• Director: Robert W. Paul
  • Year: 1901
  • Runtime: 1m

The only surviving sequence of a longer film where a country yokel sees a movie for the first time in which a train approaches and he panics and runs away.

It feels somewhat elitist but the yokel hamming it up is such an extreme parody and so far removed for our time it's hard for me to see it as anything more than a quaint artefact.

What's more interesting is that it's 1901 and they're already making fun of that story of audiences getting freaked out by what they see on screen—a story which is now widely accepted to be apocryphal.

The purveyors of this new technology very much want this unlikely story to be true, though, which is why we're seeing it on film here. See, if you're freaked out by cinema—and there are valid reasons why you might be that don't involve you thinking that what you're seeing on screen is real—then you're obviously an idiot who doesn't get it.

I wonder how long it will be until we see the first AI-generated film making fun of we unsophicates who vehemently dislike it?