Encounter in the Third
>Dimension,
>which I found highly enjoyable.  However they say that the pioneers of
>Cinema, the
>Lumiere Brothers, shot their first film using two cameras for 3D.  The famous
>sequence of the train coming into the station.  Was this shot in 3D?  I
>had never
>heard that before.

Ray Zone responds:

The film in question "L'arrivee du Train a Ciotat" was not the very first
film the Lumiere brothers shot in 1895 with their cinematographe camera but
was among the first.  It was initially shot with a single camera and
exhibited flat.

RM Hayes in his book "3-D Movies" (McFarland & Co., North Carolina &
London: 1989) dates the stereoscopic version of "Arrivee du Train" from
1903 stating (p. 132) that it was "Filmed in Stereoscopic Lumiere (dual
35mm printed single strip anaglyphic)" and that it "was released in France
in 1903 but never shown theatrically in the U.S."

James L. Limbacher in his excellent book "Four Aspects of the Film"
(Brussel & Brussel: 1969) provides two different dates on which the Lumiere
brothers exhibited stereoscopic films, 1903 and 1935.

However, in the book "Auguste and Louis Lumiere:  Letters, Inventing the
Cinema" (Faber & Faber, London: 1994) with a footnote on page 142 it is
stated that "Louis Lumiere had a persistent interest in 3-D images.  On 3
November 1900, he took out a patent for stereoscopic moving images but it
was not until 1936 that he organized public screenings of 3-D films."  A
chronology of Lumiere brothers work in this book (p. 314) gives 1935 as the
date in which "Louis remakes 'Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat' in three
dimensions."

All of which points up the potential chains of misinformation that can
arise in stereographic histories and how important it is to provide the
sources from which we get our information.







* * * * * * * *
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