In his renowned essay first published in 1937 and then revised in 1947, Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, Erwin Panofsky reminds readers that the earliest narrative movies were not at all just trivial imitations of the genus proximumof theatre plays; rather, they preferred to add movement to originally stationary works of art, such as the wax figures ‘à laMadame Tussaud’. Without providing any further explanation, the art historian touched upon a crucial topic for cinema studies, that of the animation of the inanimate and the paradoxical attempt to recreate motion(a quality immediately associated with life) by means of a sequence of staticframes, pushing mimetic strategies to the limit by trying at the same time to escape the fate of photographic images, unavoidably condemned to immerse reality in a ‘stop bath (bain de fixation)’ and to ‘cut into the living so as to perpetuate the dead’. Providing mummies with the ability to move: this is the logical conclusion of the ‘obsession with realism’ that André Bazin was mulling in the very same years Panofsky's essay was published.

It should therefore come as no surprise that between cinema and wax statues there was love at first sight, possible only when both sides have something to benefit from the encounter: by animating (even though only in an image) the inanimate, cinema celebrates its own triumph, whereas mannequins, conversely, obtain what they need to finally end the eternal chase after their models, namely, motion.