Last Thursday I took a trip to the Museum of the Moving Image. What separates this museum from most is its interactive quality. Some displays have the “look, but don’t touch” policy, but others allow hands on experience. I pressed a button and peered into a remake of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope. Eugene Sandow was flexing his muscles for me. Other early film innovations I participated in were the thaumatrope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and mutoscope. The mutoscope was best. Similar in cumbersome size to the kinetoscope, it’s like a giant flipbook machine. Turning the crank on the side of it, a set of spinning photographs, each slightly different from the next, sit on a drum inside the cabinet and give the impression of motion. Cranking away, a lunar capsule landed in the eye of a surprised moon. It was the noted scene from Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902.

My giddy tour guide ushered us through the museum. While pointing out archaic cameras, microphones, and countless other equipment, he gave a brief history of each device’s doings, successes and failures. Between his explanations and my par takings, I discovered how novel this technology was in its time. I had fun with each, regardless that it’s no longer new technology, and realized how exciting this was during its grand premiere.

All aforementioned equipment, and countless more, pioneered media production and made it what it is today. Good thing, too. I much prefer a feature length ninety-minute story, uncranked, to a feature length fifteen-second scene, cranked. Can you imagine cranking your way through something like Tikhiy Don?