ILLUSIONS IN MOTION: MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MOVING PANORAMA AND RELATED SPECTACLES By Erkki Huhtamo Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013, 456 pp. Reviewed by Zach Melzer When he is not producing programs for Finnish television about the history of cinema, recreating moving panorama performances, or appearing as an appraiser of found objects on American television’s Storage Wars, Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA, Department of Design Media Arts) is an avid collector of pre-cinema moving image culture. One of the largest of its kind, his private collection is made up of numerous optical toys, advertisements, postcards, pamphlets, and other ephemera gathered from Europe and North America, and dating from as far back as the eighteenth century. Huhtamo’s collection is a time capsule where old visual media imaginations produced both through and about these media are reanimated. Indeed, as his new book Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles illustrates, Huhtamo is invested in the very curation of such imaginations. Although he concentrates on one particular medium—the moving panorama—Huhtamo insistently treats it as a discursive object, positioning it within a vibrant multi-media ecology and highlighting the multiplicity of forms and usages it has taken. In doing so, the book aims to provide an account of a media culture “in the making” that is made up of a multiplicity of technologies, formats, audiences, users, and theories. Throughout, Huhtamo reveals how ideas about the moving panorama were shaped by loosely tied links between a host of disparate individuals—artists, performers, inventors, critics, and observers—each serving as cast members in an episodic-like narrative set between roughly 1750 and 1900. However, whereas Huhtamo extensively highlights how the moving panorama belonged to a heterogenous network of media technologies, practitioners, and evaluators, his argument also flattens the social dimensions that put this network of users at play, thereby deflating his more theoretically ambitious goal of understanding how this nineteenth century media culture was formed. As a book concentrating on the moving panorama in particular, Illusions in Motion is a welcome undertaking. As Huhtamo argues, of the many other visual apparatuses of this period, the moving panorama is among the most under-inves- tigated. Conventionally thought of as a side-note accompaniment or an afterthought to studies devoted to nineteenth century visual culture, Huhtamo shows how moving panoramas in fact have distinct histories equal in importance to those of the cyclorama, photography, and the cinema. But more than this, Huhtamo posits, moving panoramas reveal how visual cultures of eighteenth and nineteenth BOOK REVIEWS • COMPTES RENDUS 133 BOOK REVIEWS • COMPTES RENDUS