Fritz Lang’s Metropolis played last night at the Astor, twice – once on the main screen and once, simultaneously, as a cropped reflection in the glass cabinet where the emergency fire hose is kept.

From its inception, cinema was obsessed with its own creation, with the miraculous production of itself, the reproduction of life. It rehearsed this infatuation, subliminally in part I think, through the character of the toiling scientist, the scientist driven half mad by his own brilliance, and by the scientist’s bastard offspring, his mirror – the monster or robot.

Cinema, of course, was one among many new technologies, which were rapidly changing the world. Amongst these early filmmakers, there is a noticeable ambivalence, towards the uncertainty of this technological future, and toward their own part in its conception. The scientist is driven mad by his God-like power; his hubris and his narcissism are his downfall.

This obsession with the scientist is, more accurately, an identification with the chemist, with his concoctions and innumerable steaming beakers, and thus naturally with alchemy. No doubt this has everything to do, also, with the original process by which photographic images were drawn out from their chemical baths in the dark room. Early cinema can be thought of, in fact, as the literal reenactment of this process – the revelation of images, by some miraculous process, to those gathered in a dark room.

Behind cinema, like its shadow, stands the anatomy lesson of history, the revelation not of life, but of death. The scientist who unveils his robot, his monster, reinterprets the scene in which the physician unveiled the inner workings of the human body.

Watching Metropolis, you realize how dramatically the early film-makers actually defined the genre, how different film would have been without them. When Guy Madden made his brilliant silent film Brand upon the Brain! in 2006, he drew upon this history of scientific obsession, to create a portrait of his own father as a mad scientist, forever toiling underground, cooking up potions made with the brain-sap he collected from orphans. And in Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive, 6-year-old Ana, too young to understand the distinction between fact and fiction, becomes obsessed with Frankenstein’s Monster, believing him to be a sort of spirit. Which is what photography, and by extension cinema is after all, a second self, a sort of spirit, cut from life or risen from death.

The other day I found this photograph (here), one of the first ever taken. The man’s name was Robert Cornelius and the year was 1839, yet it feels like it could have been yesterday. It’s like looking at a spirit, or the atom from which cinema was born.