ABSTRACT
The last decades of the nineteenth century and first of the twentieth saw the rapid urbanization in the United States and western Europe, with cities from Berlin to Minneapolis doubling and even tripling in size within the space of a decade. This wondrous transformation gave the city a centrality in media and the popular imagination that was manifest in abundant urban imagery. "Panorama" and "panoramic views" by title constitute the single largest entry among films copyrighted in the United States between 1896 and 1912, with the preponderance of titles referring to films registered before 1906. While some of these films deal with scenic natural vistas, the preponderance record urban landscapes from New York to Tokyo and serve as a dynamic repository of the early twentieth-century city. The project of these non-fiction films has little to do with recording or documenting urban space, or with creating a sense "as if being on the spot", at least with regards to physical location.
