A man from the country decides to check out the show at a movie theater and his inability to tell fact from fiction leads to chaos. Paul poked fun at the motion pictures just six years into the history of projected cinema. In place of actually viewing films beyond, say, A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery , we have a selection of pop knowledge factoids. The lone firsthand account of panic during a screening was shared some twenty years after the event and no other evidence has surfaced.
Viewers who shared their experiences when they were fresh agreed that the train scene was thrilling but not actually frightening. But the idea of an unsophisticated viewer mistaking fiction for reality was too good of a gag to ignore and pioneering English filmmaker R. Paul made a comedy short on the subject in , The Countryman and the Cinematograph.
Nowadays, of course, we are far too sophisticated to mix up cinematic fiction and reality. That would be ridiculous. The film opens with a gentleman from the country leaping to get a closer look at the picture show on the screen.
His smock and hat identify him as a yokelβthe smock had been out of favor for decades by and was seen as pure bumpkin attire. We might compare the costuming in this context to a modern movie portraying the same type of character in a mullet, trucker hat and overalls. The countryman is amused by the first film, a dancer, and skips along with her performance.
But then there is footage of a train chugging along the tracks toward him! The countryman flees in terror but returns to see a country romance playing out on the screen. The film cuts off here.
