Finally, someone has come up with a use for holograms better than making it look as though dead pop stars are still somehow alive and performing. An ingenious short film called Holorama: An Optical Theatre by Jeff Desom presents a dazzling application of the technology: recreating iconic movie moments in spectral, three-dimensional form, albeit at Lilliputian size. Desom teamed up with model builder Oli Pesch to create a series of what he calls “boxes” or “things.” Each box contains a diorama depicting a famous movie location, such as the now-demolished Hollywood Star Lanes bowling emporium from The Big Lebowski. And onto each diorama, through what Desom refers to as “a simple holographic process,” a flickering, transparent image of a moving character (e.g., John Turturro obscenely licking and polishing a purple bowling ball) is projected. The set-up sounds wonky, but the results are astonishing. Desom and Pesch have managed to create vignettes in which well-known movie locations appear to be haunted by the ghosts of departed actors. This might seem to be incredibly new, but Desom says the project was “inspired by the great tradition of optical theaters,” a lineage that goes back to 1890s France and the work of Charles-Émile Reynaud.