What Made Cinema? Essays on Visual Culture and Early Film

"Immersion" is everywhere in entertainment today. But this promise didn't start with digital media - it was over two hundred years ago that Georgian London became the world centre of such immersive spectacles as the Leicester Square Panorama, the Eidophusikon's magical moving pictures with music, and a hundred years later, cinema itself was born in the capital's giant music halls. No - not in Paris or New York, but first and foremost at the Empire and the Alhambra in Leicester Square.

In ess...