"It occurred to me," Dwan told interviewer/filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in the late 1960s, "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just move it backward with him. I said to the cameraman, ‘How can we move it back?’ And he laughed at me." (Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It, p. 68)

It had never been done before. But Dwan did it: he fixed the camera to a nearby Ford and backed away from David Harum with film rolling. The dolly shot, one of the most basic moves in cinematographic vocabulary, was born.

It was not an immediate success. "The scene was effective," Dwan told Bogdanovich, "except that when we put it in the theatres, the movement – according to theatre managers – disturbed the audience. They said it made them feel dizzy. Some of them grabbed their chairs and hung on because they thought they were moving." (Bogdanovich, p. 68).

Like the Lumiéres’ train panic, the dizziness caused by the dollying camera would pass. People learned how to read the image for the two-dimensional representational trick it was, and – crucially – to enjoy it for the pleasure it and just about every artificial sensation of movement motion picture technology offered.

But in the evolution of cinematic language, pleasure and understanding always involve a process of orientation. My father, a Depression-era kid with a lifelong love of movies, often told me how, in the 1940s, he’d tried in vain to convince his grandfather to take him to “the show,” The old man wouldn’t go. Remembering his few experiences during the silent era, my great-grandfather said he couldn’t stand the way the movies “flickered.”

In 1999, a century after the train incident at the Grand Café, there were indications that the learning curve of moving image literacy could still be sufficiently steep to induce butterflies. When the all hand-held digital video horror movie The Blair Witch Project opened, there were widespread reports of people reeling from the theatre feeling the optical equivalent of seasickness – as the camera lurched steeply into the movie’s woodsy darkness, so did some viewers’ stomachs.