Pablo Echart, Cine dentro del cine. 50 películas sobre el séptimo arte, Published by Editorial UOC, Barcelona (2023), 212 pp.

Abstract

Book Review. Pablo Echart goes as far back as the dawn of the 20th century to locate the origins of “cinema within cinema.” In two well-known primitive shorts such as How it Feels to Be Run Over (Cecil M. Hepworth, 1900) and The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901), the author identifies the first self-reflexive traces, the “moving image” showing its own devices and processes. As a starting point, the idea is most stimulating: even when cinema was still to be defined as an art, metacinema already existed. As Echart explains, both cinephiles and filmmakers have shared, since the movies were born, an enormous interest in representing cinema within cinema. A perennial trope –the author is reluctant to call it a genre– rich in examples. Even with the fifty (-one) films selected in the book, plus an alternative list of fifty in the appendices, most readers will find personal preferences omitted.