I’ve often seen it claimed that when the Lumiere brothers first screened their film of a train coming in to the station, the audience fled from it in terror. Unused to film, the believed the train was really in the room with them.
Greg Merritt, in Celluloid Mavericks, writes that:
“When [Robert] Flaherty first projected rushes [of Nanook of the North], one viewer, Nanook, the film’s star, harpooned the screen in an attempt to kill the image of a walrus. Every native in the room grabbed the rope to make sure the celluloid mammal didn’t get away.”
I’ve always found these stories of such profound moving-image ignorance to be a bit fishy. Granted that people weren’t familiar with the process. The image is still silent and in black and white – and I suspect that image quality wasn’t the sharpest in either situation, for that matter.
Is there any real documentation for this kind of reaction? Any other tales of cinema neophytes completely misunderstanding what was going on?
He thought he was the King of America, where they pour Coca-Cola just like vintage wine.