Conclusion

The book’s conclusion examines the early cinema of the 1890s, to look at the ways it invoked and transformed earlier Victorian visual traditions. The earliest films were shown at fairgrounds and public entertainment venues, and thus differ from the more parlor-oriented objects studied in the book. Yet early film also extended Victorian pictorial traditions. Comic strips anticipated sequential visual storytelling, which was expanded in narrative stereoviews. All of the images examined in Picture World became subjects for the earliest films, from magic portrait albums coming alive to “phantom rides” alongside picturesque landscapes. The eye-tricking pleasures of early cinema extended the phantasmagoric worlds of earlier mass visual phenomena.