ABSTRACT
This chapter explores problem which arises when watching some of the earliest films that the Lumieres made and that is the problem with the "real" and with "representation". After understanding the differences between actuality and representation, it shows how film was influenced by the theatre and its own artistic crisis with the same issue by looking at the solutions which the theatre came up with and how they were influential on how cinema changed and dealt with its presentation of the real. The chapter deals with what is referred to as realism and through the work of the Lumieres, the nineteenth-century Italianate stage, and eventually that of Georges Melies, the confusions which exist around the concept of realism will be explored. The nineteenth-century theatre in Europe and the US was a form dominated by the constraints of the proscenium stage: a style of theatre building which copied the grand Italian opera houses of the seventeenth century.
