"Yet the masses needed an opiate to deliver them from the starched, arch theatricalism of the Victorian stage, and quickly accepted the paradoxical opiate of “two-dimensional realism” the cinema would sell. This opiate was quite literally present in Edison’s Fred Ott's
Sneeze (1894), whose title character stuffs some snuff into his flickering beak, causing it to twitch momentarily, and then sneezes it out in one involuntary yet definitive spasm, returning the hallucinogen to the ether as the film concludes. This, one of cinema’s very first events, recognized the medium itself as a drug, probably the first time the cinema's narcotic form and its content were used, if unintentionally, to mutually admire one another, long before the narcoses of the cinema became the Hollywood imperialism Europeans have so much difficulty resisting."
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- bill 12-17-2003 9:13 pm