“One would want, too, all the scenes of torture, from the very beginning of social life down to recent events in the prisons of the Holy Inquisition, when the Monks of Redemption, equipped with their instruments of iron, spent their leisure time over the years in massacring Moors, heretics, and Jews. And the cruel interrogations that have gone on in the prisons of Germany, Italy, France, the Orient, everywhere, why not those too? The camera, aided by the phonograph (they are near of kin), could reproduce both the sight and the different sounds made by the sufferers, giving a complete, an exact idea of the experience. What a salubrious course of instruction or the grade schools, to purify the intelligence of modern children – perhaps even adults! A splendid magic lantern!”

(Villiers de l’Isle Adam, The Future Eve, trans. Robert Martin Adams, pp.542–543 in The Decadent Reader)