From the very birth of the moving picture in the late 19th century, the revolutionary medium has had an inherent fascination with its own creation. Like the mise en abyme or dream within a dream, the movie often seems to hold up a tilted mirror to its own feats of illusion, to enchant its audience while concealing its optical legerdemain. The movie, in other words, has always been in love with itself.

In the Lumière brothers’ short Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), considered by many historians to be the first cinematographic film recording, the onscreen laborers are actually leaving their jobs at the Lumières’ factory, where photographic plates were produced and developed. So the short film becomes an inward-looking glimpse of the filmmaking process at its birth—and also, simultan

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