Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

When Edwin Porter filmed the dazzlingly illuminated Coney Island amusement parks Dreamland and Luna Park in 1905, both the motion-picture camera and the light bulb had been recently invented by Thomas Edison, whose film company commissioned this work. The film, a series of four simple panning shots, provides an almost scientific demonstration of both inventions. The film abstracts Coney Island’s fantastical version of the modern metropolis into an animation of the city in lights. Porter’s prescient film prefigures contemporary cinematic experience, in which the lines between photography and animation, reality and artifice, are increasingly blurred.