With his "Questions of a Reading Worker" Bertolt Brecht created a template that can be applied to every conceivable field of knowledge.
This also applies to film history, in which the same distortions and narrowing of the big names can be found as in the stories of Thebes, Caesar or Alexander the Great.
There is a scene in Jordan Peele's new film Nope that could be directly inspired by Brecht.
On display is one of the most famous shots of early cinema: a horse whose stride was photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in such a way that the sequence of images gave the impression of movement.
Thus the principle of the cinema was found.
And in the historic rush that ensued, no one asked the seemingly irrelevant question: Who was actually on the horse?
It will no longer be possible to determine this historically, but "Nope" has a story to tell.
The first movie star ever was Afro-American, a black man whom the Haywood Hollywood Horses company now claims is Alistair E. Haywood.
His descendant, Emerald Haywood, who lived with her brother Otis jr.
took over the business from her recently deceased father, presents the detail of the black jockey as a showstopper with which to impress today's entertainment industry.
But the reactions remain cold, and when the horse that Otis jr.
brought to the audition, it's looking like another bad day for the Haywoods.
As it turns out, that's the lesser of the problems.
Because "Nope" has a few more challenges ready for the unequal pair of siblings.
Challenges that go well beyond the questions of reading workers.
By the time the film industry took root in California, the Wild West was almost a myth, to which Hollywood then contributed a great deal.
In the meantime, the era of the genre, which at its peak was also known as “horse opera”, is essentially over.
We have to think of the Haywoods as a supplier to this Western boom, which the father may have experienced - a "horse wrangler" who is part of show business and then again not.
Although "Nope" remains largely in the catchment area of Hollywood, it is set in an area that could hardly be more remote and enchanted.
Mental geography and significant landscape are a crucial aspect in this story.
No sooner do we have a grasp of the circumstances than the patriarch of the Haywoods dies in a strange accident that qualifies as "something fell out of a plane."
The x-ray of his head, showing a cut that also bisected his right eye, is one of the first signs of shock in "Nope".
The son Otis Junior, called OJ, is supposed to continue the traditional company, supported by his dynamic but not always reliable sister Emerald, called Em. But the way the great Daniel Kaluuya plays the OJ, he is more likely to carry the many decades of marginalization around with them, in which the Haywoods' horse business somehow had to make a living.
Hollywood may be a hill or two away, but it's not much out here at the Haywoods.
A country behind and above everything
Except for a seedy Western theme park that ends with a meaningful sign to the east: this is where Out Yonder begins, meaning a country behind everything, a country, as it soon turns out, also above everything.
A country not least of daring genre mixture.
While there have been many crossroads between westerns and science fiction, no one has ever seriously attempted to invoke the spirit of John Ford and Ed Wood with equal justification and passion.
But that is roughly the project of "Nope".