The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures
P: Robert W. Paul. UK 1901

Uncle Josh At The Moving Picture Show
R: Edwin S. Porter. P: Edison Manufacturing Co. USA 1902

“(…) did early audiences actually confuse image and reality? This idea that the filmic image is so real that the naive audience cannot distinguish it from reality is pervasive in the early folklore of the cinema, perhaps too much so for it to be taken entirely at face value. Indeed, a number of films from this period dramatize this very confusion. Both the British The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901) and the American Uncle Josh At The Moving Picture Show (1902) centre on the response of a ‘naive’ spectator to film, with which the actual audience can contrast their own more knowing attitude.”
Nicholas Daly: Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000. Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 67

TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 171 f.