The Birth of Cinema

In June 1878, a debate was settled scientifically at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California. Leland Stanford, then governor of California, had argued that there was a moment when a galloping horse lifted all four hooves off the ground simultaneously — something impossible to confirm with the naked eye alone. He commissioned photographer Eadweard Muybridge to prove it.

Muybridge arranged 12 cameras along the sides of the track and rigged thin threads across the horse’s path to trigger the shutters automatically.^[1] The resulting sequence of photographs, “The Horse in Motion,” did more than confirm Stanford’s claim. When the 12 images were displayed in rapid succession, viewers witnessed an illusion of movement within them. It was merely a byproduct of a scientific experiment, yet the fundamental principle that would make cinema possible was already embedded in it.

Before Cinema: The Dream of Moving Images

Humanity had sought to tell stories with light and shadow long before that moment.

The Camera Obscura is an optical phenomenon known since at least the 5th century BC: a small hole in a darkened room projects an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite wall.^[2] With the addition of lenses in the 16th century and the development of portable box forms in the 17th, it also became a useful sketching tool for painters. The Camera Obscura was the direct ancestor of the 19th-century photographic camera.

The Magic Lantern was an early projection device developed around 1659 by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens.^[3] It projected painted glass slides onto a screen using a lens and a light source. By the late 18th century it had become famous through “Phantasmagoria” ghost-horror shows. Though it only projected static images, the Magic Lantern established the cultural template of an audience gathered in a dark space, sharing a collective experience while gazing at a screen — and that template became the prototype of cinema’s viewing culture.

In 1891, Thomas Edison and his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson completed the Kinetoscope.^[4] A coin-operated, single-viewer device using 35mm film, it caused an immediate sensation when first shown on Broadway in New York in 1894. But why did Edison never develop the technology into a projector for group audiences? Edison envisioned film as a visual counterpart to the music industry, and judged that a one-person coin-operated machine would generate more revenue.^[4] With group screenings, admission revenue per showing was fixed; with individual machines, a coin could be collected for every single viewing. Edison effectively closed the door on the future of cinema himself.

The Lumière Brothers and the Cinématographe

Auguste and Louis Lumière, born into a family of photographic equipment manufacturers in Lyon, France, brought about the innovation that would change film history.

On 13 February 1895, the Lumière brothers patented the Cinématographe.^[5] It was a 3-in-1 device that combined filming, developing, and projection in a single unit. It was smaller and lighter than Edison’s Kinetoscope, and consumed less film. But the decisive difference was not technical specifications — it was philosophy. The Lumières’ device was designed from the outset to project images onto a screen so that multiple people could watch simultaneously. Their conception was that cinema should be a collective experience, not a private amusement.

On 22 March 1895, the Lumière brothers screened a short film before an audience of around 200 at the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale in Paris. It was recorded as the first ever projected film screening in history.^[6]

The official birth date of cinema is 28 December 1895.^[7] On that evening, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in the basement of 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the world’s first paid public film screening took place. The admission fee was 1 franc, and approximately 40 audience members filled the seats. Ten short films were shown, each running about 50 seconds. The first was “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon” (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon).

Among the programme, “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat) had the greatest impact. Stories have been passed down of audience members leaping from their seats or crying out at the sight of a train racing toward the camera. Whether this anecdote is literally true has been debated among some historians,^[7] but what it demonstrates is clear: when moving images appeared before the public for the first time, the sheer strangeness and shock of them turned the act of watching into an event in itself.

From 1896, the Lumière brothers took their Cinématographe around the world — touring Mexico City, Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York, Palestine, Buenos Aires, and beyond.^[8] Cinema became not the invention of one region but the seed of a global popular culture. By the end of January 1896, the Cinématographe was earning an average of 2,500 to 3,000 francs per day.

The Spread and Development of Cinema

The transition from cinema as a simple recording medium to cinema as a form of art and entertainment was decisively shaped by Georges Méliès, a French magician-turned-filmmaker.

Méliès first became interested in film on 28 December 1895 — at that very first Grand Café screening. At the time he was running the “Théâtre Robert-Houdin” in Paris as a stage magician, and he tried to purchase a Lumière device but was refused. He eventually acquired a similar apparatus in England and began studying it himself.^[9]

What changed film history was an accident. While filming a Paris street scene, his camera jammed briefly and then started up again; when he developed the film, a bus had suddenly transformed into a hearse.^[9] In this chance event he discovered the potential of an editing technique he called the “stop trick.” From this starting point he went on to systematically develop techniques that became the prototypes of modern special effects: multiple exposures, time-lapse, fade-outs, and miniature models.

In 1902, Méliès produced “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (A Trip to the Moon), regarded as the first science fiction film in history.^[9] Inspired by the novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, this 12-minute film follows a group of astronomers who reach the moon by cannon. Méliès’s contribution lay not so much in the plot as in the methodology. He demonstrated that cinema need not be a tool for recording reality, but could become a medium of imagination — capable of making possible the impossible. Where the Lumière brothers had transported the world onto the screen, Méliès created an entirely new world upon it.

Sound, and Cinema as Industry

The next revolution in cinema was the introduction of sound. On 6 October 1927, Warner Bros. released “The Jazz Singer” in New York.^[10] Recorded as the first feature-length talkie, it included synchronised dialogue. In truth, the film contained only around two minutes of actual spoken dialogue, with the rest handled by intertitles — but lead actor Al Jolson’s improvised line “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” became the declaration of a new era.

So why 1927 specifically? The technology for synchronised sound had existed before then. What triggered the change was not technology but economic pressure. By the mid-1920s, the rapid spread of radio in the United States had caused cinema audiences to decline, and smaller studios including Warner Bros. needed a new breakthrough to survive the competition.^[10] “The Jazz Singer” was at once a technological achievement and an industrial gamble — one that paid off. The film recorded unprecedented box-office success in 1928, and within just three years the entire American film industry had converted to sound while silent film effectively ceased to exist.

During this period, Hollywood consolidated its position as the centre of the world film industry.^[11] The reasons Hollywood was chosen were multiple: stable year-round sunshine for outdoor filming, cheap land, and enough geographic distance from New Jersey to evade Edison’s patent litigation. In the 1920s and 1930s, the “Big Five” studios — Paramount, Fox, Warner, RKO, and MGM — built a vertically integrated studio system controlling not only production facilities but also distribution networks and theatre chains. This near-monopoly structure dominated the film industry until it was dismantled by a U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling in 1948.

The World Cinema Changed

Cinema created new conditions — in popular culture, in politics, and in art — that had not existed before.

The rise of actors as celebrities known across national borders was a phenomenon cinema created for the first time. Performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford became recognisable faces to audiences in countries they had never visited — a distinctive cultural phenomenon enabled by silent film’s ability to transcend language barriers. After the transition to sound, some stars found that their voices failed to match audience expectations, and their fame evaporated overnight. It was a case of technological change altering individual fortunes.

In the political sphere, too, cinema’s influence ran deep. Through the First and Second World Wars, governments around the world deployed film to stoke the will to fight and to shape depictions of the enemy. Meanwhile, in the 1920s, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein demonstrated through his theory of montage that the juxtaposition of images could plant emotions and ideas directly in the minds of viewers. It became unmistakably clear that cinema was not a neutral recording device but a language with intent.

Cinema as art developed a formal language of its own, distinct from literature or painting. Italian neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Satyajit Ray in India — diverse film movements emerged around the world, each entangled with the particular historical conditions of its own time and place. What they all shared was a single conviction: that the form of cinema is a uniquely powerful vessel for holding human experience.

What 28 December 1895 Left Behind

After that evening when 40 people gathered in the basement salon of the Grand Café in Paris and turned their eyes to the screen, a new kind of experience entered the world. Sitting side by side with strangers in a darkened space, seeing the same images at the same moment, laughing together and holding one’s breath together — that collective sensibility was something a book or a painting could not easily reproduce.

One hundred and thirty years on, cinema has spilled well beyond the theatre, dispersed into billions of private moments on television, streaming services, and smartphone screens. The original collective essence of cinema may have been diluted. Yet the power of moving images to touch human emotion directly — witnessed by accident in Muybridge’s experiment, first unveiled by the Lumière brothers in a dark basement, expanded into magic by Méliès — begins again every time a screen lights up.