Dziga Vertov's 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera was one of the first pieces I recall watching in an informal film club back in college. It's stuck with me, though, and the image of a train hurtling towards the camera and into the audience is etched in my mind.
The film depicts a day in the life of a Russian city and employs many innovative camera techniques. It's hard to imagine what seeing this film would be like in the 1920s, but thanks to the newly opened New York Times archive, the thought experiment is greatly simplified. Here is the Times' original review for Vertov's 1927 film, written by Mordaunt Hall on September 17, 1929.
Time traveling in this way is truly fascinating. I agree with Dave Winer's post that such a thing could really change our sense of information.
I'm also amazed that the Times has all of this digitized, it must have been an enormous effort. Some sort of index website to this information would be useful. Perhaps a greatest hits blog pointing to Times articles. The back catalog is so enormous that sorting through it is like sorting through the Internet itself. More difficult, though, because Google may or may not be keeping an index.