Hoare biunial (two-lens) magic lantern, National Media Museum collection
There’s a thoughtful article (’Shapes of things to come’) by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post, reviewing a recreation of a nineteenth-century magic lantern show, which is relevant to the broad concept of screen heritage.
Kennicott went to see a lantern show present by the Belgian Herman Bollaert and musicians, at the French Embassy in Washington. He starts by taking note of the efforts required to operate this ancient technology:
Watching Herman Bollaert and his crew of projectionists manipulate his 19th-century magic lantern is a bit like watching a very old and finicky sailboat being steered into the wind. There is a lot of fussing and fiddling, turning and cranking, all in the service of a charmingly antiquated technology.
However, he detects in the magic lantern a thread of moving image and visual technologies which share a common heritage and cater for a common need. He sees in the magic lantern an inheritance now to be found in anything from PowerPoint presentations to the Xbox. Specifically, he sees how the cinema came out of the magic lantern’s way of getting over a narrative:
And yet, even in the rudimentary gestures of the magic lantern, you see the beginnings of montage, the language of editing images that is now so familiar we can hardly see its operation. In a series of slides depicting the Greek cynic Diogenes being tormented by two malicious little boys, we see the philosopher being rolled in his barrel in multiple slides from various angles, the kind of visual prolongation and elaboration that would become essential to cinematic storytelling.
He then notes how the magic lantern served as a powerful metaphor for writers such as Marcel Proust and Arthur Schopenhauer. His final paragraph brings the magic lantern into that overall vision of a multi-faceted screen heritage:
It’s difficult to coax the contemporary mind into the position of someone of two or three centuries ago, who found the basic images projected by lanterns to be amazingly lifelike (aesthetically), emotionally powerful (artistically) and profoundly troubling (philosophically). But like the water wheel set turning by Bollaert’s expert hand, things will come full circle. With the rise of ever more complex virtual realities, once again the philosophical mind is set puzzling over the nature of the real. But now, in our world of Xboxes and Wii consoles, one is hardly aware of the machine that creates the representation, there is no tactile connection between the image and its master, and the boat of illusions sails forth with no hands on deck.
Read the full article on the Washington Post site, or learn more about the magic lantern on these sites:
- Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain
- Museo del precinema (Italian site with English section)
- Bill Douglas Centre
- Herman Bollaert’s own beautifully designed Laterna Magica site
