Il cinema, che meraviglia! I trucchi della visione dalla Lanterna magica a Méliès

Whoever keeps the film in a time perspective considers the opening night of the Lumière cinema as a moment, a milestone in the long journey of insights, discoveries and inventions which slowly led to the photographic representation of the movement. From the phantasmagorias of Robertson at the Teatro optical Reynaud, through panoramas and dioramas, is a succession of wonders of vision in which the screen it constitues increasingly as threshold that plays with the unconscious of the spectators and the projections of their desires, till to propose the voyeurism as favorite motif of the nascent movies. And if is the body (already the subject of the daguerreotype, of the studies on the movement of Marey and Muybridge and protagonist of Life Models English) to become measuring unit of space and time in the films on Edison and Lumière, object of vision and witness of history, is the eye - an misleading organ of vision - that allows that photography in movement actives in the spectator the suspend of the disbelief, to the point to scare him the sight of the scene of a moving train or arouse wonder in front to the "tricks" of Méliès in which a musician splits into many musicians. Splendor of truth, hallucination and trickery, cinema, how wonderful!