Projected motion pictures were displayed to a paying audience for the first time in Paris in December 1895. The Parisians would go for a regular pilgrimage to take a closer look at the Lumière Brother's invention and get amazed at what they saw.

In the Swedish magazine Fotografisk Tidskrift there were reports of these motion pictures, "being shown on a small theatre. The performance lasted only twenty minutes. But within these narrow frames and short amount of time there is a whole world on display. No stillborn stills, but life and movement - a world that moves and lives, quite as in real life. There is a railway train, the engine driver gets out and the arriving passengers are rushing in and onto the platform."

It is a film historical myth that contemporary audiences were terrified of this on-rushing train. Before 1895 they enjoyed looking at projected laterna magica pictures, as well as stereo images, and with eyes wide open they watched the panoramic buildings or humorous sequences in small peep shows. As current research of early cinema has shown, film should be seen as one medium among others. Thus, the history of motion pictures does not begin on a Parisian boulevard in December 1895, but long before and in different places.