Scorsese on the History and Nature of Film

The online version of the New York Review of Books (August 2013) has an essay by Martin Scorsese about the history and meaning of film.   

See The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema here. 

Aside from a great picture of Georges Melius working on a special effects painting, we have a pointer to the worlds first stupid cute cat video (by Thomas Edison) and a discussion of the original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).