In 1933, Félix Mesguich published Tours de Manivelle: souvenirs d'un chasseur d'images, a memoir of his experiences as a globetrotting cameraman in the first years of the century. Besides being published by the young, but already august, house of Grasset (editor of Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Blaise Cendrars, and André Malraux, to name but a few), the memoir was extensively excerpted for a three-part feature in the film industry trade paper Le Courrier cinématographique, and was graced with a preface by Mesguich's first employer, Louis Lumière, “Member of the Institute, Commander of the Legion of Honor, Inventor of the Cinematograph.” A single anecdocte from Tours de Manivelle, Mesguich's description of filming a bear hunt in the Russian wilderness of 1905, reveals many of the salient characteristics of early twentieth-century documentary: an exotic location (and the education cum entertainment of the French public about that location and activities undertaken there), real or perceived danger, urgency, and a relative comfort with the mixing of staged footage with “unadulterated” documentary images captured directly from life.