Director: Pierre Janssen
France (formerly French Republic)
1874

Pierre Janssen allowed the world to gaze at stellar objects for the first time on film in "The Passage of Venus" (1874). He gave hope that one day images in motion can become part of our quest to understand the world that we inhabit. This series of photographs explored the use of moving images for scientific purposes, thus paving the way for an effective collaboration between art and science ever since. It also set the race for the discovery of cinema, outlining the basic technical requirement of needing a succession of rapidly changing static photos, a concept that fundamentally remained unchanged in the last 150 years.