Magic Lantern Research Articles

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, by Heather Fielding; Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel, by Angela Frattarola

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, by Heather Fielding; Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel, by Angela Frattarola

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The legacy of the Jesuits: the practice and social influence of magic lantern projectors and films of the T’ou-Se-We Orphan Arts and Crafts Institute in Shanghai

ABSTRACT Taking the publications of T’ou-Se-We Press as its main historical materials and adopting the method of media archeology, this paper investigates the manufacture and films of the projector at T’ou-Se-We Orphan Arts and Crafts Institute, Shanghai (1864–1960) in relation to the technology and content of the media. The T’ou-Se-We projector was created using calcium carbide technology. The films generally concerned missions and took social themes into account. They developed concepts of private customization and copyright considerations in relation to sales. The instrumental convenience allowed by the T’ou-Se-We projectors went beyond promoting Catholic missionary activities in Shanghai during the 1930s. The projectors also played a role in the state’s policy of film education and in cultivating visual literacy to enhance sensory experience among the public during the Republic of China.

Imagined geography of Russia in Western travelogues: Conceptualizing space through history

In modern societies, imagined geographies are constituted, along with other means, by travel literature. Unlike standardized tourist guides, travelogues offer personalized accounts of ‘genuine’ experiences of exploration and encounter. These experiences, however, are largely informed by the accounts of the previous travelers and require a number of literary devices and rhetorical strategies to create a coherent, engaging and authoritative narrative. This article focuses on literary and conceptual means employed to produce the ‘imagined geography’ of Russia in two travelogues published at the same time (2010) – Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern and Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. Despite the differences in the narratorial personae and in the literary form (Polonsky’s travelogue is much more ‘experimental’ than Frazier’s), these travelogues have much in common in the ways they describe the spatial experience of Russia by connecting space to time and history. Moreover, spatial travel turns into time travel as the parallel spatial and temporal hierarchy emerges, built around several oppositions: modern, Western/European, urban, commercial places vs. unmodern, East/Asian, small town/village, de-industrialized and depressed space. Social ordering of space, therefore, becomes a reproduction of the power relations between the individual and the state, periphery and the center. These oppositions reflect how Russian historical experience of modernity is inscribed in its vast space, this experience being interpreted by the travelers through the emotional and vivid image of a ‘broken modernity’. Russian people in Frazier’s text resemble ‘survivalists’ at a ‘post-apocalyptic’ frontier while, for Polonsky, the post-Soviet Russians are disconnected from their past and incapable of imagining their future.

‘Dead as the wooden battleship’: The Fate of Silent British Features in the Transition to Sound

Dead as the wooden battleship, dead as the magic lantern: such were the similes used in 1929 by some in the British film industry to describe the fate of silent cinema in the new talkie era. Other voices predicted a lingering half-life. Either way, most film companies faced a common problem: what to do in 1929 with their stock of silent films which were completed but unreleased. Foregrounding the activities of British International Pictures, Gainsborough Pictures and the distributors Equity British, this article explores the aesthetic, practical and technical problems in exhibiting and sonically titivating silent product as the industry adjusted to sound technology. Topics include the problems generated by the Cinematograph Films Act 1927; the damage caused by awkwardly dubbed voices; the perils of management divisions; the re-release of older silent films; audience and critical dissatisfaction; and the output of young film-makers such as John F. Argyle, who made his last silent feature, The Final Reckoning, in September 1931. British silent cinema's death, it turns out, was neither quick nor painless.

Projecting Faith: French and Belgian Catholics and the Magic Lantern Before the First World War

Around 1900, the Catholic Church in Belgium and France started to systematically use the magic lantern for religious education, but also as a propaganda tool in their fight against their laic opponents in both countries. In the course of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern had become a major visual mass medium in Europe and the United States. The light beam of the lantern was seen as a powerful means to sustain faith and disseminate the views of the Church. While numerous members of the Catholic clergy embraced the projections lumineuses as a continuation of the long-standing tradition to teach the gospel through images, from glass windows to paintings, they had to face opposition by those who thought the magic lantern unfit to be used to lecture on religious matters. Despite such resistance, the projected image became an important medium used throughout the first decades of the twentieth century by the Catholic Church.

The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague

The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague

“A Bright Continuous Flow”: Phantasmagoria and History in A Tale of Two Cities

This essay explores how Charles Dickens's representation of history in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his historical novel of the French Revolution, is influenced by the Phantasmagoria. The Phantasmagoria was an optical ghost show popularized in Paris in the 1790s by the showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson. Using a hidden magic lantern in a pitch-dark room, Robertson projected images of ghosts and skeletons as well as historical personages from the French Revolution. Drawing on Dickens's own writings on the Phantasmagoria, the essay argues that Dickens's approach to historical fiction is informed by the Phantasmagoria's medium-specific effects and its cultural association with history and historical memory. Specifically, Dickens's turn to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity to represent historical temporality is influenced by the dialectical visual effects of the Phantasmagoria and related mid-nineteenth-century optical technologies. A Tale of Two Cities has always resisted the dialectical-materialist paradigm for the nineteenth-century historical novel first developed by Georg Lukács and more recently elaborated by Fredric Jameson. By employing a media archaeological framework, this essay offers a revitalized approach to Dickens's historical representation that contextualizes it within nineteenth-century theories and discourses of optical perception.

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.

Upphaf kvikmyndaaldar á Íslandi

The article addresses the early years of film in iceland, where the goal is to deepen our knowledge of the main participants in introducing and promoting cinema in iceland at the turn of the 19th century. Two years spanning a three-year period mark the beginnings of the age of film in iceland. The former is 1901 when the Dutch filmmaker F. A. Nöggerath came to film iceland and icelanders for an English film company. The latter year is 1903, when the Norwegian, Rasmus Hallseth and the Swede David Fernander, traveled around the country to screen films for the first time in iceland. These two visits mark the emergence of cinema in iceland. iceland-ers had little prior knowledge of the new medium, which was getting to be widely known around the world, apart from the coverage of newspapers and stories of lucky icelanders who had experienced film screenings abroad. Shows using a predecessor of film, the magic lantern, were held by Sigfús Eymundsson and Þorlákur ó. Jo-hnson in the 19th century. After the introduction of films in 1903, several people put together funds to buy Hallseth’s and Fernanders’ equipment and began to exhibit films on their own. However, daily performances did not happen until Reykjavik Biograftheater (later ,,Gamla Bíó”) was established in 1906. After several attempts by various parties to hold regular screenings in Reykjavik, one could say that cinema did not properly settle in iceland until the establishment of Nýja Bíó in 1913.

The Magic Lantern as a Lens for Observing the Eye in Tokugawa Japan: Technology, translation, and theRangakumovement

AbstractThis article explores the thoughts and ideas associated with magic-lantern technology in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan. Its primary focus is on trends in Japanese thought from the 1770s until the 1820s, with specific reference to theRangaku(‘Dutch Studies’) movement. The article examines connections between the magic lantern and a wider discourse within Japan on epistemology, knowledge about nature, and the study of the human body, centring upon the device's vital role in the endeavour to understand the workings of the human eye. Through this lens, a fresh perspective is offered on the role of critical analysis in the translation and interpretation of European texts in Tokugawa Japan, as well as on the shifting prominence of empiricism and deductive reasoning in Japanese epistemology. In this way, the history of the magic lantern is used to look beyond the prevailing West-centred narrative of global technological and intellectual development.

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.

Fashioned in the light of physics: the scope and methods of Halford Mackinder's geography

Throughout his career the geographer, and first reader in the 'new' geography at the University of Oxford, Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) described his discipline as a branch of physics. This essay explores this feature of Mackinder's thought and presents the connections between him and the Royal Institution professor of natural philosophy John Tyndall (1820-1893). My reframing of Mackinder's geography demonstrates that the academic professionalization of geography owed as much to the methods and instruments of popular natural philosophy and physics as it did to theories of Darwinian natural selection. In tracing the parallels between Tyndall and Mackinder, and their shared emphasis upon the technology of the magic lantern and the imagination as tools of scientific investigation and education, the article elucidates their common pedagogical practices. Mackinder's disciplinary vision was expressed in practices of visualization, and in metaphors inspired by physics, to audiences of geographers and geography teachers in the early twentieth century. Together, these features of Mackinder's geography demonstrate his role as a popularizer of science and extend the temporal and spatial resonance of Tyndall's natural philosophy.

The Revival of "Gentou" (magic lantern, filmstrips, slides) in Showa Period Japan:

The Revival of "Gentou" (magic lantern, filmstrips, slides) in Showa Period Japan:

Magic lantern shows through a macroscopic lens: topic modelling and mapping as methods for media archaeology

ABSTRACTThis article explores trends across Lucerna, an online web resource for magic lantern materials, by combining two digital approaches: topic modelling and geospatial mapping. Topic modelling identifies words that occur most frequently together in a large corpus of texts through a form of statistical analysis. Using this method, I studied 2,000 descriptions of magic lantern shows given between 1874 and 1903. While there were records from Canada, India, and New Zealand in this data set, most of these lantern shows occurred in England. The groupings of words, or ‘topics’, reflected the prevalence of the Church Army, Band of Hope, and Sunday Schools in Lucerna’s textual record. Mapping these patterns revealed that descriptions of magic lantern shows were relatively uniform across the UK, suggesting that magic lantern shows in urban and rural spaces were represented similarly in periodical literature. Since the topics did not vary by region, I studied how the most prevalent topics differed by host organization and how they changed over time. The article finds that descriptions of lantern shows given by evangelistic organizations shared vocabulary with those hosted by Sunday Schools and temperance societies. It also shows that evangelistic shows tended to avoid the language of entertainment, echoing earlier discourse about the magic lantern on the mission field, and that the decline in topics related to Sunday Schools over time corresponds with the rise of educational lantern lectures, particularly those given by secular institutions like the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. Overall, the article suggests that topic modelling can be used to excavate the performance history of lantern shows by foregrounding latent linguistic similarities in published descriptions of these events.

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.

Métempsycose as attraction on the fairground: the migration of a ghost

ABSTRACTMétempsycose shows were popular in fairgrounds in France and Belgium in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, staging mutating ghosts and the supposed migration of the soul as optical illusion. The attraction stands in a tradition of episcopic projection, with mirroring techniques and seamless dissolving views. In this article, we aim to demonstrate the the peculiarity of métempsycose by detailing its technique and genealogy and by unveiling its relationship with famous illusionists who experimented with the magic lantern, including John Henry Pepper, Henri Robin and Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. The lantern proved vital to the illusion, as it operated as a hidden technology. By rehabilitating métempsycose as a late ‘phantasmagoria’, with a distinctive iconographic narration and specific position in different cultural-historical contexts, this article uncovers how a growing taste for virtual environments with a realistic sense of texture, color and volume was established in a long tradition of obscure apparitions.

The Light of the World: transport and transmission in colonial modernity

ABSTRACTTaking a photograph from the 1906 Australian tour of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World as my starting point, I explore the special relationship colonial audiences had with magic lantern shows and related entertainments. I examine the sense of 'transport' that audiences felt at collectively witnessing images that had been 'transmitted' to them from Britain. I argue that their reactions were more complex than those felt in the metropole, and in many ways anticipate our own contemporary experience of globalized media.

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin's Late Poetry by Smoliarova Tatiana (review)

REVIEWS 535 Smoliarova, Tatiana. Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry. Translated by Ronald Meyer, with Nancy Workman and Tatiana Smoliarova. Edited by Nancy Workman. Liber Primus. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. 319 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $79.00. The Russian text on which this book is based was published in Moscow in 2011 by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie under the title Zrimaia lirika. It was warmly received, saluted especially for its adventurous, deeply informed intellectual scope. This English version must be acclaimed first of all as a feat of translation; the particular contribution of each of the three individuals credited is not specified. The main difficulty arises, needless to say, in translating adequately the primary material concerned, which is exhaustively and bilingually cited here—threemajorpoemsfromthesubstantialbodyofworkDerzhavincreated after his enforced retirement from state service in 1803, ‘Magic Lantern’ (1804), ‘Rainbow’ (1806) and ‘To Evgenii. Life at Zvanka’ (1807). The third of them, not surprisingly, gets the lion’s share of analysis, about 110 pages. This poetry is rugged, pocked with archaisms, and seems to revel in syntax that is sometimes maddeningly convoluted. The task of translation has been accomplished with rare sensitivity and insight; chasteningly, it is hard to imagine anybody reading the result who cannot at least make at least a stab at the original Russian. There are minor inaccuracies, but very few in view of the bulk and barbarity of the target texts. To say all this about the vehicle is by no means to denigrate the significance of the content it articulates. Why the book’s original title has been so radically altered is not easy to understand. The English version, after all, does not deviate substantially from the central concern of Tatiana Smoliarova’s original, i.e. the relationships between ways of seeing as modified and articulated by various technologies — sometimes, it is argued, as metaphors — scientific theories and imaginative writing (and also such concerns as garden design). These technologies notably include the telescope, the magic lantern, the camera obscura, all the way down to the ‘Claude glass’ used by devotees of the picturesque. The pan-European dialectic between these bodies of thinking about human perception, going right back to antiquity, runs through the book. A good deal of the reference material adduced here was originally written in English, and filtered usually through French before it reached the Russian versions which, as Smoliarova asserts (with due caution, thankfully) Derzhavin was aware of and which helped to shape his thinking. Alexander Pope is rightly a key figure. The quotation and illustration of secondary material is lavish. Unfortunately, in view of the subject matter, the illustrations are all in monochrome, and sometimes reduced to miniscule size. The now fashionable interpolation into the text of self-contained topic boxes, where a particular subject is given mini- SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 536 encyclopedia treatment, means that a sustained narrative sometimes struggles to emerge, but readers with attention-span problems will be delighted. Exceptionally good of its kind is the box on the picturesque. But Smoliarova can be as rewarding when performing close reading as she is when the focus is pulled back, as witness in particular the analysis of the ‘steam engine’ stanzas of ‘To Evgenii’. There are lapses, though, when falsifiable statements are ventured: an abyss yawns when the free iambs (vol´nyi iamb) of Derzhavin’s ‘Girl at the Harp’ are categorized as ‘bumpy vers libre’; in Derzhavin’s last poem and Morris Halle’s translation of it ‘iambic pentameter seems crucial’ — but both happen to be in iambic tetrameter; and the iambic pentameter of Pope’s Essay on Man doesn’t have a fixed caesura. The author’s mind was on higher things, let us surmise. Smoliarova is throughout standing on the shoulders of giants, some of the Russian ones relatively neglected, like Lev Pumpianskii and I. Z. Serman, but her manner and her approach are much more unconstrained, even breezy. The author’s most risky positions assert or imply bold claims about what ‘we’ perceive and understand when reading and contemplating poetry and art. Nothing is ever written or even thought without a conscious subtext, it would seem. The book’s last chapter spirals away...

On the Relationship between Documentary Films and Magic Lanterns in 1950s Japan

In this paper, I explore three cases from postwar Japanese media history where a single topic inspired the production of both documentary films and magic lanterns. The first example documents the creation of Maruki and Akamatsu’s famed painting Pictures of the Atomic Bomb. A documentary and two magic lantern productions explore this topic through different stylistic and aesthetic approaches. The second example is School of Echoes, a film and magic lantern about children’s education in rural Japan. The documentary film blurs distinctions between the narrative film and documentary film genres by utilizing paid actors and a prewritten script. By contrast, the original subjects of the documentary film appear as themselves in the magic lantern film. Finally, the documentary film Tsukinowa Tomb depicts an archeological excavation at the site named in the title. Unlike the monochrome documentary film, the magic lantern version was made on color film. Aesthetic and material histories of other magic lanterns include carefully hand-painted monochrome films. Monochrome documentary films in 1950s Japan tended to emphasize narrative and political ideology, while magic lantern films projected color images in the vein of realism. Through these examples of media history, we can begin to understand the entangled histories of documentary film and magic lanterns in 1950s Japan.