In England the movie theatre was originally called “The 
Bioscope,” because of its visual presentation of the actual 
movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios , way of life). 
The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order 
to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular 
wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric 
world. In the chapter on The Wheel, the story was told of how 
the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in an attempt to 
photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for to set a 
series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the 
mechanical and the organic in a special way. In the medieval 
world, curiously, the idea of change in organic beings was that 
of the substitution of one static form for another, in sequence. 
They imagined the life of a flower as a kind of cinematic strip of 
phases or essences. The movie is the total realization of the 
medieval idea of change, in the form of an entertaining illusion.