Panorama pris d'un train en marche

Panorama From Top of a Moving Train (1898)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

aka Panorama pris d'un train en marche

There's nothing overly special here but the camera is set on top of a train and for a minute we get to see various parts of the town, which it is traveling through. I've seen a lot of films like this and today they seem either strange or worthless but I guess at the time they were released people got a kick out of being able to see this stuff. There are a few bridges that the train travels under and I guess you would call these the best moments of the film. If you're looking for any of that magic from Melies then you'd be best to start somewhere else. This is historically interesting but that's about all.

"Panorama from Atop a Moving Train" is a rather atypical film for master filmmaker Georges Méliès. Most of his films involved film trickery and magic...but this one is more or less exactly what it says...no tricks involved. So, in other words, a poor cameraman was standing or sitting or kneeling atop a train as it rolled along! Fortunately, it didn't appear to be going all that fast...but imagine if you were the poor sap who had to be up there...hand-cranking away to make this film you can see today on YouTube!

While this film is not particularly exciting, for 1898 it was...and must have wowed audiences as they watched.

It's hard to understand exactly why Georges Méliès was still occasionally filming documentary shorts by 1898. Back in 1896 it was excusable--after all, Méliès hadn't yet 'discovered' (as some people like to believe) the film edit or any of the special effects you see in later works of his. By 1898, however, he was well aware of this...so why was he still doing things like putting cameras on trains?

Part of this could have been he had not yet realized all the stuff he could produce using this simple editing concept. Like others of the time, he was still playing with the invention, trying new things... In this case, the camera is on top of the train, not at the front of the locomotive like other Phantom Ride films of the time (a Phantom Ride being a view from on top of a train as shot by the camera). Likely he hadn't yet tried such a gimmick yet. It would take a bit longer for him to realize the potential of the substitution splice.

This movie still retains some interest for at least film historians because it's one of the few rare documentary films by the director that still survives today. Many of his earlier, 1896 and 1897 documentaries cease to exist. That said, it's hard to understand exactly how film historians are able to identify this as being a Méliès short since so many similar movies were made at the time by just about everybody else. It's interesting in these regards, but not really a typical Méliès film and something the average person now will want to skip.

With the simple mounting of a camera on a train for a minute or so, it would have given the audience a feeling of speed in a cinematic sense. While the results are relatively dull to us, there is a bit of anxiety produced as the train encounters various visuals along the way. Still, it isn't much of a film and probably was put in the memory banks for future use.