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Ernest Coustet |
Detailed technical and historical study of the cinematograph in eight chapters, covering:(...)
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(1978) |
Anyone who has ever visited secondhand bookstores, or has meditated on the fragility of human things in some attic, knows that chance can save from destruction the least important books as well as the most weighty. By virtue of this egalitarian law, it is not absolutely impossible that a copy of the present book will still exist in five hundred years. Lets suppose that this copy comes into the hands of an inquisitive man who, bewildered by his find, shows it to some student he knows. The student, who cannot make out the subject of this sorcerer's manual written in an archaic language, will perhaps offer it to one of his professors for examination. This professor, an authority on the history of twentieth and twenty-first-century customs, opens my book. "What," he wonders, "is this unknown author talking about? What was this thing he calls a 'film?' What was this 'cinematic art' which seems to have been so important in the life of the good people of the past?”.


