ABSTRACT
It is already possible by ingenious optical contrivances to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices, and it would be diffi cult to carry the illusion of real presence much further. (The Talking Phonograph, 1877, p. 385)
From the opening titles I was mesmerized. The bright blasts of deliriously vibrant color, the gunshots, the savage intensity of the music, the burning sun, the overt sexuality … the hallucinatory quality of the imagery has never weakened for me over the years. (Scorsese & Wilson, 1997, p. 14)
These quotes, separated as they are by more than a century-the century of cinema, as it turns out-denote the centrality of the phenomenon of presence to the evolution of the moving image through its entire history. The prescience of the fi rst, by a Scientifi c American writer, was not unique at that time, as documented by additional published reports of a world-wide fascination with presence-inducing new media in the late 19th century. And the visceral, unbidden response noted by contemporary fi lm director Martin Scorsese in the second quote clearly refers to the vivid experience of immersive presence in a fi ctional and unlikely world-on-fi lm.
