It’s a pleasing synchronicity that HG Wells’s first, seminal novel, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, at the very moment that Louis and Auguste Lumière were perfecting their Cinématographe in time for its public unveiling on 28 December that year.

Wells’s time traveller, in his attempt to convince a sceptical audience of the possibility of time travel, shows them a series of photographs of a man taken at different ages; if photography allowed the capture and preservation of vanished moments, then cinema would achieve something more – the projection of the rapt viewer to the other side of the world or beyond, back into the past or forward into the future.