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Reality Without Reality: The Change of Film's Role in Art I Perhaps the newest form of art, and least understood is the art of filmmaking. Its roots date back only 125 years to 1877, when Eadward Muybridge first showed how a series of photos of a running horse can be made to look like one continuous picture. But only after Thomas Edison invented the kinetoscope in 1889, and the opening of the first kinetoscope parlors in 1894 was the art of film making revealed to the public. And at the time, film making could hardly be considered an art; it was really just a spectacle. When Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1936, the world had only begun to scratch the surface of what could be created with motion pictures. It is therefore logical for Benjamin to feel that movies were little more than spectacles meant to entertain the uneducated masses (Benjamin 96). It is hard to deny his opinion at a time when the most popular films told little more than the story of a gangster, or a western cowboy's exploits on the Great Plains. Well, things have changed dramatically since the writing of Benjamin's essay. His arguments can barely hold water against many of today's films; but what he feels is not entirely false, there are many films that only serve to demonstrate Benjamin's arguments.