For cinema, the equivalent moment came on December 28, 1895, with the first public showing of the Cinematographe Lumiere at the Grand Cafe in Paris. Thirty-five spectators witnessed the screening of Louis and Auguste Lumiere’s film of workers leaving the family factory in Lyon, shot nine months earlier. They included reporters from Le Radical and La Poste, who had the task of trying to explain this “Cinematographe” to readers who could have no conception of it: a photograph which is suddenly animated, movement captured on the spot, life itself. Le Radical’s reporter managed to see “a complete illusion of real life”, including colour and perspective. For the writer from La Poste, the importance of the invention was that it would allow ordinary members of the public to capture their loved ones on film and, almost literally, to revive them after they were dead: “Death will cease to be absolute”.

At least, no one can accuse these early spectators of underestimating the significance of the event. Modern historians of cinema usually consider the Lumieres’ first exhibition as the conclusion of a prehistory that dates back to the 16th-century camera obscura. The invention of cinematography was conditional on a succession of other inventions, particularly the magic lantern for projecting slides, photography and celluloid film (glass plates would have obvious disadvantages for projection at 24 frames per second). It also required an understanding of how motion can be simulated, which is why histories of cinema usually begin by talking about the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope and other toys for giving pictures the appearance of motion, as well as Pierre Janssen’s “photographic revolver” and Eadweard Muybridge’s use of multiple cameras, which photographed movement as a succession of still images. Theoretically, what has been broken down into its component parts, can afterwards be reassembled.

The effort to reassemble the pictures and exhibit them went on in various countries during the 1880s; hence the rival claims of Thomas Edison, William Friese-Greene, Etienne Marey and Louis Le Prince to have been first in the field. Edison’s life was commemorated on film by Clarence Brown (1940), Friese-Greene’s claim as the inventor of cinema was the subject of The Magic Box (John Boulting 1951), but no one so far seems to have seen the potential of Le Prince, who vanished mysteriously while in the midst of a patent battle with Edison. There was probably nothing criminal involved, but you can be sure that this is not how Oliver Stone would tell it.

Meanwhile, Edison and his employee William Dickson were fighting for sole rights over the process, having exhibited films in the Kinetoscope and the Black Maria from the early 1890s; but these were devices for individual viewing, more elaborate forms of the “What the Butler Saw” machines. However, one early production, Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1891), is sometimes claimed to be the first true film, brief though Fred Ott’s performance was. So did the first film precede the invention of cinema? It was the Lumi res who, in February 1895, patented the Cinematographe, a combined camera, printer and projector, which they demonstrated to scientific societies in Paris and Lyon before inviting their first paying audience to the Grand Cafe.

Among the earliest members of the Lumiere audience was Jean Cocteau. Six years old in 1895, he recalled (more than 60 years later, in a speech at the Cannes Festival) being taken “to a basement across the street from (the shop) Old England” to see L’Entreee d’un train en gare, L’Arroseur arrose and Les Bebes sur la plage. The first of these, showing a steam locomotive approaching the camera, appeared so natural to some members of the audience that they fled away from the screen or ducked under their chairs. L’Arroseur arrose is a sketch about a garden hose, often considered the first film comedy, though it could more plausibly be a premature entry for You’ve Been Framed: it is comforting to know that slapstick has not advanced at all in the past 100 years.

The people who feature in some early films are clearly intrigued by the film-maker, and point at him as if not realising that he is recording their gestures. Others, like the peasant raking hay in one early Lumi re genre scene, is so bemused that he stares directly into the camera, walking towards it and waving his rake quite unconvincingly a foot or so above the ground. We may be more sophisticated in our attitude to it, but the camera-eye still fascinates us.

But what was it for? “A wonderful and dangerous weapon in a poet’s hands, ” Cocteau would later call it. Others in those early days thought that the technology of cinema might prove to be mainly of interest to science: revealing processes that the eye could not follow, recording operations as training films for surgeons, and so on. As Tom Dewe Matthews notes in his history of censorship (Censored, Chatto and Windus 1994), the first British film to be banned was not pornographic (though film-makers were already exploring that use of cinema), but Charles Urban’s 1898 film of bacteria in a piece of Stilton cheese, magnified under a microscope. The cheese manufacturers protested that no one who saw it would want to eat their product again.

The Lumieres and Charles Pathe thought of the camera primarily as a means for recording real events; Pathe said prophetically in 1900 that it would be “the theatre, the newspaper and the school of tomorrow”. They sent teams of cameramen out to film picturesque scenes in various parts of the world, the moving version of the lantern slide sequences of earlier times. It was enough to set up the camera and crank the handle for a minute or so - until one of them, Albert Promio, tried filming from a moving gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice, and discovered the travelling shot. The lift on the Eiffel Tower, the Bellevue funicular railway, the New York El train and a variety of other platforms added the moving spectator to the possibilities of cinema.

Historical events were recorded: the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II; Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, then her funeral; the Paris universal exhibition of 1900. When the camera had unfortunately not been present, film-makers discovered that the events could be simulated: it is as easy to lie on film as in print. They mocked up scenes from the Boer War, the assassination of President McKinley and the coronation of King Edward VII - the last filmed in the studios of Georges Melies and shown in Paris on the day of the actual event in Westminster Abbey.

The interesting thing about this is that what we would probably consider a reprehensible deception, does not seem to have bothered either the spectators or the consciences of the film-makers: Edward VII simply observed that Melies’ film was a remarkable achievement, especially as it managed to show parts of the ceremony that had not taken place. Since the medium itself had no history, it was not yet conceived of as historical evidence. Even at the time of the First World War, much of what was exhibited as newsreel from the front had in fact been re-staged, sometimes with real soldiers on or near the actual locations. The camera often pretends to have been suicidally positioned in no man’s land.

Yet, if we look at these early films now, we can see that they are qualitatively different from still images. Events that happen in the cinema age, even though it is now a century long, belong to modern times. As historical document, film adds very little to our knowledge of the early years of the century, but enormously to our imaginative understanding. The dignitaries at a royal funeral, the ordinary visitors enjoying themselves at the Paris Exhibition and those workers who walked or cycled out of the gates of the Lumiere factory on March 16, 1895, are “real” to us in a way that characters in paintings or still photographs are not. It is no accident that the tense most often favoured in the commentary to television historical documentaries is the historic present, because archive film preserves a shadowy double of actual events, in an eternal here-and-now. It was not death that the cinema would abolish - death is one of its favourite subjects - but historical time. Caught in this constricting present, film had to find its own ways of dealing with nuances of time. At first, a single event might be shown successively from different points of view, as with the landing on the “face” of the Moon in George Melies’ Le Voyage dans la lune (1902). Melies used double exposure, stop-frame animation and models, seeing film as an addition to the armoury of the showman and by-passing the debate over the rivalry between cinema and theatre that was the main topic of French writing on the new medium before the First World War, continuing to preoccupy Pagnol and Cocteau almost until the arrival of television.

In France and Italy, film-makers sought to give their work prestige by using it to show great historical events: one playwright, responding to the threat of motion pictures, was quoted as saying that cinema was “the picture book” and theatre “the story”. So the productions of Le Film d’Art in France and the historical epics of early Italian cinema (which inspired D W Griffith), while ambitious in what would now be called their “production values”, were content to think of film primarily as illustration, adding little to its narrative language.

It was in America, between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909), that the language started to evolve towards what we now accept as the natural idiom of film, firstly by removing the spectators from their seats in the stalls and putting them successively close to the action or far from it, indoors or out, on the robbers’ level or on the roof of the train; and then by breaking down events, to show them from different points of view, but without interrupting the forward movement of time. Griffith’s contribution was to emphasise the importance of editing, which Sergei Eisenstein would develop into his theory of montage, the first complete description of how film, without sound or colour, can convey narrative and emotion in ways peculiar to itself, through the use of juxtaposition and visual metaphor: a wonderful and dangerous weapon in a poet’s hands . . .

A century ago, all this was merely the potential of a brand new toy. If the centenary does nothing else, it should at least remind us that what developed out of the Lumiere Cinematograph was not inevitable, but the result of trial and error, guided by existing forms of expression. It could easily have gone in other ways: cinema could, as some early writers thought, have been restricted to scientific ends, or to recording stage plays, or to documentary, travelogue and news.

However there was a factor to which nobody could give its proper weight at the time: the fact that cinema would rapidly be able to develop a visual language with an astonishing appeal to the emotions - not only amazement at the trickery of the camera or laughter at the pratfalls in L’Arroseur arrose, but a previously unimagined delight and pleasure. What cinema does, above all, is: it moves.