SOURCE: "'Primitive' Cinema: A 'Frame-up'? or 'The Trick's on Us'," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narration, edited by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker, The British Film Institute, 1990, pp. 95-103.

In the following excerpt, Gunning attempts to dissassociate Méliès from the theatrical tradition, with which he often is linked, and pronounces him a pioneer in film-editing techniques.

'People will come back to that, you get sick of everything except sleeping and daydreaming. The Trip to the Moon will be back again . . .' (Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Instalment Plan).

Frank Norris' 1899 novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, contains a sequence absent from the novel's definitive film version, Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925). Stroheim updated McTeague to the contemporary 1920s and therefore omitted Norris' topical reference to 'the crowning scientific achievement of the nineteenth century, the kinetoscope'.¹ The kinetoscope occupies the next to last place on the...