PERSPECTIVE ON THE MOVIES : Sex, Lies and Cinematography : On the 100th anniversary of the public screening of movies, we should be revel in the pleasures films bring us, not blame them for behaviors.

On the 28th of December 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, 33 spectators attended the first public projection of Louis and Auguste Lumiere’s “Cinematographe.” The program was comprised of 10 short films--hand-cranked silents, of course, in black and white-- including “Le gouter de bebe” and “L’arroseur arrose.” This latter film, with the first gag in cinema history-- the gardener getting squirted in the face with his own hose, thanks to a young prankster’s foot on the hose behind him-- was reportedly by far the most popular in the show.

In New Jersey, Thomas Edison had already invented and gone public with the “Kinetoscope,” which granted its illusion of motion, however, to only one viewer at a time--the visual Walkman, as it were, of its day. Today’s anniversary is not exactly of pictures’ movement, but of the public screening of movies--the first time that movie-watching became a social experience. As cinema became a mass medium, the power of the image took on star stature. Moving pictures could now go global, as Charlie Chaplin would soon prove.

Like Edison, with his shots of sneezes, kisses and boxing matches, the Lumieres were also documentarians; they used the camera to record life as it existed. But soon enough in 1896, Georges Melies, a stage magician, discovered trick photography. By stopping the camera, one could make things magically appear or vanish.

One type of imagery opened our eyes to the world, the other turned our eyes away, diverted them from reality. The movies got progressively better at concealing the differences between fantasy and fact. Those dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” look as real as any of the actors, don’t they? Didn’t Forrest Gump just shake hands with JFK?

But we’ve gotten more sophisticated as moviegoers, too, as if we’d learned something from 100 years of watching the flicks. When in January 1896 the Lumieres brought out their newest title, “The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat Station,” audiences panicked, believing that a real locomotive was bearing down on them. Of course we’re harder to fool now. We know the difference between what’s on the screen and what’s off, even as movies continue, brilliantly, to make us participate emotionally in things that we know intellectually to be neither real nor true.

The movies have actually taught us a lot about how not to be fooled. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” boomed the Wizard of Oz’s voice, but meanwhile the camera was showing us that lights and microphones and screens could be used by grown-ups to put on a completely bogus show. From “Children of Paradise” to “All About Eve,” from “Network” to “The Net,” the movies have been telling us all along to peek backstage, to peer behind the curtain or even behind the screen.

Ironically, today’s centennial of the public screening of movies comes at a time when movies are being challenged for the negative impacts on viewers’ behavior. The movie “Money Train” is accused of inciting copycat crimes of murderous arson in New York City’s subways.

For 100 years, movies have been a part of our culture’s software. They’ve never come close to competing with other sources of direct experience in guiding our behavior, except occasionally on the visible fringes of fashion, and that is why we probably shouldn’t go overboard on the copycat clamor.

But it does make sense on this lovely anniversary to put movies’ effects on our behavior in context, because movies can sometimes affect our thinking, our values and our emotions in ways that are not carried into action. For every alleged copycat crime, how many hundreds of unseen good deeds have been inspired by some noble cinematic action, some grand or trivial gesture deemed worth emulating because we saw it on the bright wall of a darkened room where for awhile we sat transfixed, surrounded by like-minded strangers?