As historians of early cinema have pointed out, the very conditions of early film projection and exhibition prevented the spectator’s narrative or aesthetic immersion into the spectacle of moving pictures. Many early screenings took place in social settings such as plazas (or the Grand Café in Paris, famous for hosting the first documented public screening in 1895), which encouraged social interaction among spectators but not immersion into the world of the film. In addition, the film projector was noisy and its mechanical operations were impossible to ignore during screenings