The invention of movies came about as the 19th century was ending and the 20th century was beginning. Although many viewers saw the advent of cinema as the culmination of Realist movements in the visual arts that had marked the 19th century, others experienced it as an unsettling shift from traditional canons of beauty to the "tender mercies" of the machine.

In this lecture, film historian Tom Gunning explores the revolutionary energy of the moving image and its power to transform notions of representation through the introduction of motion, vitality, and the mechanical into the domain of the picture. Did pictures survive? Or were they altered irreparably?