Cineastes streaming into "The City" next week for the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival might want to consider taking a cable car down to the Musée Mécanique in between the screenings at the Castro Theatre and the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas....

Seashells are molded into the metal sides of the Mutoscopes at the Musée Mécanique, which seems appropriate—not only because the collection of antique arcade amusements is located on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, but also because these turn-of-the-century motion picture machines contain cinematic pearls.

Inflation being what it is, these former “penny-in-the-slot” peepshows now cost a quarter, but it’s well worth the price for anyone at all interested in film history. Resting my brow against the cold metal of viewing hoods and rotating hand cranks blackened by generations of sweaty palms, I became my own projectionist—flipping through black-and-white photographic prints to animate such sequences as the aptly titled Quick on the Trigger, a one-minute Western starring Tom Mix.

Also available was XXX—not to be confused the Vin-Diesel-as-extreme-sportsman-spy actioner from 2002. This one features a rather matronly office worker who, when her boorish boss makes an unwanted advance by—gasp!—touching her shoulder, throttles a ludicrously light, limp dummy whose substitution for the flesh-and-blood actor is disguised by a clumsy cut. And the performance? Let’s just say Diesel doesn’t have anything to worry about.

The Musée Mécanique’s collection also includes several Cail-O-Scopes. Invented by the Caille Brothers in 1904 (exactly 10 years after Herman Casler patented the Mutoscope), the Cail-O-Scope experience more closely resembles a slide show than a motion picture. Turning the crank caused a reel of still stereoscopic photos to fall one by one in front of the viewer, allowing me to—as the hand-lettered poster promised—“See Naughty Marietta Do Her Stuff.”

After finding out that “her stuff” consists solely of sitting a broad-backed wicker chair (think the ones Morticia favored on The Addams Family) in a spangled skirt and a prehistoric predecessor of the bikini top, I decided to skip the Cail-O-Scope advertising “Artists’ Models: 3-D Figure Studies”—especially after noticing it had been “approved by New York City censors.”

Still, those all-for-me afternoon matinees on Pier 45 reminded me that watching motion pictures could be a private practice long before the days of iPhones—although Apple needn’t fear a resurgence in Mutoscope popularity anytime soon. Hard to imagine a chest-high metal machine making a dent in that hot handheld’s hold over the mixed-media marketplace.