"The Kinetoscope of Time" is a successful short story because it wasn't just a linear, something-happened-to-someone story. I was actually pleasantly surprised to find that these seven or eight pages knocked me back into my seat to think for a while about film and time, truth and fiction. (And in literature at least, isn't that the point?) And the hall where the narrator peeks into the kinetoscopes, draped with velvet? Pretty close to a cinema curtain!
Interesting to me in the short story is the amazement of the narrator peering into the kinetoscope as "the darkness took shape and robed itself in color"; nowadays, the layperson walking down the street would be just as amazed at the feat of looking down into a box with eyeholes to see pictures moving; if only because kinetoscopes are archaic. But the wonder is the same. My suggestion would be, if man can look backwards and forwards and slantwards at the merest suggestions of his mind- isn't he limitless?
As a modern-day reader it took me a while to figure out that the scenes he was looking at were short glimpses of histories- or stories. Until The Scarlet Letter I had no idea that they were other works at all. After that it was very intriguing. I recognized the Crusades, the battle between the Indians and the Europeans, and I'm still wondering what other scenes were truth and which were fiction.
Finally, I liked how the narrator exits the little world of darkness and time and reenters his "actuality" with elevated traincars, electric light, and cable cars. Modernity. Truth. Out of one world and into another, making them two different spheres of experience.
Actually, not yet finished.
"Time"- was he Time or wasn't he? Who is the "Monsieur le Comte Cagliostro"? An Italian? And what were the "lines of fire" that drew the narrator forward?
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