Since the late 19th century, film has been the ultimate medium by which to express and illuminate the darker, wilder recesses of man’s imagination. An alchemical convergence of magic lantern experiments and new photographic technology led to the production of the very first moving images, including visual captures of magic, mystery, violence, cruelty, crime, sex, nudity, devilry and death.

SHADOWS IN A PHANTOM EYE VOLUME ONE reveals a flickering carnival of attractions and aberrations, from the groundbreaking motion capture experiments conceived by Eadweard Muybridge in 1872, through the first protean film eruptions of Georges Méliès, James Williamson and others in the 1890s, up to 1907 when Pathé Fréres were the world’s leaders in film exploitation. This volume references more than 1,000 films from all countries and reproduces more than 250 rare photographic images and illustrations, many newly unearthed from international film archives and never before published.

SHADOWS IN A PHANTOM EYE is the ultimate multi-volume guide for those wishing to explore an alternative global history of the moving image in its inaugural decades – a history that reveals a wild, often disturbing and provocative world which includes Hollywood but also stretches far, far beyond.