Cinema was "born" in 1895 when an audience paid to watch a screening in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café in Paris, and from very early on it began to take two divergent but fundamentally unified paths: that of reality as defined by Auguste and Louis Lumière, who diligently recorded the everyday phenomena of the world around them; and that of the unbridled imagination as exemplified by Georges Méliès, a magician who parlayed his stage acts into whimsical flights of fancy.