In this week’s snoop around the Bill Douglas, Screen Online Editor Jess O’Kane gets a closer look at a piece of projection heritage, far removed from the 3D glasses of today.
The Bill Douglas Centre houses a large collection of early motion picture apparatus, including this magic lantern, which gives us an insight into early forms of projection.
Though their origin is hard to determine, magic lanterns were in recorded use from the mid-17th century in Europe, particularly in The Netherlands and Germany.
A simple device, the lantern contains a concave mirror that passes light through a slide and projects the image outward, and thus can be seen as a predecessor to Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope.
Magic lanterns are not only useful for tracing the genealogy of modern technology, however. They can also tell us about the attitudes of pre-movie going audiences towards technological advances, images, and the potentially devious influence of visual culture.
From the late 17th century through to the boom of the Gothic 100 years later, magic lanterns were used to delight and horrify audiences unacquainted with such trickery.
As early as the 1650s, German priest Athanasius Kircher wrote of magicians and itinerant conjurers using lanterns to project images of the devil, silhouetted “spirits” and the supposed souls of the dead.
In the 18th century, special “Phantasmagoria” shows depicting ghouls and ghosts became wildly popular.
Just as a cinema full of people ran for cover when the Lumière Brother’s train pulled into le gare de La Ciotat, these early audiences were clearly fascinated – and frightened – by the permeability of reality.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, moving images were becoming commonplace, and magic lanterns were widely marketed as toys or educational tools.
These Alice in Wonderland slides, for example, were produced in the between 1900 and 1925, and are based on Joseph Tenniel’s classic illustrations.
Travel photos, ethnographic studies and maps were other commonly used slides.
That those images that once seemed frightening and alien eventually became domesticated is perhaps unsurprising. Propelled by that wave of popular interest that would inspire the Golden Age, the magic lantern, like so much else that was once marginal, became commercial to the point of commonality.
Jess O’Kane, Screen Online Editor
For more information on The Bill Douglas Centre, click here. Tell us your thoughts on Facebook, Twitter or by commenting below.
exeposedev 