Simona Josan: The Soul-stealing Camera and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard

The new miracle of photography that swept over the world in the mid-nineteenth century, when the world had for the first time the possibility of gazing at its own image, was only a vague reflection of the wonders of the moving pictures and the celluloid industry soon to come. From the invention of the photographic process, to the stereographic image, and finally to the appearance of motion pictures, people have been mesmerized by this new universe of forms and shapes that seem to have a life of its own, life borrowed or even stolen from the original scene or person.