The Mysteries of Cinema

People who saw the first moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth century were delighted by a new art that communicated without words - yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm, where the laws of time and space were suspended and magical transformations could occur. Some early commentators hailed cinema as a blessing and praised it for resurrecting the dead; others likened it to a hypnotic trance or a hallucinogenic drug.