In the 19th century, industrialisation brought about a large number of technological developments. In 1826, Frenchman Josep Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph on his parents’ estate, the first surviving daguerreotype depicting people was taken twelve years later. This effectively ended the era of painting as the leading visual medium of civilisation. Within a short time, the new photo-realist pictures learned to move: the predecessors of modern film projectors include the camera obscura – a camera with a small hole through which the incoming light falls as an inverted image onto a transparent surface in a darkened space – and the laterna magica – a projection device for translucent lantern images.

After the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge came to public attention in 1887 with a series of photographs of a galloping horse that simulated movement, several inventors competed with each other in the following years to produce the first working film camera. Ultimately it was the brothers Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948) who entered the history books as the fathers of modern film-making. On 28 December 1895 they held the first public film showing in Paris. Recordings such as the approach of a train caused some members of the audience to panic and flee the auditorium. In the years that followed, film-making moved on swiftly from the depiction of mundane, everyday scenes and developed a vast range of styles and genres. Technological advances saw sound and colour added in the 1930s.