Watch Pan-American Exposition by Night

"This picture is pronounced by the photographic profession to be a marvel in photography, and by theatrical people to be the greatest winner in panoramic views ever placed before the public," declared the Edison catalog. The panorama as a genre pre-dated the cinema by more than a hundred years and found its way into many forms of popular culture, including lantern shows, for which long slides were slowly moved through the lantern. In 1900 cameramen adapted it to moving pictures with the "circular panorama." The film is remarkable, then, for combining the panorama with an early use of time-lapse photography and a two-shot construction. There is a pan in the first shot taken during the day that is continued from the same point, in the same direction, and at the same pace in the second shot filmed at night. As a result the panorama seems to display a temporal relation that is characteristic of day/night dissolving views: the image of a building during the day gradually dissolved to the identical view at night. Here, however, the scene is apparently done in a single shot. A tour de force, indeed.