Cinema at last! Arts, images and shows in France (1833-1907)

At the dawn of the XXᵉ century, cinema is just as much, if not more, a way of appropriating the world, bodies and representations, than a machine or a medium. An eminently social and popular new look, it was the product of an urban culture fascinated by the movement of beings and things and eager to make a spectacle of "modernity."