One cylinder girder hurries out of the frame, the other stops at the cast-iron railing and directs his gaze from a bridge, the “Pont de l'Europe”, down to the Parisian train station Saint-Lazare, where the smoke and speed of the trains mark a new era ring in. Two speeds in a capital that was just being reorganized under Baron Haussmann in terms of urban planning, which the painter Gustave Caillebotte, pioneer and patron of the Impressionists, preferred to capture in unusually trimmed perspectives. In the same year, 1876, two years after the construction of the railway bridge, another large-format version was created. This time a worker looks down at the train tracks, other passers-by seem to be walking towards the viewer on the sidewalk.

One cannot avoid recognizing the influence of photography in these pictorial inventions.

In 2012, the Frankfurt Schirn dedicated an exhibition to this aspect of Caillebotte's work.

And also in “Finally cinema!” In the Musée d'Orsay, the show curated by Dominique Païni, the former director of the Cinémathèque française, alongside Paul Perrin and Marie Robert, on the cultural and historical prehistory of cinema, refers Caillebotte with his momentary bows to modern technology not only on the competition with photography at the time, which claimed the field of depicting the movable.

Cinema as the culmination of a process

His observing strollers also anticipated the type of spectator who, in the dark of the cinema, would soon push the zeitgeist of mobility to the extreme. The longing for moving images, according to the show's thesis, was preceded by a transitional phase in which suitable presentation rooms were still a long way off.

This is where the curators come in, with Charles Baudelaire, who is ready to play and who wrote about the new optical stimulations from thaumatropes, phenakistiscopes, stereoscopes, praxinoscopes and other cinematographers: “There is a kind of toy that has been multiplying for some time and about me can say neither good nor bad. I'm talking about the science toy. The main flaw with these toys is that they are expensive. But they can amuse for a long time and develop the taste of wonderful and surprising effects in the brain. "

In the context of these inventions, the dense exhibition links the image production of the nineteenth century with fifty paintings, forty drawings, twenty-five sculptures, prints and posters and more than 230 photographs, but also books, magazines, postcards and bizarre machines to form an exuberantly staged school of vision. 1833-1907, the dates mentioned in the title, leave no doubt about it: retrospectively, cinema can be seen as the culmination of a long process.

In the course, which jumps through the objects, one finds fingerprints, dioramas and sporty movement recordings, which help the act, which has been the master discipline of the fine arts for centuries, to an unfamiliar immediacy.

This is followed by silent films by film pioneers such as the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Léonce Perret and Alice Guy.

They are projected on fragile canvases in the middle of the room and here and there reveal the influence of impressionistic light perception.

Elaborate architecture makes it possible to literally watch voyeurs through keyholes as they watch scantily clad women in their morning toilet.

War films are juxtaposed with military paintings by Édouard Detaille.