French archaeologist and filmmaker, Marc Azema, has come up with a novel theory. Maybe the earliest cave paintings, created some 30,000 years ago at sites like Chauvet, weren’t static creations. Maybe they were meant to show movement, to tell a sequential story. Maybe the cave paintings in France and Spain gave us our first animations, a prehistoric kind of cinema. The video above takes cave paintings from Lascaux, Les Trois-Frères, Chauvet and elsewhere, and shows how the images, if arranged sequentially, and viewed by flickering fire light, actually depicted motion.

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Georges Méliès

Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès, a prolific innovator in the use of special effects, accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his work. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the first "Cinemagician".In May 1902 Méliès made his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon. The film includes the celebrated scene in which a spaceship hits the man in the moon in the eye; it was loosely based on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon. In the film Méliès stars as Professor Barbenfouillis, a character similar to the astronomer he played in The Astronomer's Dream in 1898.  At 14 minutes, it was Méliès's longest film up to that date and cost 10,000 francs to produce.The film was an enormous success in France and around the world, and Méliès sold both black and white and hand-colored versions to exhibitors. 

Robert Flaherty 

Robert Flaherty was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film. In 1913, on his expedition to prospect the Belcher Islands, his boss, Sir William Mackenzie, suggested that he take a motion picture camera along. Flaherty brought with him a Bell and Howell hand cranked motion picture camera. He was particularly intrigued by the life of the Inuit people, and spent so much time filming them that he had begun to neglect his real work. When Flaherty returned to Toronto with 30,000 feet of film, the nitrate film stock was ignited in a fire started from his cigarette, in his editing room. His film was destroyed and he received burns on his hands. Although his editing print was saved and shown several times, Flaherty wasn't satisfied with the results. Flaherty was determined to make a new film, one following a life of a typical Inuit and his family. In 1920, Flaherty secured funds from Revillon Frères, a French fur trade company to shoot what was to become Nanook of the North. On the 15th of August, 1920 Flaherty arrived in Port Harrison, Quebec to shoot his film. With him he took two Akeley motion-picture cameras which the Inuit referred to as "the aggie". Flaherty also brought full developing, printing and projection equipment to show the Inuit his film, while he was still in the process of filming. Flaherty lived in an attached cabin to the Revillon Frères trading post.