From Page to Screen
Liesegang’s work was relatively unknown to English speakers until it was translated from German in 1986. Since then, his text-based approach to lantern material and the visual layout of the book have been adopted and expanded by each subsequent history of the moving image. Of these, C.W. Ceram’s Archaeology of the Cinema (1965) and Laurent Mannoni’s The Great Art of Light and Shadow (2000) are the most often cited.[2] Like Liesegang, Ceram and Mannoni position the lantern among a constellation of other technologies which produced moving images before film. Yet, Ceram’s work has reached a more widespread academic audience in the US and in the UK thanks to the fact that it was originally published in English. Private collectors have made the greatest strides in expanding Liesegang’s detailed mechanical history of projection equipment. The Magic Lantern Society of the UK has served as the international hub for conversations among collectors, pre-cinema scholars, and archivists. In this role, the Society has not only revived interest in the lantern show as a performance medium, but also served as the principle publisher of reference works for studying lantern equipment. The Magic Lantern Society’s quarterly journal (1978- present) features contributions from archivists, media historians, collectors, and performers, creating a space for wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversations.
The Society’s efforts to produce reference works is impressive. The Encyclopaedia of the Lantern (2001) adopts the visual layout of Liesegang’s Dates and Sources, but it is organized by topic instead of date. In this arrangement, key figures in the lantern’s history are placed on equal footing with entries on slides, lanterns, and lighting mechanisms. The Encyclopaedia extends Liesegang’s focus on textual sources beyond continental Europe, providing increased attention to British lantern shows. Likewise, The Lantern Image Supplements Numbers 1 (1997) and 2 (2001) draw extensively from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print culture to trace the mechanical development of projection equipment. As their titles would suggest, both supplements present illustrations of lantern shows with little critical commentary. By showing lanterns in action, these sources also capture the content of lantern shows and their evolution over the course of the nineteenth-century from the phantastic to the scientific. Servants of Light (1997), which takes its name from a type of lantern, is somewhat of an outlier among these reference works because it provides a mechanically-oriented survey of extant equipment. It not only includes a glossary and exploded diagram of lantern parts, but it also offers a detailed history of specific lanterns in private and public collections.
As print reference works have increasingly turned to projectors, digitization initiatives have focused on making magic lantern slides available to the public. In most cases, lantern slides have been integrated into digital collections of photographs. These include the Historic Environment Image Resource, the International Missionary Photography Archive, and Getty Images as well as a host of museum and university archives. This mode of displaying slides emphasizes the visual nature of the lantern show, but it excludes the supporting textual ephemera needed to place these images within their performance context. Lucerna, a relational database designed by Richard Crangle, adopts a more holistic approach to preserving magic lantern ephemera in a digital environment. The project presents digital copies of lantern slides alongside textual material and projection equipment. Crangle’s approach to photographing slides differs dramatically from the image-centric databases described above. Most archives focus solely on the images on the slide. By including manufacturer’s labels in the digital version of the slide and in the textual metadata for this digital object, Crangle emphasizes its materiality. Treating the slide as an artifact—as opposed to an image—captures information about how these images were used in performance. Furthermore, Lucerna’s underlying structure showcases the interconnectedness of textual and material ephemera. The relational database that drives the website makes it easier to connect different kinds of material to reconstruct the visual and spoken content of specific shows. The advantages of this structure are best seen in the Illustrated Bamforth Catalogue, originally published on CD ROM and now publically accessible through Lucerna. The interactive catalogue enables users to see examples of the slides described in the inventory of Britain’s leading manufacturer of late-Victorian temperance tales and services of song. In some cases, these slide sets can be paired with scripts in the Magic Lantern Society’s archive. From September 2015 to January 2018, Lucerna grew exponentially through A Million Pictures Project, an international consortium of scholars, archivists, and museum curators led by Frank Kessler at Utrecht University. The project not only increased the number of slides on Lucerna, but also established best practices for photographing magic lantern slides and creating metadata for lantern material. This work which will be continued by B-Magic, a Belgian digitization initiative funded by an Excellence of Science grant. While this dissertation does not mirror Lucerna’s relational database structure, it capitalizes on the flexibility of a web-based environment to emphasize the interplay between visual, textual, and mechanical source material.
This functionality proved to be the tipping point for the dissertation to shed its document form and grow into a web-based project. It began life as a document that would ground my professional portfolio, which was becoming increasingly digitally-oriented, in forms of scholarship more recognizable to an audience unfamiliar with digital humanities projects. The more I immersed myself in magic lantern material and digital approaches to cultural heritage objects, the more I struggled to represent the lantern as an interactive and dynamic medium through print-based media. The co-chairs of my dissertation committee, Steven Watt and Ellen Mackay, recommended writing a digital-born dissertation as a means to present my research in a more holistic way. The turn to the digital not only made it logistically easier to annotate prose content with visual material, but it also radically reshaped the project’s framing.
[1] Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography was originally published as Zahlen und Quellen: zur Geschichte der Projektionskunst und Kinematographie, Deuches Druck- und Verlagshaus, 1926. It was edited and translated by Hermann Hecht and was published by The Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain in 1986.
[2] Mannoni’s work is most often cited in translation. It was originally published in French as Le Grand Art de la lumière et de l'ombre (1994) and was translated by Richard Crangle in 2000.
