This is an origin story. In June 1896, the Soviet novelist Maxim Gorky, then a 28-year-old reporter, attended an event organised by the Lumiere brothers in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Gorky was there to see what he and his fellow Russian citizens had never seen before; moving images, in this case projected onto a bedsheet in a brothel.
Source: ‘The inmates ran the asylum’: Insider’s story on Hollywood wild years | The Herald