"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows, If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. And all this is in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people."

— Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) on viewing a screening of the Lumiere CInematograph in 1896, his review was published in the newspaper ‘Nizhegorodsky Listok’ under the pen name of I. M. Pacatus