Chapter 13 - Fade-Out

Summary

This short closing chapter returns to the camera obscura as earliest film apparatus and considers a related projection device, the zoetrope, as it may be imagined to have existed in antiquity. The ill-fated epic Cleopatra (1963) was to have included a charming tribute to its own medium in a scene in which Cleopatra shows Julius Caesar a zoetrope as an example of advanced technology. The chapter then turns to the Hollywood melodrama Primrose Path for the most irresistible tribute in film history to the ancient Greeks. The chapter, and the book, ends on the most stupendous view of the Acropolis ever filmed, which appeared in the Cinerama travelogue Seven Wonders of the World.