{"id":134,"date":"2016-11-07T14:39:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T19:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2016\/11\/07\/no-a-silent-film-of-a-train-probably-didnt-cause-mass-hysteria\/"},"modified":"2016-11-07T14:39:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T19:39:00","slug":"no-a-silent-film-of-a-train-probably-didnt-cause-mass-hysteria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2016\/11\/07\/no-a-silent-film-of-a-train-probably-didnt-cause-mass-hysteria\/","title":{"rendered":"No, a silent film of a train probably didn&#8217;t cause mass hysteria"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably heard this one before: back during the dawn of motion pictures, a short movie showing a train heading for the camera caused audiences to freak out and try to run from the theater. It&#8217;s a funny anecdote about how much of an impact film made \u2013 and it makes those audiences look pretty naive.<\/p>\n<p>But as Atlas Obscura&#8217;s Eric Grundhauser explains, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/did-a-silent-film-about-a-train-really-cause-audiences-to-stampede\">this probably never actually happened<\/a>. We can trace the story to a specific film (1898&#8217;s <i>Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat<\/i>), the lack of circumstantial evidence like news stories and police accounts of a mobscene suggests this was just a myth. If anything, it was a metaphor for the powerful impact of film, one that spread so quickly it was parodied in a 1901 short (embedded above).<\/p>\n<p>So although audiences probably didn&#8217;t actually panic, the mental image was real. It might&#8217;ve been exaggerated shorthand. Think of it like a turn-of-the-century straw man argument.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably heard this one before: back during the dawn of motion pictures, a short movie showing a train heading for the camera caused audiences to freak out and try to run from the theater. It&#8217;s a funny anecdote about how much of an impact film made \u2013 and it makes those audiences look pretty [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[168,212,311,377],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history-lesson","tag-links-of-interest","tag-silent-film","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}