Magic Slides Research Articles

Enticed to settle elsewhere: Magic lantern slides and the transnational creation of European colonial citizens

During the early twentieth century, people across Europe were enticed by magic lantern slide shows about a wide range of topics and issues. This contribution examines magic lantern images depicting South Africa and conveyed to Dutch viewers. How did the slides shape an imaginary both of South Africa and of the viewers themselves? My analysis shows that the slides not only transmitted information about South Africa – its built infrastructure, nature, population and economic sectors (in particular, the agricultural sector) – but also conveyed a narrative that established specific social subjects hierarchized on the basis of race, ethnicity and class. A critical engagement with the imaginary carried across by this material heritage helps us to understand how it promoted a colonial, social subjectivity with which potential emigrants could identify: a rights-bearing, European citizen with the right to move to South Africa and establish a new life there. Prior to any actual emigration, then, subjects were inscribed in a history of structural and physical violence, racism, alleged White superiority, social injustices and social inequality.

The Common Reader in Public Readings with Magic Lantern Slides in Late Imperial Russia

This article investigates public readings in late Imperial Russia, which became both an official and popular educational practice following the establishment of the Standing Commission of Public Readings by the State Ministry of Public Enlightenment in 1872. Public readings, done by an authorized person who would read aloud useful and entertaining texts in front of an audience, represent a significant democratization of the practice of reading. The content of such readings, both textual and visual, was heavily controlled by the state authorities which inevitably led to the shaping of a very specific addressee, the so-called common reader, whose official image was supposed to reflect the ordinary citizen, and is emblematic of the complex problem of nation-building in Russian history. The study enquires how the visual context of public readings contributed to the general image of the common reader. The article examines the representation of the common reader in the media of the time, the limitations imposed by the censorship and strategic choices of images for the magic lantern slides to illustrate the public readings. It provides a deeper perspective on the figure of the common reader, which became an ideological construct of importance for both domestic and foreign policy.

Defining the first preventive conservation guidelines for hand-painted magic lantern glass slides

This article intends to define and make available guidelines for the preventive conservation of hand-painted glass slides for magic lanterns, the first optical instruments for the projection of images, invented in the 17th century. For this purpose, around 300 hand-painted glass slides from the Portuguese Cinematheque – Museum of Cinema (CP) and Nacional Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon (MUHNAC), were studied in terms of representativity in these collections, discursive genre, type of construction or movement mechanism, state of preservation and degradation problems. A survey was designed and distributed to institutions across the globe aiming for an overview of the formal characteristics of the collections of magic lantern slides and the preventive and interventive conservation measures undertaken. The guidelines are focused on the environmental conditions (temperature, relative humidity, and light), fine particles and pest control, storage and display conditions and materials, as well as handling. Recommendations on performative projections or demonstrations are also provided.

The (Mis)Representation of Reality: ‘Knowledge’ and Image-Making in Glass Lantern Slides of China

AbstractThe Royal Asiatic Society in London houses a collection of magic lantern slides of China dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By investigating a selection of lantern slides, this article explores their epistemological nature and their wider relations to socio-cultural and political systems of power. These lantern slides highlight the complexity of our ways of seeing and representing that are embedded into particular historical and ideological systems in which meaning is both shaped and negotiated. This article argues that images are powerful conduits in disseminating and, if unchallenged, maintaining particular notions and ideas.

Early Māori photography as commodified object: Mementoes, miniatures and material culture

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a boom in the different forms of material culture of the photographic image with the emergence of cheap methods for its mass (re)production. The material culture extended into postcards, illustrated books, magic lantern slides and stereoviews, but also into the much-less discussed area of souvenir china. These commodified objects of illustrated porcelain were popular mementoes of places visited, physical reminders of spaces encountered, made possible through newly developing modes of leisure culture and organized travel. Edwardian New Zealand was no exception, where images of the Māori were a striking presence within its visual culture. This was a country that was beginning to promote its cultural uniqueness partly through its Indigenous population, with early tourism literature referring to the country as Maoriland. New Zealand souvenirs depicted images of the Māori and Māoritanga (Māori culture) on decorative china essentially for consumption by local tourists and travellers. This article considers these commodified objects in the context of photography as material culture, exploring their social biography and the manner in which the images were reproduced and altered. It contends that in addressing keepsake china as objects bearing photographic images, and in positioning these souvenirs as popular artefacts within a scopic culture, a more complex argument of variant readings emerges.

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

Order of the Magic Lantern Slides

Dr Sylvester Lambert, an American public health doctor who worked for the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, created a magic lantern slide presentation to retell the arrest of a sorcerer that he had witnessed in 1925 on the island of Malakula in Vanuatu. In this article, I use creative non-fiction to envision other audiences and narrators of this storied event to present an expanded picture of life for Pacific Islanders at that time. I also reflect on how particular events make for good stories because they are contests about belief and incredulity. Reimagining medical stories of sorcery reminds us that medicine is part of larger contests over the nature of reality. This is an imaginative ethnographic experiment with decolonizing intentions which combines archival research, ethnographic research, colonial images and creative non-fiction. It aspires to untie the images from a single fixed colonial narrative and to revisit the images in ways that are open to multiple interpretations, audiences, and narrators.

Magic Lantern Glass Slides Materials and Techniques: The First Multi-Analytical Study

This paper presents the first systematic investigation of hand-painted magic lantern glass slides using multi-analytical techniques combined with a critical analysis of historical written sources of the painting materials and techniques used to produce them. The magic lantern was an optical instrument used from the seventeenth to the twentieth century that attained great success and impact on the entertainment industry, science, religion, and advertisement industry. The glass, colorants, and organic media of five magic lantern slides from the Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon were studied. By means of energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, the glass was characterized and the oxide quantification unveiled that the glass substrate was possibly produced between 1870 and 1930. Ultraviolet-Visible, Raman and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies allowed the characterization of the colorants: Prussian blue, an anthraquinone red lake pigment of animal origin (such as cochineal), an unidentified organic yellow, and carbon black. The remaining colors were achieved through mixtures of the pure pigments. Infrared analysis detected a complex fingerprint in all colors, nevertheless, a terpenoid resin such as shellac was identified. Metal carboxylates were also detected, contributing to the assessment of the state of conservation of the paints.

Linternauta: a web application for the interpretation of magic lantern slides according to discursive genre

ABSTRACTAs part of the ‘Dynamics of Educational and Scientific Renovation in Secondary Schools Classrooms (1900–1936): An Iberian Perspective’ and ‘A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in the Common European History of Learning’ research projects, investigators at the University of Salamanca carried out an exploratory study of 198 Spanish magic lantern slide sets: 52 sets from Cardenal Cisneros High School, Isabel la Católica High School, San Isidro High School (Madrid), El Greco High School (Toledo) and 146 sets from Museu del Cinema-Col.lecció Tomàs Mallol in Girona. This study was a content analysis with the objective of classifying the slides according to discursive genre, intended to open up the neglected and extensive visual heritage of the magic lantern and to provide guidelines for making magic lantern slides available as historical sources for research into European cultural history. This exploratory study has contributed two results of special relevance to the projects: a) a controlled vocabulary that facilitates the classification of magic lantern slides according to their discursive genre, the result of an empirical study using content analysis; and b) Linternauta, a web application, developed using the vocabulary obtained through the content analysis, that helps with the interpretation of the cultural heritage of Spanish magic lantern slide collections.

Charity begins at home? Philanthropy, compassion, and magic lantern slide performances in Australasia, 1891–1892

The biblical maxim ‘charity begins at home’ was given very different meanings by magic lantern slide performances touring the Australasian colonies during the early 1890s. The London-based Barnardo’s orphanages competed with the Australian missionary John Brown Gribble, in aiming to divert public sympathy towards their very different social causes: Barnardo worked to relieve the metropolitan white waif, while Gribble sought funds to ameliorate the impact of invasion upon Indigenous Australians on the remote Queensland frontier. Central to both Barnardo’s and Gribble’s magic lantern slide campaigns was a visual and emotional ‘before and after’ narrative of uplift and transformation. These performances defined ideas and social categories that circulated across the empire, seeking to arouse concern for different, and competing, objects of compassion. This mirroring point towards a process of defining cultural categories of class, race and gender across empire, shaping both British and colonial identities. Where Barnardo’s campaign was tremendously successful in raising funds and attracting support across Australia and New Zealand, the missionary Gribble was challenged by white colonists who denigrated Aboriginal people and ridiculed humanitarianism. These responses reveal how compassion was deployed in the colonies to affirm racial solidarity with the distant white child, and to exclude Indigenous people. This dynamic shows the diverse and politicised effects of these emotive performances, and how emotional narratives worked to construct imperial hierarchies.

Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh

Reviewed by: Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh Jonathan Zwicker (bio) Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen-Year War. By Sharalyn Orbaugh. Brill, Leiden, 2015. xii, 365 pages. €119.00. Over the last two decades, the work of literary historians has increasingly turned to the interrogation of "the great unread": those works of a popular register that were once widely read, occupying an important place in how people experienced the world in the past but that now have been all but forgotten.1 As the work of literary scholars has moved beyond the canon, the study of literary works has also abutted the study of other forms of mass culture, everything from the cinema and television to animation and the graphic novel, and this expanded range of subjects has required a broader set of interdisciplinary tools. And while arguments about media specificity mean that an attention to what makes these forms distinct from one another has been an important part of academic disciplines (as well as interdisciplinarity), it has also become impossible to cordon off these various media from each other as their historical consumption (and quite often production) was never premised on these easy distinctions. In her Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen-Year War, Sharalyn Orbaugh uses her training as a literary historian to analyze a genre of performance all but forgotten by the scholarly world in which a narrator performed a story that was illustrated by a series of paper slides. While the focus of Orbaugh's book is the wartime period, this form of narration has important connections back to the use of magic lantern slides in both the Edo and Meiji periods. This book is part of a renewed interest in the larger history of these modes of performance but also an important contribution in suggesting a way of approaching a broader set of issues related to how we can account for storytelling as a part of a history of culture (both literary and performance) over the last two and a half centuries.2 The body of the book provides a historical overview of kamishibai from the 1920s through the end of World War II and an extended analysis of wartime plays that focuses on different thematic elements within the plays [End Page 428] themselves. Orbaugh also situates her reading of these plays within a theoretical discussion of propaganda and, in the book's conclusion, begins to think about what might be the neurobiology of propaganda and how this, in turn, can shape our reading of history. One of the most intriguing problems raised by Propaganda Performed is a question that is at once historical and formal. As Orbaugh points out in her introduction, these works are of a "hybrid nature," sitting at an unusual crossroads of academic disciplines: "part script, part picture, part performance, it falls somewhere between literature, art history, and theater" (p. 2). Situated at a crossroad of disciplines—but not, in an obvious way, belonging to any one—forms like kamishibai have been especially vulnerable to being simply written out of history. Part of what Orbaugh is doing in this book, then, can be thought of as an act of recovery, though, it is important to point out, not recovery for the sake of recovery but always as part of a larger project of understanding how this form can be analyzed as part of a larger framework of wartime propaganda and how propaganda itself is an integral part of the twentieth century. But formally this subject also poses a challenge: how do we address a subject that likely will be unknown by our audience? Is it enough to analyze these plays at the textual and graphic level without also presenting or representing them to the reader? In this sense, the book is itself an experiment in form, interweaving a historical and critical introduction to the genre with the presentation of seven kamishibai from Japan's 15-year war, the period between 1931 and 1945. Each chapter which treats a historical or generic aspect of the plays is followed by the presentation of a complete play that both reproduces the images used and translates...

Media infrastructure: the Grenfell Mission of Newfoundland and Labrador

The Grenfell Mission of Newfoundland and Labrador operated on the North Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Founded by Dr Wilfred Grenfell, an evangelical Protestant medical missionary, the Mission sought to come to the aid of the settler ‘fisherfolk’ of the colony of Newfoundland. From the late 1890s up until his death in 1940, Grenfell would undertake nearly annual illustrated lecture tours to publicize the work of the Mission and to raise funds. Over the course of this period, the Grenfell Mission would mobilize the chronological, sequential and conventional imagistic media of magic lantern slides, photography and eventually film to propagate the documentary evidence of both the conditions of ‘need’ prevailing on the coasts, as well as its own pragmatic and constructive responses to it. Its recurrent deployment of magic lantern slides, coming to number some 1300 by the 1930s, during the Mission's fundraising tours throughout Canada, the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, would vouch for their importance on the level of the Mission's self-representation. This article aims to think about the mediated representation of the Mission through its collection of magic lantern slides as a form of infrastructure, both on the levels of their materiality, that is, the slides themselves, and their symbolic coherence, in the sorts of Mission works they would enable. In so doing, it aims to begin to blur the line between scholarly approaches to infrastructure that, on the one hand, approach it as a material substrate to transportation, communication and various other service-delivery systems that are largely structured around commercial exchange, human circulation and societal organization; and those, on the other hand, that address infrastructure as a mode of relational analysis.

Picturing Muharram: Images of a Colonial Spectacle, 1870–1915

The festival of Muharram had a central place in British colonial discourses on India as it was both a site of fascination and fear. While in textual discussions the fearsome aspect invariably came to the fore, in contemporaneous images of Muharram on magic lantern slides, on postcards or in film, fear was rarely depicted, although Muharram was never shown as being out of colonial control. Images tended to focus on Muharram as an attractive spectacle, with fear often located in the accompanying text. Between 1870 and 1915, the heyday of the Raj, visual economies in postcards and in film oversaw a transformation in representations of Muharram, in which the fear was displaced and the spectacle took centre stage, offering a fresh discourse around Muharram.

Picturing the Demon Drink: How Children were Shown Temperance Principles in the Band of Hope

The UK Temperance movement attracted millions of members in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including children. Probably the most successful of the many groupings was the children's organization, the Band of Hope (1847–1995), and there is a rich legacy of teaching materials, including magic lantern slides, which enables later generations to discover and evaluate its use of visual discourse. This article explores the visual means by which the message was spread and members were gained, sustained, and given material for their own missionary endeavors. The argument highlights the importance of the pioneering visual tools for communicating these messages used by the Band of Hope.

Fairytales and the Magic Lantern: Henry Underhill's Lantern Slides in The Folklore Society Collection

Among the collections of The Folklore Society, London, are a number of hand-painted magic lantern slides by Henry Underhill, an amateur scientist and naturalist who lived in Oxford during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The slides illustrate Japanese, Irish, Russian, Norwegian and French folktales drawn from various printed sources. They add a new dimension to our understanding of folktale reception at the period and to the interaction of folktale texts and their visual realisations.

Desire among the Ruins: The Politics of Difference in American Visions of Porfirian Mexico

Travel to Mexico became instantly faster, smoother, and cheaper for Americans when workers finally linked US and Mexican rail lines in 1884. Following the opening of the international rail connection, Americans went south of the border in droves and produced a wide array of representations depicting Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911, a period known as the “Porfiriato”). Travelogues, picture postcards, stereographs, and magic-lantern slides with Mexican themes all circulated heavily in US popular culture during this time. This essay examines the politics of difference in these representations – chiefly travel writing and postcards – arguing that travelers and other observers played a crucial but overlooked role in popularizing the view of Mexico as a logical field for capitalist (and sometimes territorial) expansionism. By positioning Mexican bodies as both desirable and dangerous, I argue, the creators of travel discourse set the stage for contradictory and ambivalent views of Mexico that reverberate in the United States even today.

Object lessons: a cultural genealogy of the dunce cap and the apple as visual tropes of American education

When we look in depth at how the experience of education was represented in American culture, we find evidence of visual tropes representing evolving but persistent aspects of the experience of schooling, such as the performance of judgement, and the desire to know the world. These tropes were rendered in terms of pictorial conventions that went back centuries to chapbook woodcuts, and that by the early twentieth century had appeared and would reappear in movies, illustrations of novels and textbooks, magic-lantern slides and stereograph cards, and the art of popular magazines. Focusing on the dunce cap and the apple, this essay shows how these two simple objects arrived in the early twentieth century as icons for the process of education and the experience of schooling. While changing over time, they were important for the way in which they gave successive generations common symbols for understanding school. In the process of being appropriated repeatedly over the space of decades and centuries as symbols of the educational process, the dunce cap and the apple were transformed into conservative forms, dense with the layers of meaning that accrued to them.

Building Civil Society One Brick at a Time: People’s Houses and Worker Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia

Next article No AccessArticlesBuilding Civil Society One Brick at a Time: People’s Houses and Worker Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia*Adele LindenmeyrAdele LindenmeyrVillanova University Search for more articles by this author Villanova UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 84, Number 1March 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/663091 Views: 171Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Yana Agafonova The Common Reader in Public Readings with Magic Lantern Slides in Late Imperial Russia, Russian Literature 129 (Apr 2022): 73–93.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2021.12.001Murray Frame EARLY SOVIET CULTURE, (Aug 2020): 375–382.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118620878.ch30 Bibliography, (Aug 2020): 429–450.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118620878.biblioYoshifuru Tsuchiya From Workers’ Milieu to the Public Arena: Workers’ Sociability and Obshchestvennost’ before 1906, (Jan 2015): 34–60.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547231_3Mori Ram White But Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests Through Spatial Mimicry, Antipode 46, no.33 (Dec 2013): 736–753.https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12071Vera Kaplan WEATHERING THE REVOLUTION: PATRONAGE AS A STRATEGY OF SURVIVAL, Revolutionary Russia 26, no.22 (Dec 2013): 97–127.https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2013.855061

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism Helena Ifill (bio) Alberto Gabriele , Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2009), pp. xxvii + 275, $80 cloth. Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print is a wide-ranging exploration of the "trope of sensationalism" in the Victorian periodical press. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia is focussed upon as a "unique example in the history of miscellanies" (28), but also as a case study for considering the ways in which we can approach periodical research. Alberto Gabriele's work is especially important because few single issues of Belgravia complete with paratextual material exist, and he has attempted to piece together, as much as possible, the Victorian reader's experience. Although not all readers would have read "a single issue as a complete unit" (42) from cover to cover, Gabriele effectively argues that researchers should be attentive to the montage effect produced by reading a single issue of Belgravia containing stories, articles, advertisements, illustrations, and poetry. Connected to the notion of montage is the (sometimes oppositional) relationship between fragmentation and unity. The early chapters of this book associate both fragmentation and the periodical press with the shock of the sensational, modernity, and industrialization, and explore how periodicals are inherently fragmentary because of their diverse contents by different authors (including serialized novels delivered to the reader a fragment at a time). Yet Gabriele also argues for a sense of "symbolic cohesiveness that brings together the mosaic of perspectives and disparate stimuli that constitute the magazine" (35); he suggests this reflects the way in which late-Victorian society wove fragmentation "into a larger theory [End Page 99] of culture" (42). Included in this discussion is a consideration of the potentially disruptive influence of sensation fiction, which challenged the social status quo. Braddon's Belgravia as a whole is also shown to be at odds with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century aesthetic theories, such as E.S. Dallas's The Gay Science (1866), which tend "towards abstraction that dismisses and finally erases the episodic and the fragmentary from artistic appreciation" (53). Chapters three and four consider various relationships between readers, periodicals, and contributors. This includes an assessment of the way in which Belgravia's audience was "defined by the fascination for the controversial issues that the novels appearing in installments provoked" (70); debates over author anonymity; an examination of Victorian advertisements, showing the shift towards "brand-name advertising, which imagined—and created—target niche markets" (84); and "industrial journalism," which took the reader behind the scenes of the factories that produced the items she or he was intended to covet. Gabriele finds in the diversity of advertising "a hidden symmetry of recurrent phrases," speaking a language "of an increased availability of products, of purported thrilling novelties, and of fabled universal access to luxury" (90). Chapter four also considers the anonymously serialized Bound to John Company, or the Adventures and Misadventures of Robert Ainsleigh, started, and later revised, by Braddon into Robert Ainsleigh but finished (due to her nervous breakdown) by an unknown author (1868-69). Gabriele shows how this novel (concerning the East India Company) sensationalises the "telling of British history" (83). Chapter five explores the relationship between popular periodical fiction and pre-cinematic entertainment. Gabriele argues that both periodical literature and magic lantern shows present "episodic" information "as part of a somewhat coherent fragmentary genre" (116), and that Belgravia achieved "the ability to strike the optic nerve with a quick and strong impression," much like a magic lantern slide (120). The chapter concludes by showing how early silent film often directly adapted sensation plots such as Lady Audley's Secret or, like Louis Feuillardes's Les Vampires (1915-16), drew on the sensational. The final chapter, "Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Paris," jumps back to the 1870s and 1880s with the promise of a discussion of Braddon's 1873 feuilleton novel La Chanteuse des rues, yet Braddon is disappointingly only mentioned briefly. Instead we have a discussion of French sensation fiction and the pros and cons of genre distinctions, especially in relation to "sensation" and "detective" fiction. The book concludes with a useful index to Belgravia's contents...

Magic Moments: Contextualising Cinema Advertising Slides from the Queensland Museum Collection

The Queensland Museum's eclectic State Collection holds an extensive range of photographic and moving image equipment, as well as a collection of slides and photographs that tells all manner of stories about the history of Queensland. This collection goes back to the earliest technologies, such as daguerreotypes and hand-drawn magic lantern slides, and extends through to a digital image repository. Included in this collection are two captivating series of cinema advertising slides used at the Wintergarden cinemas in Maryborough and Ipswich during the 1940s and 1950s. These slides simultaneously illuminate a history of entertainment and cinema-going, a history of image technologies and the histories of the advertised products and events pertinent to regional Queenslanders at this time.