1. We've Been On This Ride Before

Virginia Woolf, writing at the dawn of cinema (1926), expresses doubt about whether or not this new medium has any legs:

"Anna [Karenina] falls in love with Vronsky” – that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene – like the gardener mowing the lawn – what the cinema might do if left to its own devices. But what, then, are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how [...]