The 1860s and 1870s were an incubation period for cinema. A time when scientists, inventors, and showmen laid the precise technological and conceptual foundations that would make projected motion pictures possible. There was a shift from static optical toys toward the mechanical realisation of simulated movement.

In the 1860s, devices like Pierre Desvignes’s refinement of the Zoetrope and John Barnes Linnett’s patented kineograph (the flipbook) popularised the concept of persistence of vision among the general public. The 1870s were the same, fascination meeting limitation. Until in the late 1870s that Eadweard Muybridge successfully captured a running horse using a multi-camera setup. By inventing the Zoopraxiscope in 1879 to project these chronophotographic sequences, Muybridge effectively bridged the gap between sequential photography and true projection.

Figures born during the 1870s—including French visionaries Alice Guy-Blaché and Louis Feuillade, German Expressionist architect Robert Wiene, and foundational American and Swedish filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Victor Sjöström—spent their childhoods immersed in the twilight of proto-cinematic optical novelties. The technological leaps of the 1870s directly fostered the creative environment that allowed these future directors to transition cinema from an experimental scientific novelty into a global, industrialised art form at the turn of the century.