L'onda

Regarded as the first motion picture ever made, The Wave (La Vague 1890) shows under half a minute of breakers pounding on an upright rock in the shallows of a bay.

To make this the very first requires dismissing some other motion picture methods, notably the moving photos of Eadweard Muybridge.

But what the hey; if The Wave was the first movie on Earth, that would mean the world's first cinematographer was the elderly French inventor & physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904).

He would live barely long enough to obtain good glimpses of what he started rolling, in the works of the Lumiere brothers & the world's first great filmmaker, Georges Milies.