Serafino Gubbio has the perfect job for this: he is, in the language of the early twentieth-century, "a cinematograph operator." He watches. He is the impersonal tool of a new industry based on make believe, and he turns the crank of the camera, noting, uncomprehendingly, the cruel and strange displays before him. In Rome of 1915, Serafino Gubbio plods through his life and its romances, always mindful of the frame, always ready to shoot.
