L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat

The advent of the cinematic age strictly speaking begins with, precisely, L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1895) as recorded by the Lumière brothers, a steam train that we could say departed, which is to say first arrived, one hundred years earlier (the first working model of a steam locomotive having been constructed in 1794, the same year that Kant published “The End of all Things”, in which he wonders why it is that human beings expect an end of the world at all, that is, that “a time will arrive in which all alteration […] ceases […], the whole of nature will be rigid and as it were petrified”, against which thinking would be “a reflection that can occur only in time”). In Kant’s age, the source of such negative collective protention was millennial divination; a century later, with the image of the steam train, awareness of the entropic aspect of what would come to be called the Anthropocene was only beginning to dawn. But if this is the question of the opening of a new cosmology, it remains significant that the movement of this arrival is first shown to us in 1895, an exhibition the purported shock of which for contemporary audiences is legendary, if not mythological. It is this combination of the thermodynamic event and the cinematic event that ultimately and fundamentally and collectively exposes the arrow of time – that is, to a public. And this same evolution from chronophotography to cinematography also made possible, in the field of production, the analysis of time and motion that ultimately led to the science of calculating and organizing gestural behaviour in order to maximize the efficiency of human labour – that is, that ultimately led to the massive acceleration of the process of the entropization of human work.