When the Lumière brothers screened one of their first moving pictures – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station – at the Eden theatre at the close of the 19th century, it was said that some of those present were so shocked by the life-like images that they leapt from their seats in terror to flee the oncoming steam locomotive.

On Wednesday, more than a century on, these early black-and-white silent films lasting less than a minute were given top billing in the newly renovated Eden, which claims to be the world’s first, and oldest surviving, public cinema.

The historic theatre at La Ciotat, 20 miles east of Marseille, which later played host to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, has undergone a €6.5m (£5.5m) refurbishment that has more than restored its former glory.

Before Hollywood became the worldwide symbol of the movie industry, there was La Ciotat – a small, picturesque town on the Mediterranean that lays claim to being the birthplace of modern cinema.

There were already machines to record moving images when Auguste and Louis Lumière, the sons of a photographer-turned-photographic manufacturer, based in Lyon, came up with their Cinématographe Lumière, a wooden box that could not only take images, but also develop and project them on to a screen.

After patenting their invention, the brothers showed their short films first to an audience of 33 people at the Grand Café in Paris in 1895, then at the Lumière family summer home, a magnificent chateau in La Ciotat, and finally at the local Eden theatre.

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