Pioneering Lumière movie 'The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station' upscaled to 4K

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Credit: YouTube)
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Credit: YouTube)

Despite being just 50 seconds long, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is one of the most important pieces of filmmaking in cinema history.

Made by the pioneering brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895, the black and white reel shows a steam train arriving at a station in the coastal town of Ciotat, in the south of France.

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A single continuous shot, passengers board and disembark from the train, the camera held static.

Despite its seeming simplicity, it's the first example of many techniques used in filmmaking today, from angled camera shots and use of perspective to close-ups.

The now-dubious legend has it that when audiences saw the movie for the first time, they fled the room in panic, believing the train to be about to mow them down.

But whether this happened or not, audiences were enthralled by the the Lumière's moving images and early cinematic storytelling.

Now, the 120-year-old movie has been brought into the digital age, transformed and upscaled into 4K resolution and 60 frames per second.

YouTuber Denis Shiryaev has used 'neural networks' software Gigapixel AI to remake the film, and added sound too, with stunning results.

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The 'generative adversarial networks' that are used in the clip are a type of machine learning system, also seen in the increasing number of uncanny 'deep fake' videos, in which faces have been swapped in recognisable movie roles, with disturbingly real results.

The original movie can be seen below...