“Immersion” is everywhere in entertainment today. But this promise didn’t start with digital media — it was over two hundred years ago that Georgian London became the world centre of such immersive spectacles as the Leicester Square Panorama, the Eidophusikon’s magical moving pictures with music, and a hundred years later, cinema itself was born in the capital’s giant music halls. No – not in Paris or New York, but first and foremost at the Empire and the Alhambra in Leicester Square.

In essays written across thirty years, Ian Christie explores how these novelties gave London an appetite for media innovation, with the earliest film studios ringed around the city — as their successors are once again. Discover Queen Victoria as a connoisseur of early photography, Fred Karno as the architect of slapstick comedy, and how Ancient Rome was reborn on screen, giving cinema its first box-office hits.

Having written The Last Machine, Terry Gilliam’s 1994 series for BBC Television that marked the centenary of moving pictures, and a prize-winning 2019 book about Britain’s overlooked film pioneer Robert Paul, Ian Christie adds a fresh account of how early cinema opened new windows onto the 20th-century world, drawing on new digital access to many of its treasures and curiosities.

Here for the table of contents.

Ian Christie’s unique expertise and his magnificent and unappeasable curiosity lead him again and again to open new vistas from unusual angles. He is a brilliant and innovative chronicler of cinema’s development, a supreme archaeologist of proto-cinema’s wonder-working machines, a diagnostician of how cinema carries values and shapes society, and an open-eyed prophet of how it continues to model and inspire entertainment. This exciting collection maps a lifetime of remarkable, generous, incisive inquiry into the medium that dominates the collective imaginary.

Marina Warner

An invaluable testament to Ian Christie as a leading historian of early cinema. This collection reveals the amazing range of Christie’s interests in exploring so many subjects with fresh eyes. Empire and film, early filmmaking practices and theatre programming. Innovators like Robert Paul and others less known. Popular genres like trick films. Legal controversies and questions of cultural ephemerality and memory.

Richard Abel, University of Michigan

Ian Christie’s cabinet of curiosities about early cinema as the last machine’ is a wonder of a book. The sparkling, erudite, and entertaining essays are crammed with creators and audiences, technologies, images and ideas that contributed so significantly to the making of our modern world.

John Wyver, University of Westminster

lan Christie, known for his books on Scorsese, Powell and Pressburger, and the legendary Soviet masters, is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy and Visiting Tutor at the UK’s National Film and Television School. He was Gresham College’s first professor in the history of film and media between 2017-21. As a teacher, curator and frequent broadcaster, he aims to bring the history of screen media in from the margins of academic research and inform everyone’s understanding about how the media that continue to shape and entertain us have evolved. His website is here. His collection of essays about Russian cinema, published by Sticking Place books, is here.

Command Palette

Filmmaking craft