"The subject of this film-essay is cinema itself: an apparatus of representation, wherein fact and fiction are recreated. As such, the pro-filmic facts are necessarily drawn from two of cinema's 'pioneers': Louis Lumière and Abel Gance, with additional material provided from a Warner Bros. featurette. The exposition and form of the film is closely tied to the tradition of cine-structural poems which foreground the actual materials of the medium (light, dark, form as shadow-projection of the cinematic apparatus).... (It) chronicles...the coming to life (of the apparatus) and the birth of documentary and narrative fiction forms (complete with disasters)...." Al Razutis