Film has returned to Perth's Piccadilly Arcade. Not to the adjacent and currently closed cinema, but to a vacant shop window, showing rare footage of city life from 1907.

Accidental Cinema is a collaboration between the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, the City of Perth and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) to reawaken interest in empty shopfronts in the CBD.

Projection artist Roly Skender has created the first instalment, which uses two screens, one in front of the other, to juxtapose modern and historic images of the city.

"At the front we have a material called holo-gauze, which is a little bit transparent and allows some light to hit it and some light to go through," Mr Skender explained.

Projection artist Roly Skender is the creator of Accidental Cinema. ( ABC Radio Perth: Emma Wynne )

"I shot a landscape photo of Perth and we are panning across that on the front screen.

"On the rear screen is some very old footage of Perth, some of the oldest footage that we know of in existence."

It's that old footage that is prompting shoppers to stop and take a second look, intrigued by the sight of Hay Street when it carried horse-drawn carts, trams, and throngs of well-dressed men and women all wearing hats.

The 1907 footage comes from the NFSA's Corrick collection, which lay dormant in a garage in Tasmania before it was rediscovered and donated to the archive.

The screen in Piccadilly Arcade adds some movement to a CBD with many vacant shopfronts. ( ABC Radio Perth: Emma Wynne )

"The Corricks were a family of troubadours and vaudeville performers that were touring the world at the turn of the century and they would shoot films," Mr Skender said.

"Leonard Corrick would shoot films during the day for the show and then he would somehow process them during the day or that week and then show them at night.

"So you can see a lot of people looking directly at the camera knowing that they would be able to go to the show that night and see their image on the big screen, which you can imagine in 1907 would have been a pretty special thing, and it served to get bums on seats in a big way.

"The footage itself just looks very eerie and I'm always fascinated by the way people look at the camera."

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Although most of the businesses in the footage are long gone, landmarks like the Horseshoe bridge, Boan's department store and the Perth Town Hall are still clearly recognisable.

"The bridge and the Perth town hall are a couple of landmarks that have stayed the same," he said.

"A lot of people see this footage and are quite saddened by the number of buildings that have been knocked down and that we have lost over the decades.

"It can serve as a bit of a warning for the future as well — let's not just knock stuff down because we can.

"It's nice to have the footage being seen again because it spent probably 80 years in a garage."

The screen in the Hay Street end of Piccadilly Arcade is just the first in what Skender and Revelation festival director Richard Sowada hope will be a series of installations in the city's many vacant spaces.

"We will probably do some night-time activations as well and just try and grab people's attention and show them something a little bit different."

This first instalment of Accidental Cinema will run until the end of December.