ABSTRACT
Despite the assumptions of most film historians, the medium of film does not depend upon a mass audience. Research into the pre-history of moving pictures has clearly demonstrated that much of the technical impetus behind the development of film came not from entertainers, but from scientists eager to record and analyze natural motion. Even without the intervention of showmen or lantern lecturers it is evident that both film cameras and peepshow viewers would have appeared around 1895, as tools by which scientists could record and reconstitute movement in the laboratory. It is also apparent that in time these scientific devices would have been adopted by doctors wishing to demonstrate surgical techniques, by anthropologists trying to record vanishing cultures, and by salesmen needing to demonstrate heavy machinery, all without the intervention of the music hall or shop show. Eventually there would have been both projected moving pictures and even film historians, all without the appearance of either a mass audience or of purpose-built cinemas.
