In 1995, in a text that, not at all by chance, addressed the question of colour, Georges Roque remarked that ‘we have undoubtedly not fully grasped the importance that the concept of movement took on for both science and art beginning in the 1880s.’

Naturally, this could only be a statement in hindsight; for people of the day, it was not so much the concept of movement that had the importance described here, but rather movement itself. It was not a change of paradigms; it was a transformation of the world. This suddenly manifest presence of movement was certainly connected, as has frequently been noted, with the rapid evolution of the means of transport in the early twentieth century – automobiles, trains, planes, streetcars, subways – which completely redrew the body's relations with physical and geographic space and created hitherto unseen situations of perception. The latter were not only unprecedented in their regular and passive high-speed conveyance through the landscape, these conveyances also effected – more so than today – a singular kind of jolting, trembling, and shaking of the entire body and thus also the eyes. The connection between these modes of transportation and the cinema was obvious at the time on this point as well, as Jules Claretie remarked, for example, in 1896: