Long before the advent of cinema, inventors drew on discoveries of the effects of light and the laws of space to realize the dream of the moving picture. Werner Nekes, an experimental filmmaker from the twentieth century, shares with us his museum-quality collection of "cine-archaeological" finds from the 18th and 19th centuries in Film Before Film (or What Really Happened Between the Images?). Before film there were peep shows and magic lantern shows, flicks, flip-books, kinetoscopes, zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, thaumatropes and mutoscopes, lithophanes and traxinoscopes. One chapter of the film is devoted to the ways space is made visible by the Camera Obscura, from anamorphic and stereoscopic effects to holography, another to the phenomenon of persistence of vision ingeniously used to create the illusion of movement. Nekes demonstrates the continually surprising functions of the objects in his collection and something else, as well: that, long before the Lumière Brothers, many a film genre had been anticipated, including abstract animation and spectacular special effects, newsreels and (very often) pornography.