Gonda Yasunosuke' s The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures, the first monographic study of cinema in Japan, hovers on the border of film theory. Read today, it seems a peculiar combination of history, technical explanation, humor, aesthetics, sociology, manifesto, and oral storytelling. It may initially perplex the reader. First, because it is written in a sometimes witty, colloquial style that resembles little of the heavy language we call "theory" today. Second, because not all of its claims or arguments about the cinema match the medium we believe we experience now. I would dare say that reading Gouda's book is in some ways not unlike viewing early cinema, with its mixture of the familiar and the strange. But just as research on early cinema, especially after the Brighton conference in 1978, has reevaluated the first years of film—shifting away from seeing it as a primitive model that leads to and is necessarily superseded by classical cinema, toward conceiving it as an alternative, if not equal possibility to the classical mode—we should look at Gonda's Principles not as an inadequate first stab at understanding the medium (as essentially the "primitive" of classical film theory), but rather as an alternative to the historically dominant forms of theory that eventually developed. There are ways we can make Gouda's text speak to us. Some might look to Gonda's emphasis on how lower class spectatorship becomes the "subject" of film entertainment, effectively finishing the film as it is viewed in the theater, as an early form of British cultural or reception studies. Another, of course, is to connect Gonda to his own time, as a spokesperson, so to speak, for aspects of early cinema, one who can translate or explain it to us. Yet, I believe another way to approach Principles is to preserve its alterity, as something that is hard to understand because it is in a different language from the one film studies employs today.