It would be misleading to credit the moving image to a single inventor; from Edison's Kinetoscope to Marey's chronophotography, many were approaching the same threshold at once. Yet the screening that Auguste and Louis Lumière of Lyon held for a paying audience at the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895 is often taken as cinema's public beginning: a single device — the Cinématographe — could film, print and project images collectively onto a screen.

The first films were everyday scenes a few minutes long, each a single shot: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station, a man watering his garden. There was no narrative; what astonished audiences was reality itself set in motion again. The tale that a train rushing towards the screen sent viewers fleeing is surely exaggerated, but the wonder the image produced was real.

Over the following decades cinema grew from these documentary beginnings into a language of its own — editing, montage, light and performance — to become the twentieth century's most pervasive narrative form and perhaps its most influential mass art. The Lumières did not foresee this future — they are said to have called film "an invention without a future" — yet the door they opened, by letting the time that photography had frozen flow again, permanently changed how humanity watches itself.