ABSTRACT
In a 1915 lecture, Paul Wegener (1874-1948) was the first Berlin stage actor to dream of new developments in animation and an entirely new universe of synthetically created images. The fact that actors reflected synthetic images is unique. Georges Melies found it easier to star himself in his films instead of hiring a comedian or an actor. These pictures seemed to be too tricky for actors. Wegener, on the other hand, became interested in trickfilm. He played a key role in German silent cinematography and he was not even interested in the acting, just in technique and aesthetics. Wegener foresaw a magic forest of optical lyric as he called it. All this was imagined, however, not by an engineering wizard or a technical visionary but by an actor coming from the legitimate stage. Paul Wegener had joined Max Reinhardt's acting troupe in 1906 and got interested in the movies right before World War I.
