The history of the cinematic image of walking is undeniably underpinned by the contested ideals of the human body in nineteenth-century Europe. The rise of the factory and the industrialist model of production led to the praise for an abled, inexhaustible body which, as one moving part of the industrial process, would be efficiently integrated into automation. This quest concurred with the growing emphasis placed on physical robustness in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Education policies, health programmes, and scientific research were geared towards improving the capabilities of the body. Physical fitness was praised as the precondition for a strong mind and the key to scientific and, ultimately, socio-economic progress. The disciplines of anatomy, physiognomy, eugenics, anthropology, and ethnography prospered in this context. The invention of photography and subsequent technical advancements that shortened exposure time presented scientists with new opportunities to study the human body and locomotion.

Early practitioners such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey photographed the human stride extensively in mid- to late 1800s. Chronophotography, and later on cinematography, were consulted as effective methods of registering the locomotion of the abled body as well as so-called aberrations, such as gendered, racialized, or diseased bodies. Fatimah Tobing Rony explains the colonialist male gaze that characterized the pathologized depictions of racialized bodies, especially in the early photographic and cinematographic images of walking.