Rethinking the Image

Image source: https://www.50ansdepubs.com/Pubs/pub.php?p=AudioVideo/Grundig/2422 (Accessed: 20 December 2025). © Grundig

In January 1896, the pioneering Lumière brothers showed their 50-second short film titled Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat) at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, in what was one of the first public film screenings.^[1][2] It is commonly said that the audience ran from their seats in panic upon seeing the approaching train – an urban legend that has been supported by some historians and disputed by others.^[2][3]

This account has been described as the ‘founding myth’ of cinema,^[3] and its reverberations are evidenced throughout contemporary visual culture. The idea of a moving object or living being emerging from the screen is a recurring trope in popular visual media, used to notable effect in horror films such as The Ring (2002) and in advertisements for televisions.

In this French-language press advertisement by Grundig, the consumer electronics brand, a male figure flees from a crocodile as it emerges from a television screen in a scene which echoes the myth of the Lumière train. Here, it is adapted into a metaphor for the immersive audiovisual experience offered by the brand’s televisions.

In the context of this scene, the hat and boots of the fleeing figure appear to form a direct visual reference to the eponymous protagonist of the 1986 action comedy film, Crocodile Dundee. The flora in the top-left of the image, meanwhile, is equally reminiscent of the film’s iconography, adding an element of visual interest to an otherwise nondescript backdrop.

There is a slight but perceptible element of humour in the image – much of which is concentrated within the depiction of the human figure. His falling hat, the acute angle of his boot, and the slight motion blur that accompanies both items are all indicators of the speed of his exit from the scene and his likely startlement upon sight of the crocodile.

With its left eye shooting a coy glance at the viewer and its relaxed jaws almost resembling a knowing smile, the crocodile takes on a personality which is both placid and mischievous. These details add to the image’s humour while tempering its shock value; here, just as in the Lumière film from a hundred years earlier, the threat is a mere illusion, despite how real it may seem.

The fact that this advertisement makes indirect reference to the Lumière brothers’ early screenings almost exactly a century after they took place may not be a coincidence. The centenary of cinema was given considerable attention throughout Europe,^[3] not least in France,^[4] and would have been highly topical at the time of the advertisement’s publication.

Through the intertextuality and visceral impact of its imagery, this advertisement appeals to an audience which is sensitive both to visual culture and to the merits of technological advancement.

[1] MoMA (no date) Louis Lumière. Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat). Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/307080 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).

[2] Cooper, A. (no date) Did One of the First Film Audiences Panic Over Footage of a Train? Available at: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/first-film-audiences-panic-footage-train.htm (Accessed: 20 December 2025).

[3] Loiperdinger, M. and Elzer, B. (2004) ‘Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image, 4(1), pp. 89-118. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/171125 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).

[4] Reuters (no date) France: Open Air Premier of Film by Lumiere Brothers Mark Centenary of French Cinema. Available at: https://reuters.screenocean.com/record/646267 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).