Georges Méliès and the Dawn of Fantastical Cinema

In an age when innovation was everything, the French film maker Georges Méliès was the greatest innovator in a pantheon of greats. With a studio -- literally -- in his back yard, and his wife, family, and neighbors as his most frequent cast, he made a vast variety of films -- "trick" films, comedies, farces, and especially films of discovery and adventure -- far beyond anything else made in his era. His background as a stage magician was surely of some help, but so was his sense of fun, his stage presence, and his showmanship. More than anyone else, he bridged the gap from stage to screen.

Legend has it that, in the mid-1890's, he saw a demonstration of film by the Lumière Brothers, and approached them to ask how he could do what they did. He was told that this new art was "merely a fashion of the time," and that in a few years there would be no money in it -- don't waste your time. Perhaps the Lumières were being facetious, but in any case, Méliès bought a camera on his own and in 1896 made his first film, "Une Partie de Cartes" (A card-playing party). Further fancies followed: a woman (his wife) was placed in a chair under a sheet -- with a flourish, she was a skeleton! A lodger checked into a haunted hotel; his coat was stolen, the hat-rack vanished, and he was plagued by enormous bedbugs. Soon, no tale was too wild or strange: a man sang a quartet with his dislocated heads; another inflated his head until it exploded; sailors brought up bodies from the USS Maine as magnified goldfish swam before them. Most famously, a voyage from the earth to the moon was filmed, complete with a crash landing in the "Man in the Moon's" eye; Joan of Arc revived the Kingdom of France, and a bearded explorer -- Méliès again, as usual -- conquered the North Pole (above).

Nearly 200 of Méliès' films survive, out of perhaps 500 that he made. After World War I, the market for his kind of cinema spectacles decreased with the rise of narrative, multi-reel films. By the early 1920's, his company collapsed, and the great director was reduced to selling magic trinkets from a stall at a Paris railway station. Happily, in the 1930's, shortly before his death, he received fresh accolades, and was awarded a pension from the French government, which enabled his widow to live out her days in comfort. Most recently, he was portrayed by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Hugo, which includes both actual footage and re-enactments of some of his most famous films.

The Origins of Cinema

Although its basic technical details are clear enough, the origins of cinema are shrouded in doubt, dispute, and even death. As with other media technologies, among the earliest uses of sequential images were in scientific projects, such as those of Marey and Muybridge. The technical problem confronting them both was how to get a series of images in quick, measured sequence. Muybridge used timers and tripwires to obtain sequential images; Marey, more direct, invented a cinematic gun which "fired" a cylinder of small photonegatives; it looked somewhat like a Thompson submachine gun but was limited to 12 exposures. What was really needed was some kind of double movement -- a shutter which would open and close quickly and repeatedly, and a mechanism which would advance the photosensitive material. When the material in question was glass plates, the problem was overwhelming -- but with the invention of celluloid photo "film" by George Eastman, a solution was in sight, and the prize belonged to the inventor who could best employ it.

Louis Augustin Le Prince (above) is my personal favorite among the many candidates for first filmmaker. He had gotten his start working on great-circle panoramas, where his job was projecting glass plate photos onto the canvas for artists to trace. Arriving in Leeds, England, in the late 1880's, he married into a well-off family, and his father-in-law financed further experiments. Le Prince's first design was a 16-lens camera, using a series of "mutilated gears" to fire off 16 frames in short order on two strips of film. He later designed a single-lens camera, with a mechanical movement using smooth rollers (sprockets not yet having been tried) to advance the film. He planned to stage a grand début in New York City, and had rented a private mansion for his demonstration; his equipment was packed into custom-made crates, and his tickets were purchased for crossing on a luxurious Cunard liner. And yet just then, as he was returning from visiting his brother in Dijon, France, he vanished from the Dijon-Paris express and was never seen again, alive or dead.

As with many early cinematographers, Le Prince's films do not survive. Eastman's celluloid turned out to be volatile; it could disintegrate into a brown powder, burst into flame, or even explode without warning. However, at some point, paper prints were made of three of his films, and these have been reconstructed into short, viewable sequences. The films were made in 1888, earlier than any others. His first film, "Roundhay Garden Scene," shows his family dancing about in his father-in-law's back garden; his second, "Leeds Bridge," shows traffic and pedestrians crossing a bridge in the city where he worked; the third, untitled, shows his young son playing an accordion as he dances upon a set of stairs. The only question is: with what camera were these shot? Distortions and perspective problems with the frames, as well as the fact that there are rarely more than 16 of them, suggest that the 16-lens camera is the most likely source, but some believe he used his single-lens camera for some or all of the films. If so, he was certainly the first person in the world to make what we have come to regard as cinema film.

The Magic Lantern and Projected Photographs

In some ways, it's the original optical medium, the lanterna magica, the method behind the madness of Robertson's Phantasmagoria, the first device ever to "throw" an image on a screen. The great-granddaddy of the slide projector and the PowerPoint presentation, the technology that made the 'carousel' of life go 'round for Kodak, a mass medium and later a home entertainment system.

And, as Don Draper observed, it's about coming back to where we began, and feeling that strange 'twinge' of nostalgia -- which is why, I think, the Magic Lantern is presently enjoying a new life, a new vogue, and a new kind of magic. It began with folks such as Terry and Deborah Borton, who quit their day jobs to form the American Magic Lantern Theatre, and to write the first comprehensive account of the work of Joseph Boggs Beale, the premiere American lantern slide artist. It began with Joe and Alice Koch back in Tacoma, Washington in the 1960's; it began with Bill Douglas, Bob Bishop, Oldřich Albrecht, Judith Thurman and Jonathan David, Julius Pfranger, John Barnes, and Steve Humphries -- all of whom rediscovered this lost medium and helped retrace its history even as they brought it back to life. For, as it turned out, audiences today were as readily enthralled -- though perhaps for different reasons -- as were their grandparent and great-grandparents in the heyday of the Magic Lantern. Old lanterns could be found and collected, as could old slides; put the two together, add a top-hat and a booming voice, and all the ingredients were there for a revival of this lost art.

In 1851, a crucial innovation in photography -- that of the wet-plate collodion process -- enabled the production of photographic lantern slides. The glass plates produced by this process were negative images, from which any number of glass positives or paper prints might be made; a more common method, for portraits and single-use images, was simply to place black paper or cloth behind the negative. A downside of the process was that the plates had to be exposed while still wet -- a very narrow window -- but this was later solved (1871) and various dry plate processes were developed.

For a good introduction, I've scanned the first section of the hard-to-find book Projected Photography, which is available to you in .pdf for via this link. As discussed in class, I'm also asking everyone to bring in a photo from you own personal or family archive -- it doesn't have to be an antique, simply a photo that has particular significance that you'd like to share.

The Fiendish Mirror of Daguerre

The arrival of photography was not, as we conceive of it now, the arrival of the possibility of accurate representations of reality. The eyes of the times were as yet untrained to decipher the "real" within photographical realism. The Duke of Wellington complained that his nose looked too big (never mind that his nickname in the Army had been "Old Nosey"), and many public figures avoided photography as though it were the plague. In the cartoon shown here, Punch magazine satirized the "Interesting and Valuable Result" of a family photograph; to many at the time, the camera's eye seemed a lie, almost an instant caricature of the sitter's worst qualities.

The Daguerreotype, the very first commercial process, was expensive and time-consuming; early sitters had to remain still for at least three minutes, assisted in this task by a metal neck-brace. The cost of the photo was based on the size of the copper plate from which it was made; a "sixteenth plate" was the smallest, and cost the modern equivalent of more than $100; a quarter- or half-plate such as was ideal for a family portrait could cost well over $500. Daguerreotypes were also "one offs," in that the plate was the positive and (because opaque) could not be printed off. Yet at around the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot developed his "Talbotype" process (also known as a Calotype), using sensitized paper to produce a negative image. From this paper negative, any number of positives could be made, although since their medium was paper, the outlines were far less sharp than with Daguerreotypes. Finally, the invention of glass-plate negative processes such as the Ambrotype (also known as a Collodion Positive) created a medium in which many excellent copies could easily be made from a single negative. By the era of the American Civil War, inexpensive photographic processes such as the Tintype meant that very few soldiers went off to battle without leaving a photo behind, and quite often took a family photo with them. The final step in cheapness and availability was George Eastman's invention of flexible celluloid film, which was used both in still and in moving picture cameras; with its inexpensive "Brownie" box cameras and rolled film that could be processed anywhere, Eastman and Kodak (who later merged) made the "snapshot" a part of the American, and the world, landscape.

For this week, since we won't have an in-person class (due to the Monday/Wednesday shift following the Columbus Day holiday), so I'm asking everyone to undertake a small special project: locate a photograph taken some time prior to 1870 -- these might be Daguerreotypes, Collodion (glass plates), Tintypes, or Ambrotypes -- and write a brief analysis/reflection about it. You can choose a photo which related to the larger theme or subject you've chosen for your project -- indeed, I'd encourage you to. Send the photo and your text to me via e-mail, and I will add them to this site as individual "pages," so that we can all read each other's reflections -- here is the link!

A Picture of Light: Daguerre's Diorama

A surviving Diorama Scene (in the "night"view)

We've looked at static forms of Victorian virtual reality, such as the great-circle Panorama, and we've looked at movement both mechanical (the Eidophusikon) and scrolling (the moving panorama). But riddle me this: what Victorian medium involved change over time, despite it having no "motion" at all?

The answer is Daguerre's "Diorama," for which he was famous many years before he became known as one of the inventors of photography. In the Diorama, a scene changed slowly, unutterably slowly, from night to day, from fall to winter, from sunlight to moonlight; its subtlety, along with its resemblance to natural changes of light and color, was its attraction. The changes were obtained by varied means: some of the surface of the canvas was prepared without gesso or sizing, making it translucent; on the opposite side of the canvas, there were other colors revealed only when illuminated. Behind stage, lamps, colored filters, and other apparati invisible to the viewers was brought into play to heighten these effects.

Until recently, we believed that only one original Diorama canvas had survived (see above); it had been hanging in a church for more than a century, its colors muted by a coat of shellac, until restored with help from the Getty Trust. Now, however, a second Diorama, attributed to Daguerre and Bouton (his partner in the business); you can watch some of the effects in this video posted by the gallery.  And, as with panoramas, there was been some interest in re-creating the illusion, most of them using digital technology. The original Diorama building in Regent's Park in London, though long gutted, is still visible in aerial shots; one can see the two theatres, with the circle in the middle which housed the rotating platform that turned from one view to the next (this view is from Google Earth). The original building in Paris is long gone, and there was even an affiliated establishment right near us in Boston, though its exact location is unclear. The Diorama has also attracted great interest among art historians, such as Dore Bowen and Stephen Pinson; Pinson's 2012 book, Speculating Daguerre, argues that the Diorama was as significant an invention as photography.

Nine-Mile Mirrors and Bunyan Tableaux

From the late 1840's through to the late 1860's, the English-speaking world went panorama crazy. In many ways, it was Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi that started it all; his success in England, and later in the United States, was so enormous that he was able to build himself an enormous mansion, modeled on Windsor Castle, which earned the sobriquet "Banvard's Folly" from his neighbors on Long Island. Suddenly, the proprietorship of a moving panorama was a route to fame and fortune unlike any other medium of its day; there were panoramas of the Great Lakes, Mammoth Cave, the Overland Mail to India, the Arctic Regions, and the Oregon Trail. Landscapes and current events were joined by proselytizing panoramas, including one of Garibaldi's campaign to unite Italy, at the conclusion of which volunteers were recruited to join his army. Or Henry "Box" Brown, who had infamously escaped from slavery by mailing himself northward in a shipping crate, traversed England with a panorama of his life, at the conclusion of which he jumped out of a replica box. And, amidst the "true and accurate" representations of all parts of the globe, fantastical subjects were not unknown; Milton's Pandemonium, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess, and various tales from classical mythology and the Bible were common. It was, indeed, one of these "Bible Scrolls" that caught Mark Twain's attention; in his parodic story "The Scriptural Panoramist," Twain made great fun of a showman with a Bible-story panorama who, his regular accompanist unavailable, hired the piano player from a local saloon, who ruined one religious moment after another by playing popular drinking songs.

With the emergence of film though, the days of moving panoramas were numbered. In 1903, the veteran panorama showman Rufus C. Somerby reflected on his career in the pages of The Billboard, a showman's periodical that later became Billboard Magazine. Writing as "The Old Panoramist," he reflected on the decline and fall of a medium which had once been well-known in nearly every town in America.

There's hope though -- lately, the medium has been revived, on a somewhat smaller scale, by "Crankies." These mid-sized moving panoramas -- usually between 24 and 40 inches tall and designed to rest upon a table-top -- have taken up all kinds of new forms and themes, even using old-fashioned tricks such as shadow-puppets and back-projection. The finest artists of this new old medium, such as Balimore's Katherine Fahey, have broken new ground, as can be seen in her crankies Pickett's Charge and Francis Whitmore's Wife. The medium lives!

NB: I'd encourage each of you to visit Sue Truman's page of Crankies, view a few, and perhaps comment on one.

Illusions in Motion

From the 1820's through to the 1890's, a new form of visual spectacle swept the world: the "moving" panorama. Unlike its circular and static namesake, the moving panorama actually did move, with new scenes emerging one by one from the right-hand side of the painting, while old scenes scrolled away. It was, above all, a narrative form, perfectly suited for journeys from one place to another, as well a for representing current events or familiar stories, ranging from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (a panel from a panorama of which is shown above) to the military campaigns of Garibaldi (this panorama is preserved at Brown University) to journeys up (or down) the Mississippi River.

Unlike great-circle panoramas, these scrolling painting required a narrator, typically a man in a top hat and tails who used a pointer to direct attention to specific parts of the canvas, and who served as a sort of conductor for this virtual journey. Most were professional showmen, but sometimes the attempt was made to have someone actually involved with the scenes depicted appear at, or even narrate, the painting. The pre-eminent Scottish firm of Messrs. Marshall & Co. hired a survivor from the wreck of the Medusa to appear with their depiction of the subject; the combined effect was so dramatic that it forced the exhibition of Géricault's great painting of "The Raft of the Medusa" -- then exhibiting in the same town -- out of business. Similarly, exhibitors of panoramas about Arctic exploration often hired the explorers themselves to narrate the scenes.

And it was not just the canvas the moved. Most had music, and employed a variety of special effects: lantern images were projected from behind the canvas; smoke was blown through holes in the cloth when the painted "cannons" were meant to fire; colored lights and sometimes even the shaking of the fabric were also used. Moving panoramas also had the advantage that they were far more portable than their fixed cousins, and could travel from town to town via horse-drawn carriage or train; in this manner they criss-crossed the UK, the US, and many other countries, sometimes being shown for more than a decade, until the paint began to chip off.  They were also easily copied, and at times there might be half-a-dozen of the same subject appearing at multiple venues. Lastly, as a portable medium, the size of its public was limited only by the endurance of the panoramist and his or her ability to find fresh audiences; some of the most widespread and durable ones may well have had audiences in the millions.

Human Zoos

The display of humans to other humans has taken many forms over the ages, but surely there have been few as problematic, and often degrading, as the practice of displaying human beings in zoos. The image at left is from Carl Hagenbeck's Hamburg "Tierpark" (Animal Park), and shows a group of Labrador Inuit who appeared there in the fall of 1911. The group included Nancy Columbia, whom Arctic historian Kenn Harper has aptly described as the most famous Inuk of her day; she was actually born in an Eskimo display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and over the course of her career appeared at well over a dozen world's fairs and expositions from Seattle to St. Louis to Madrid and Paris.

Inuit, of course, were very far from the only indigenous peoples displayed in these venues: there were Samoans, "Igarottes," Native American "Indians," Zulu warriors from "Darkest Africa," and even villages of seemingly civilized folk ("The Streets of Cairo," "Japanese Village," and so forth). In perhaps the most disturbing iteration, an "Old Plantation" was populated with African-Americans portraying themselves as slaves. And, before the era of the great expositions, all manner of smaller shows, many of just a single individual, can be traced back to Elizabethan times.

Altick's subject is London, and it's the people displayed there that are at the center of his chapter. The cause célèbre of these was Sarah Baartman, who arrived in London in 1810 and was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Given the sobriquet the "Hottentot Venus," her appearance was both enormously popular but also controversial, even at the time. Similar exhibits of Africans displayed as "primitives" appeared throughout the Victorian era; one of them, a group of "Zulu Kafirs" shown at Hyde-Park Corner, is among the shows referenced by Dickens in his "The Noble Savage."

The other show that caught Dickens's attention was that of George Catlin who, in his efforts to sell his paintings of native American "Indians," engaged the services of a troupe of Ojibway who had been in England for an unrelated exhibition. He brought them to the Egyptian Hall, where they performed some of their native dances and rituals, while Catlin and his assistant answered questions from the audience. This was, in a way, a step up from Catlin's earlier events, which featured tableuax vivants of white people in "redface" makeup and feathered headbands.

These types of exhibits gradually declined in number and popularity in the early twentieth century, as many nations began to ban the exploitation of their indigenous people for such purposes, Nancy Columbia, the star of her "Eskimo" troupe, enjoyed a brief career in Hollywood films, including 1911's "The Way of the Eskimo," which credited her as its screenwriter. She left show business in 1920, and lived quietly in Santa Monica, where she died in 1959.

Of the Eidophusikon, and other simulacra

The original Eidophusikon

When it comes to Victorian virtual reality, the Panorama by no means had a monopoly on the concept. For centuries, there lived the dream that one could, by means of some mechanical apparatus or another, perfectly simulate the motion and appearance of life and the world around us. The eighteenth century was fixated on automata, ranging from mechanical musicians to a remarkable "digesting duck" which not only ate food, but excreted it out its other end! As the nineteenth century dawned, the scope of such simulacra both expanded and contracted -- expanding into the world of landscapes and natural phenomena, and yet shrinking in scale such that individual people, in some instances, were no larger than ants.

First and foremost among these new wonders was the Eidophusikon -- invented by the actor David Garrick and the artist Philip James de Loutherbourg. Miniature theatres were already known, and would have been familiar to Garrick; what this new spectacle added was a realistic set of changes, whether of light, clouds, or weather; within its confines, the sun rose and set, the moon appeared behind clouds, storms blew across tiny harbors, and volcanoes erupted with fire and smoke. Its exact mechanism is no longer known, but it has been reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree several times. The first, in 2004, made use of a full-sized theatre, and thus was really only a tribute of sorts; the second time, at the Yale Center for British Art in 2005, was the first done to scale. Since then, a third version has been built, and is now a permanent part of the New National Museum in Monaco. Yet another has recently been tried, using 3D computer modeling, in Sydney, Australia -- this video illustrates some of the challenges involved, and re-creates one of the original scenes with remarable exactitude.

The Eidophusikon debuted in 1781, and despite one brief revival, survived only as a sort of rumor. Nevertheless, it inspired a wide variety of Victorian exhibitions, most prominently an apparatus known as a "Theatre of Arts." Its inventor, one J.F. Thiodon, had hit upon the expedient of using leather belts that were in constant motion; when a belt was raised into position below the stage, mechanical figures -- men, horses, ships, and so forth -- were "actuated," the friction with the belt causing them to move about. Thus, while the individual figures might not be thought "realistic," their collective motion -- armies marching in file, horses galloping along a road, trees shaking in the wind -- gave such a lifelike appearance that audiences were mechanically swept off their feet. No less a showman than P.T. Barnum aquired one of these theatres, and displayed it to great effect at his American Museum in New York. They were not only captivating, but versatile -- Barnum's "Siege of Sebastopol" (1854) could readily, by re-painting its soldiers, be made to serve as the "Attack on Fort Sumter" (1861) -- indeed, this was just what was done (the change was made right here in Providence, by a company that specialized in re-purposing panoramas and mechanical amusements).  This, after all, was an age of economy; the labor represented by the mechanical apparatus was, like a panorama's canvas, more valuable than the paint which represented its subject. There was no need, within these "theatres," to aspire to the status of fine art; they comfortably rested between entertainment and education, and proved enormously durable.

Similar mechanical theatres of this sort far outlived Mr. Thiodon, and appeared around the world; one of them, the "Grand Théâtre Méchanique" of Moreiux survives to this day; here you can see the figures in detail, with animated GIFS showing them in motion. With the mechanism hidden just below the bottom edge of the stage, it's no wonder that audiences gasped in wonder, as General Menshikov -- or was that Major Anderson? -- bravely tried to hold on despite heavy losses among their mechanized followers.

As Altick notes, these shows were coeval with lantern and panorama entertainments, and quite often a single exhibition would combine elements of all of them. There was the additional element of what was then called "The Chinese Shades," but we would see as a "shadow play" -- the Australian artist Richard Bradshaw still plies the same trade today. So many were the various apparati of the time, and so ambiguous the words on the handbills, that Erkki Huktamo (author of Illusions in Motion) often notes that it's probaby impossible to know exactly what some of them consisted of. All we can be sure of, is that the audiences came expecting a spectacle of some sort, and seem to have gone home happy.

Arctic Spectacles

Life reflects art reflects life -- at least sometimes -- and this is never more so than with the Victorian fascination with places that were the hardest to actually visit, such as the Arctic. Referred to in many texts of the day as "those almost unseen regions," they were as exotic in their time as images of the Moon or Mars are to us today. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, since so few knew what they looked like, they were liable to all sorts of fanciful picturings; who, after all, would be able to compare any of them to their own actual experience?

Here art played a pivotal role, especially in the era before the invention of photography, but also after. The Panorama catch phrase -- "painted from sketches made upon the spot" -- put a premium on the works of explorer-artists such a Samuel Gurney Cresswell, whose image of HMS Investigator heaved up by the ice has become so iconic that, even today, it's a go-to for the cover of any book on an Arctic subject. Later in the century, fine art painters decided that they, too, must learn to paint icebergs from life; one of them, Frederic Edwin Church, bought passage on a ship to Labrador, while others, such as Willam Bradford, chartered their own ships in order to be able to sail yet further north.

And sometimes, despite the limitations of the pre-photographic world, the Victorian's notion of life in the Arctic turns out to be more real than one might imagine. Before I headed north this year, friends of mine gave me a colored print depicting a polar bear attacking a seal; the print came from a nineteenth-century edition of Buffon's Natural History, General and Particular. Imagine the strange shock of recognition when, a week or so into my Arctic sojourn, I beheld almost the very same scene upon the ice. I have only one criticism of the artist who depicted this scene for Buffon -- there is not enough blood.

There were other "unseen" worlds that drew the Victorian gaze in their direction, of course. Microscopes revealed the teeming life in a "Drop of London Water," while one of the earliest films in history depicted the microscopic life within a Stilton cheese, which is quite literally teeming with cheese mites (the film led to a lawsuit from the London Cheese Council). And, just as it is for us, the vast range of distant planets and outer space was a great draw for Victorian spectators; many of these images drew from the Moon as imagined in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). And yet it was the earthbound vision of the Arctic, with massive icebergs so monumental that one critic compared the one in Frederic Church's "Icebergs" (1861) to "the great white throne of the Apocaypse." The peoples of the Arctic also drew interest, not only in panoramas, dioramas, and lantern slides, but also in the form of human exhibitions at world's fairs and carnivals, where fairgoers could gawk at actual "Esquimaux" people (whom today we know as Inuit).

So read the chapters of my book Arctic Spectacles (linked near the top of the liks list at right), and do a quick self-check: when you think of the Arctic, what images come unbeckoned to your mind? Might some of these, indeed, be similar to those conjured up by your great-great-grandparents? Do these Victorian versions of the north still cast their shadow upon today -- and if so, what does that tell us about our own ways of seeing?