Some of the Pre-Cinema devices also include attempts at reproducing realistic depth, sometimes by conventional artistic means established in drawing and painting - tromp l'oeil effects, perspective drawing, etc - but also with techniques based on stereoscopic photography. Some of these practitioners of pre-cinema time-based media were attempting, in many instances, to produce an exact reproduction of reality, with movement, colour, depth and sound - as many of the early film-makers did.

The vast canvases of the Panorama and huge changing views of the Diorama have much in common with the large-screen cinema experience. In other cases, these entertaining and/or instructional pre-cinema presentations introduced technologies - sequential images, projection, photography - that later led directly to, or became incorporated with, cinema film apparatus, and in this sense the term Pre-Cinema is accurate and appropriate. There are other relationships between these early visual media and cinema. In an apparent quest for greater veracity than a painted image could provide, Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype process of photography while running his Diorama, and it seems likely that the early motion picture pioneer Le Prince first dreamed of photographic moving pictures while he managed a series of panoramas.

To view 'pre-cinema' devices merely as steps towards the cinema, however, would be a very narrow perspective. They were - and in some cases still are - self-contained media with their own particularities, differences, potential, and limitations. Much work still needs to be done to document the histories of these media, histories which in most cases started 'Pre-Cinema' but did not end with the introduction of cinematography. In some instances - the camera obscura, peepshow boxes, domestic magic lantern shows, the table-top praxinoscope theatre - there is a closer analogy with television than with cinema.

Perhaps the most useful way to look at these problems is to recognise that cinema is just one of the many time-based visual media that have existed over a number of centuries. Because it is so familiar to us, we naturally relate the previous time-based media to it, and these recognisable similarities can, to some extent, help us to understand those media. But new time-based visual media continue to be invented and developed, and since cinema is no longer the dominant form of time-based media - television, video, computer games and the internet have overtaken it to a large extent - we can no longer expect to consider all of these media solely as precursors of cinema.

We hope that you enjoy the tour.