From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film by David Robinson with a Foreword by Martin Scorsese Published by Columbia University Press November 1995 / 248 pages / 158 illustrations & film stills / 0-231-10338-7 / $27.50g, cloth One hundred years ago, the crude realism of early cinematic exercises caused shockwaves among audiences--some even panicked. "On one occasion," read a news report from the time, "an old lady in the audience, quite unable to suppress a scream, started up in her seat and tried to scramble out," knocking over others on her way. This sort of reaction was not uncommon--on a screen that might have featured nothing more than minute-long clips of a running horse or a moving train, what modern viewers might see as a pale shadow of the explosive, full-color blockbusters of 1995. From Peep Show to Palace recounts the enchantment of the early years of film, a trajectory which began with the "magic lantern" in the seventeenth century and progressed rapidly from 1893 to 1913, when the modern motion picture was born. Prominent film critic David Robinson offers a vivid account of the haphazard process, "like the assembly of the pieces of a puzzle," which was the birth of American film. Replete with more than 120 fascinating drawings and photographs of the earliest devices of cinematic prehistory--colorful names like the thaumotrope, the phenakistiscope, the stroboscope, the Wheel of Life--From Peep Show to Palace leads readers along the winding path of missteps and innovation that led to the filmmaking technology we know today. In his vivid pictorial essay, Robinson shows readers how these early gadgets actually worked--and describes the shortcomings that led inventors to try, try again. Robinson chronicles the early use of film as vaudeville sideshow, where it ran alongside contortionists, strongmen, performing animals, and jugglers. He documents an age when the sheer spectacle of moving images precluded any notion of plot development or drama. From Peep Show to Palace goes on to describe fledgling dramatic efforts, ranging (without much variation of treatment) from prizefights to Passion plays, which brought audiences back to the theaters in record numbers after they became bored with clips like "Moving Train." Robinson takes a look at the nickelodeon theaters--the rise of venues with names like Nickolette, Dreamland, Theatorium, and Bijou Dream--the first places where cinema was the feature presentation. Inaugurating the centennial of the motion picture in America and including a Foreword by renowned director Martin Scorsese, From Peep Show to Palace offers an entertaining, often humorous, vision of this central player in our century's cultural history. DAVID ROBINSON is a film critic for The Times of London, and author of a number of books, including Chaplin: His Life and Art (1989), Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion (1984), and The History of World Cinema (1981).

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