Luna Park Research Articles

The kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the rise of American amusements

A generation before Walt Disney, Fred Thompson was boy-wonder of American popular amusements. At turn of 20th century, Thompson's entrepreneurial drive made him into an entertainment mogul who helped to define popular culture of his day. In this lively biography, cultural historian Woody Register tells remarkable story of Thompson and examines transformation of commerce and entertainment as American society moved into an era of mass marketing and large-scale corporate enterprise. Register shows how Thompson got his start as a creator and promoter of carnival shows and world's fairs, including World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, and he traces Thompson's career as one of principal developers and promoters of Coney Island (where he built Luna Park) and other amusement parks. Thompson built mammoth Hippodrome Theater in Manhattan and mounted many productions there and on Broadway, noted for their spectacular (and spectacularly costly) staging effects. Thompson aggressively marketed to adult consumers a world of make-believe and childlike play, crafting his own public image as the boy who never grew up. Register shows how strongly Thompson's fantasies appealed to growing legions of men and women who found themselves in a world that seemed increasingly businesslike, profit-oriented, and regimented.

Luna Park, Sydney, 1978

Luna Park, Sydney, 1978

Identity Signifiers in Contemporary Russian Films: A Lacanian Analysis

The claiming of an essential identity is a common psychological mechanism human beings use to characterize themselves. For Russians in the last decade of this century, searches for the meaning of the self are endemic. Much of Russia is engaged in re-writing the narrative of community and re-constructing history in an effort to fill the identity void left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its monolithic Ideological State Apparatus. 1 Contemporary Russian films are both symptomatic of and a productive force in this process of identity reconstruction. In the last ten years, Russian film production has frequently focused on problems that originated with the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Film producers, liberated from the ideological constraints of the Communist Party, have embraced the search for alternative ideologies as a primary narrative. The protagonists of new films are often in the position of confronting old values that are no longer realizable and so distort those values in their search for viable social and personal standards. In order to explore the limits on traditional signifiers, they look for alternatives and find them in chimerical discourses such as pre-Revolutionary Russia (e.g. Stanislav Govoruchin's controversial documentary, The Russia That We Have Lost). Three films made in the early 1990s characterize this quest for alternative identities: Pavel Loungin's Luna Park (1991), Vladimir Khotinenko's Muslim (1994), and Nikita Mikhalkov's Urga (1991). Each movie addresses issues of post-Communist Russia in different locales--in Moscow, in a Russian village, and in China. Each film works through problems of identity, concentrating on one particular conflict in discourses that threaten the identity of the protagonists. Thus Luna Park stresses the conflicts arising from racial and gender [End Page 95] stereotyping; Muslim focuses on the difficulty of achieving religious tolerance in a traditional rural community; Urga depicts the intrusion of Western commercialism on a remote, idyllic Eden. The reception of these works, as well as interviews with the directors, suggests that each of these films attempts to find an essential Russian identity, to reassess traditional signifiers of what it means to be Russian in the era of post-Communism. 2 Our interpretation of these films is based on psychological theories developed in the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan rejects the understanding of identity as essential and transcendent. Rather, he views it as constructed through the play of signifiers within a socially produced symbolic order. In his work, Lacan distinguishes between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real--three sites which are important for understanding an individual as well as his or her universe. The imaginary is established in early childhood, when the infant experiences the reflection of his own body as a unified and unproblematic whole in the mirror. This mirror stage constitutes a basis for that subject's sense of "I" as a center of the universe where the surroundings--the Others--are made whole in the optic of one's own imaginary order. If individuals share premises from the symbolic order of their era in their own imaginaries, the Other and the "I" can have successful interaction. Such acts of relating through a social set of signifiers promote an individual's entrance into language and into identity. Yet Lacan views the realization of one's own identity in language as constructed in absence and lack because no signifier is ever adequate to its signified. Words remain the surrogates of desire. The human subject experiences this sense of his or her own lack as measured against the symbolic order. That subject uses language or other sign systems (e.g. behavioral norms) to create a relationship between his or her imaginary and the symbolic order of the exterior world. At moments of successful communication, when perceived desires appear to be fulfilled, the subject believes that his or her identity is complete and autonomous. This transient illusion of success is inevitably permeated with the reality of individuals' unfulfilled desires. In order to cover this...

Exhibiting a War in progress: Entertainment and Propaganda in Vienna, 1914–1918

On the morning of July 1, 1916, prominent members of Viennese high society gathered in a large imperial park not far from the center of Vienna. This park, the Prater, had been the site of many fairs, exhibits, and festivals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It accommodated the World's Fair in 1873 and since then had housed circuses, variety shows, children's exhibits, and the Luna Park amusement complex. The Prater was a favorite destination of Viennese of all classes in search of recreation and entertainment. On this particular morning, those in attendance were more notable than usual; they included Archduke Franz Salvator, War Minister Alexander Krobatin, Education Minister Max von Hussarek, the Austrian defense minister, ambassadors of several allied countries, and local and regional government officials. They were on hand to celebrate the grand opening of what sponsors promised would be an exhibition unlike any Vienna had ever seen. At eleven o'clock, the prestigious entourage entered the first hall of the grandest entertainment spectacle of the wartime home front: the Vienna War Exhibition.

METHOD IN THE MADHOUSE

The engineer E.A. Hopkins was closely connected with the Sydney fun fair, Luna Park, during his whole working life. He kept a meticulous photographic record of the developments and changes at the Park, and these photographs were of pivotal importance for Dr. Holleley's researches for a doctoral thesis on Luna Park. In this article lie examines the methodological and theoretical implications of the use of photographs as archival material.—Eds.

Democracy and Deconstruction

In August 1995 I directed a studio production of an unfinished piece called Luna Park Eclipses for the National Theatre Studio. The production was non-public and experimental. We rehearsed for two weeks, and then put on a one-off show for an audience of about twenty-five. The cast comprised Peter Bayliss, Timothy Bateson, Dilys Laye, Diana Fairfax, Sheila Burrell, and David Neal.The words ‘success’ and ‘failure’, mercifully, are not relevant in this context. If they were, the project could be called ‘sucessful’ if only because it threw up questions and I was encouraged to continue: the old mould had cracked open for a moment and I saw, briefly, drama in a new light again. A year later I decided to write about what I am trying to do in Luna Park Eclipses.

Incubator-Baby Side Shows

On the morning of Thursday, March 2, 1950, I read the following obituary in the New York Times: MARTIN A. COUNEY, "INCUBATOR DOCTOR" Dr. Martin A. Couney, a specialist in the care of prematurely born infants, who had shown such babies to the public for an admission price at fairs and other exhibitions throughout the United States and in Europe for more than fifty years, died last night at his home, 3728 Surf Avenue, Sea Gate, Coney Island. He was 80 years old. "The Incubator Doctor" as Dr. Couney was informally known, was born in Germany, studied medicine in Breslau, Berlin and Leipzig, receiving an M.D., and later in Paris under Dr. Pierre C. Budin, noted pediatrician, who developed a method of saving the prematurely born. At the Berlin Exposition in 1896, Dr. Couney operated an exhibit of prematurely born babies to show the Budin technique. The exhibit was a financial success, as was a second one at Earl's Court in London. In 1898 Dr. Couney paid his first visit to the United States and staged an exhibit at the Omaha Trans-Mississippi Exposition. He returned to Paris for the exposition of 1900, but was back in this country for the Buffalo Exposition the next year, and then decided to remain here for good. For years he had shows at both Dreamland and Luna Park, and the night Dreamland was destroyed by fire the babies were saved by a quick transfer to the Luna Park incubators, some of the lodgers doubling up.

Cycle, Symbol, and Parody in Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall"

Evelyn Waugh's novels are packed with symbolic characters, incidents, objects, and locales that make in condensed form satiric points conveyed by larger portions of the narrative.1 This symbolic shorthand, summarizing and reinforcing what otherwise takes longer to express, encapsulates Waugh's pessimistic vision of the secular world. In Waugh's version of the nature of things, madness, mismatch, and misalliance flourish: incompatibles marry, the guilty go unscathed, innocents bear the blame, incompetents hold positions of power. The circularity of Waugh's novels, their penchant for ending where or the way they began, combines with the images of circular motion they contain to depict a tragicomic world with no sense of direction. Symbols are always the key to Waugh's art. They implant in one's mind the essence of his vision: a series of disturbingly satiric images of modern life that easily outlast one's capacity to remember whom Brenda Last finally marries or the identities of the various Mr. Chatterboxes. Major symbols, such as the deadly auto race in Vile Bodies or the crazily spinning wheel at Luna Park in Decline and Fall,

Schwab v. Washington Luna Park Co., Inc. June 8, 1911. [71 S. E. 542.

Schwab v. Washington Luna Park Co., Inc. June 8, 1911. [71 S. E. 542.