Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910 "The most striking thing about ''Moving Pictures" as a viewing experience has less to do with scholarship than perception. It turns time upside down. With their colors and verve, the paintings and posters and prints look so much more contemporary than the more recent art form does. Many of the films have deteriorated with time, lending them an appearance of patination. More than that, they have this alien aspect -- the jerky motions, the black and white, the teeming silence -- as from a distant, subaqueous world. It's as if the black edges of all those nifty screens are so many high-tech frames around images that could be from Lascaux."
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