But the film industry slowly got their act together,
I don’t think it was that slow. Even ‘A trip to the moon’ in 1902 already used stop motion, ‘The great train robbery’ in 1903 had already used more complex cutting & perspectives & even put a camera on a moving train.
By 1930 the film industry had done:
complex tracking shots (1927)
experimented with previously impossible perspectives (1930)
nice visual effects (1927)
stunts (1923)
combined a lot of techniques (1924)
and did various experimental stuff (1929)
My understanding is that a lot of the slow progress from 1878 to the early 1900s was the “cinema tech stack” needing to become technically and economically viable.
To get good motion you need ~16 frames per second, which means each frame has to be exposed ~1/16 of a second, which in turn means you need stuff like sensitive film stock, lots of light, decent lenses. Then you need a camera that can move film in a way that is at a constant speed but also holds each frame perfectly still briefly, for a precise duration, and without any jitter/warping/etc. Then for economic viability you also need projection that’s bright and safe for a room, plus a practical way to duplicate film at scale.
The starting point for all of this was early photography (e.g. daguerreotypes in the 1830s–40s), which used rigid metal plates and multi-minute exposures in bright daylight.
For some forms of AI art (single images, short clips) the tech stack feels maybe mostly already there, while for others it doesn’t (how to turn short clips into a full-length movie). But maybe that’s just a lack of imagination, and we’ll look back and say something like: “they didn’t realize they needed BCI to really unlock AI art’s potential”.