The early years of the 1890s were dominated by Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson’s Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device introduced in 1894 that allowed only one spectator at a time to watch short loops filmed in the world’s first movie studio, the Black Maria.

However, the paradigm shifted permanently on December 28, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first commercial, public screening of their Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris. By inventing a lightweight, portable machine that functioned as a camera, printer, and projector all in one, the Lumières transformed cinema into a collective, theatrical experience. Almost simultaneously, Georges Méliès recognised the potential of the medium, and started pulling it from the Lumières’ documentary-style “actualities” to pioneer special effects, double exposures, and constructed fantasy.

Those born in the 1890s—including monumental figures such as Fritz Lang (1890), Jean Renoir (1894), John Ford (1894), Howard Hawks (1896), and Sergei Eisenstein (1898)—were the first generation of filmmakers whose entire lives ran parallel to the existence of projected film.