As Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie explain in their book, The Japanese Film , movie screens were pushed over to the side, and the projection crew was out in plain view of the audience. Benshi would explain what was going on in the films, and how all the machinery worked, too. While Americans are still catching up after a century, they have realized that media production methods are often just as interesting as the finished products. The original article compared photos taken from the same vantage point with different lenses, which all wound up looking the same. The Art of Renaissance Science offers a related movie clip in a display on perspective in architecture and graphics.
Some illusions depend on angle and distance together.
The Ames Room is so powerful, that it works after you've been told how it works. But it also works while you watch it working. Various studies of photographed stage effects have been written since movies were invented. John Brosnan covers the major effects from the silent period in Movie Magic , Plume Books, NY, 1976. A. N. Vardac's 1949 Stage to Screen is available in a 1987 Da Capo reprint.