Ten Milestones in French Cinema

1895 - The Birth of Cinema

The question "who invented cinema" is one in which there will never be consensus, for within the span of a few years in the late 1800s a series of machines that projected moving images began to appear worldwide. Yet on December 28, 1895 cinema as we know it today was born thanks to the efforts of two brothers, August and Louis Lumière. Though there had been prior documented projections, the ten one-minute films shown in the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines was not a technological milestone, but the first ever combination of the three Ps -- public, paying and projection - the very model that continues to this day.