How did it all begin?

The cinema can be defined as the projection of a series of moving images on a screen for an audience. With this definition, the cinema is in fact one of the very few areas of the arts where one can pinpoint exactly WHEN and WHERE it began: 28th December 1895, a Saturday night, in the basement below the Grand Cafe at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris.

It began with the Lumiere Brothers of Lyon, who gave the first show of their Cinematographe before a paying audience. A setting of a hundred cafe chairs was arranged. The charge was one franc per person. The show was 20 minutes long.

Though it was very convenient to date the beginning of the cinema, the cinema was in fact a product of a complex evolution of the visual arts and technology, as well as culture and an audience.

Welcome to this blog dedicated to the history of the cinema and other forms of modern visual art. This blog aims to present the main trends in the development of cinema in an easy-to-read format through which readers can easily get a glimpse of the big picture in a nutshell.