When the motion picture camera was invented, early practitioners were filled with a sense of the limitless possibilities of this amazing mechanism. With its ability to mimetically reproduce reality, as well as its potential for the manipulation of images as well as time and space, the movie camera was truly a tool of progress and hope. Those who produced some of the most inventive and experimental short films of the time went on to make it big in Hollywood, but their earliest work contains a rebellious spirit that is lacking in their later studio pictures. These incredible films, by luminaries including savant Orson Welles, Russian montage maestro Sergei Eisenstein, pioneering director D.W. Griffith, as well as Elia Kazan, Ernst Lubitsch, artists Joseph Cornell and Fernand Leger, photographers Man Ray and Paul Strand, film scholar Jay Leyda, and numerous others, are compiled on this incredible collection. Seven different volumes, including "Light Rhythms" and "The Amateur as Auteur," have been lovingly c...