Imagination, Perception, and Presence
Williams’ efforts to present the projected image as “only a representation” implies that his audience, which was comprised of Pacific Islanders, perceived it as something more. But what does it mean for an image to become more than a representation in the context of a magic lantern show? Where does a representation end and something more begin? And why might this make Williams feel uncomfortable to the point that he explicitly addresses this with the audience?...when the plate of the Crucifixion was shown, there was a general sobbing; their feelings were overcome, and they gave vent to them by weeping. I took care to inform them that it was only a representation.
These questions uncover what’s at stake in foregrounding the material archive in archaeologies of early screen culture. When interpreted as objects, projection apparati and their presence in the textual accounts of missionaries like Williams’ shed light on the global circulation of magic lanterns during the first wave of slide mass-manufacture. The physicality of magic lanterns and slides contrasts the immateriality and ephemerality of the images that they create, a juxtaposition which I hope has been made even more visible through photographs of Carpenter and Westley’s scriptural sliders and animated sequences of the set. Seemingly innocuous details like opaque black paint on the slide depicting Christ’s crucifixion and the short objective of the improved phantasmagoria lantern have a significant effect on the projected image’s appearance, particularly the ways in which they structure the delineation between the world represented on screen and the physical space inhabited by the audience.
By focusing on the mechanical limitations of ephemera described in Williams’ letter and the kinds of screen experiences this equipment structured, I show how Williams’ concerns about the image of Christ as “only a representation” stem from the way that it would have appeared when projected. The audience’s perception of Christ as more than a representation could be attributed to the fact that it was their first encounter with a magic lantern, but I would argue that their reaction is more accurately described as a product of the low-lighting of the performance space, the slide’s composition, the narrative tactics supported by quoting scripture, and Williams’ presence. Compared to other images in Carpenter and Westley’s scriptural set, Christ’s crucifiction is remarkably consistent in that he is always depicted without scenery. The visual composition of Christ crucified, combined with the total darkness required to operate an oil-powered lantern, created an immersive screen experience that made Christ appear as if he were physically present in the space inhabited by the audience. Williams’ reaction not only confirms that the projected image of Christ produced this effect, but Williams’ account also suggests that magic lantern could undermine the Protestant theology driving his missionary work.
Setting, Perception, and Imagination
The scriptural sliders and commercially-produced lanterns provide nodes through which to identify other textual sources that illuminate tacit features of Williams’ lantern show, particularly how the setting structured the audience’s interpretation of the projected image. Ideally, I would now turn to an audience member’s account to address gaps in the primary textual source. Unfortunately, no such account has survived. Other missionary accounts, including ones which describe later lantern shows in the South Pacific, are equally vague about the settings these events. However, the equipment that would have been available to Williams is based on the technologies that powered phantasmagoria, making eyewitness accounts of Robertson’s faux-séances in Paris and Philador’s performances in London the closest approximation. Replicating European perspectives in a study of Williams’ lantern shows shows risks minimizing the cultural and geographic distance between European and South Pacific audiences. In order to address the lost perspectives of the South Pacific audience, I approach the lantern show as an embodied experience. When viewed in this light, the South Pacific setting scaffolded the audience’s encounter with the projected image, even though the precise locations of Williams’ lantern shows remain unrepresented in Williams’ letter and unseen by the audience in the lantern shows.The most mechanically-oriented eyewitness account of phantasmagoria comes from mathematician and chemist William Nicholson, who witnessed one of Paul de Philipsthal’s performances in London’s Lyceum Theatre and published his account in the Journal of Natural Philosophy in February 1802.[1] Nicholson’s account reflects his professional interest in science, for he was particularly eager to hypothesize about the apparati behind Philipsthal’s special effects. As a more skeptical audience member, he described how these devices worked in tandem with the setting of the lantern show to structure the audience’s interpretation of the images on screen. Nicholson’s account begins with a detailed description of the lighting conditions of the theatre.
The total darkness of the performance space hampered audience’s ability to locate the mechanisms creating these visual effects. To maintain total darkness, Philipsthal placed the screen between the lantern and the audience, literally screening the lantern from view. Back projection also enabled Philipsthal to move the lantern closer to and away from the screen; this reduced and enlarged the size of the projected image, causing the figure on screen to appear as if it was rushing toward or receding from the audience. This effect foiled Nicholson’s pupils, who also attended the lantern show; they were unable to judge the distance between themselves and the screen due to the total darkness of the performance space. Nicholson admired the effect created by this configuration.All the lights of the small theatre of exhibition were removed, except one hanging lamp, which could be drawn up so that its flame should be perfectly enveloped in a cylindrical chimney, or opaque shade. . . After a short interval the lamp was drawn up, and the audience were in total darkness, succeeded by thunder and lightning; which last appearance was formed by the magic lanthorn upon a thin cloth or screen, let down after the disappearance of the light, and consequently unknown to most of the spectators.
The circle of illumination would have been a tell-tale sign of the lantern’s presence, for without any obstructions, the lantern’s objective casts a circle onto the screen. Nicholson inferred the kind of lantern slide needed to create this effect.It must again be remarked that these figures [of men, ghosts, skeletons] appear without any surrounding circle of illumination, and that the spectators, having no previous view or knowledge of the screen, nor any visible object of comparison, are each left to image the distance according to their respective fancy.
In this manner, Philipsthal removed contextual cues by creating a pitch-black viewing environment and by using opaque black paint on his slides. These techniques made it difficult for the audience to see the screen as the boundary between the space that they occupied and the space depicted in the projected image. The audience’s inability to place the screen between real and represented worlds ultimately led to a collapse of perception and imagination. According to Nicholson’s account, the activation of the audience’s “respective fancy” is predicated by the fact that they were given no frame of reference by which to calculate distance between themselves and the screen. Because the audience was unable to identify this physical boundary, the delineation between external phenomenon and internal processes of imagination also became permeable.[Philipsthal’s] sliders are therefore perfectly opaque except that portion upon which the transparent figures are drawn.
For this reason, phantasmagoria persisted in literature long after they had waned in popularity as an entertainment, particularly as shorthand for the collapse of distinctions between imagination, perception, and memory. Cultural critic Marina Warner has argued that phantasmagoria serve as a metaphor for “experiences that are retained in the mind’s eye with hallucinatory intensity,” particularly those which concern a past trauma. [2] Warner builds on the work of Terry Castle to offer a survey of ghosts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, but Castle’s essay contains a far richer account of performance practice and the persistence of phantasmagoria as a literary metaphor. “In each case,” argues Terry Castle, “a mental image appears to come to life, fantastically, in the flesh” (emphasis original).[3] Subsequent analyses focus on sonic cues that were remediated through literary phantasmagoria. In her analysis of Christmas Carol, Joss Marsh demonstrates that Scrooge’s interaction with the three ghosts is framed by phrases which, when spoken in the context of lantern shows, signaled transitions between slides. By depicting Scrooge’s encounter with his past, present, and possible future as a procession of lantern-like visual experiences, Marsh argues, Dickens transformed the lantern show in text into a vehicle for moral reform.[4] Similarly, David Jones has traced the persistence of musical instruments and sound effects that accompanied projected ghosts in gothic fiction; the sound of the harmonium referenced in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not only evokes the visual tropes of phantasmagoria but also instruments in Robertson’s faux-seances.[5]
As a remediation of late-eighteenth-century lantern shows, literary phantasmagoria represent the ways that projected images, particularly those painted on black backgrounds, appeared to materialize in the space inhabited by the observer, even though the image itself remains intangible. While several steps removed from Williams’ lantern show, the collapse of perception and imagination in fiction parallels the liminality of phantasmagoria in performance. Setting played an integral role in structuring this effect, yet the precise locations of Williams’ lantern shows is unknown. The only explicit reference to their settings is a fleeting reference to his first exhibition, which took place “at Mr. Murray’s station” on Samoa on November 23rd, 1838. Given the relatively short throw of improved phantasmagoria lanterns and the luminosity of oil lamps, Williams would have had to find a location with the fewest possible sources of ambient light. The darker the setting for the lantern show, the larger and brighter the image could be. Since his first performance was for a relatively small audience, he may have given the show indoors. On that evening, lighting conditions would have been favorable outdoors because only a third of the moon was visible. In exceptionally dark settings, Williams’ Carpenter and Westley sliders would have produced the same effect as Philipsthal's in that there would be no circular boundary around the figure of Christ. The opaque black paint on the slider masked the presence of the lantern regardless of the lantern’s position relative to the surface onto which images were being projected. Williams’ lantern and sliders would have created a sharp contrast between the illuminated figure and the total darkness of the lantern show’s setting. This focal point, combined with the low lighting of the setting, would have downplayed visual cues that signaled the boundary between the world represented on screen and the space occupied by the audience. This effect ultimately contributed to the audience’s perception of the projected image as something more than a representation.
Narration and Embodiment
The apparent materialization of images on screen was further supported by the spoken narration that would have accompanied them. Like the visual dimensions of the lantern show, sound blurred the distinction figures on screen and show’s South Pacific setting. This effect is captured by folk etymologies of phantasmagoria, a term invented by Robertson to describe his display of projected ghouls and goblins. Terry Castle offers two possible sources for this term: the first reflects Robertson’s cheeky public persona, for he collapsed the French words for ghost and gourer, to deceive. The more dignified etymology parses phantasmagoria into Greek terms for phantasma, phantom, and agoreuien, to speak publicly.[6] Thinking of phantasmagoria and other figures painted against an opaque black background as ghosts who speak exposes a fundamental tension at work in the magic lantern show; while the image remained intangible, the experience of seeing the image and hearing the narration offered an embodied encounter with the figures on screen. Though largely missing from the textual record, the soundscape of the magic lantern show encouraged the audience to interpret the projected image of Christ on the cross as more than a representation.This effect is perhaps best described in approaches to film. Mary Ann Doane characterizes “the body reconstituted by the technology and practices of the cinema” as a “phantasmatic body.” (emphasis original).[7] Though Doane does not explicitly address pre-cinema technologies like the magic lantern, her gesture to phantasmagoria in her theorization of sound evokes the immateriality of the projected images created by early projection equipment. In Williams’ lantern show, the technology and practices of lantern show reconstituted Christ’s body on screen. Visually, Christ’s corporeality is emphasized by the stream of blood flowing from his side. According to Doane,
The tactical value of sound, particularly the voice, is to lend dimensionality to the phantasmatic body. The voice expands the two-dimensional world depicted on screen in two ways: as part of diegetic sound, or sound that belongs to the world represented on screen, the voice travels through representational space. Dialogue, reverberation, and echo offer moments where the voice intersects and interacts with the surfaces and bodies on screen. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the voice bridges the three-dimensional world on screen and the acoustical space occupied by the audience. Because the audience is enveloped by the acoustical space of the theatre, Doane argues, characters on screen gain a consistency of the real when the production of diegetic sound and the audition of that sound coalesce. Diegetic sound transcends the boundary between real and representational worlds in the moment it is heard by the audience.The phantasmatic visual space which the film constructs is supplemented by techniques designed to spatialize the voice, to localize it, give it depth, and thus lend to the characters the consistency of the real.[8]
Williams almost certainly provided some sort of narration to accompany the images on screen, for it would have represented a significant break from the conventions of magic lantern shows to remain silent. With the exception of his assertion that the image was “only a representation,” Williams’ letter contains no details about the content and style of his narration. However, Carpenter and Westley’s catalog, which contains references to the biblical sources for Williams’ lantern slides, offers several narrative tactics to reconstitute bodies on screen through spoken narration. The scenes mentioned explicitly in Williams’ letter, create opportunities for the narrator to speak on behalf of the figures on screen. Christ’s crucifixion, particularly as portrayed by Carpenter and Westley, visualize Christ’s last words— “It is finished!” When repeating these words, the narrator’s voice would extend the corporeality of the body depicted on screen by reconstituting Christ voice in the acoustical space enveloping the audience. Citing Old Testament prophecy gave the images on screen depth by including off-screen voices. Transitions like “then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying…” remediate the aurality of the act of prophesying (“that which was spoken”) and Matthew’s reiteration of these prophecies, “saying” (Matthew 2:17) via an aural medium, the voice of the narrator. If he included these verbal cues in his narration, Williams reconstitutes the phantasmatic body of Jeremiah by giving voice to his prophecies, even though Jeremiah is not depicted in the slider’s visualization of the Flight to Egypt. This technique would also lend depth to the phantasmatic bodies of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph by eliding temporal and geographic distance. Quoting the prophecy would collapse distinctions between the moment represented on screen, the preceding moment of prophecy, and the subsequent presentation of these moments in Williams’ lantern show. Finally, Simeon’s characterization of Christ as “a light to lighten the Gentiles” supports a moment of hypermediation which calls attention to the audience’s ethnicity. If repeated in the context of the lantern show, Williams as the voice of Simeon foregrounds his audience’s non-Jewish identity in order to inscribe them within the narrative illuminated by the magic lantern. These narrative tactics would be even more effective if given in the audience’s native language, for a translator could mitigate moments of misunderstanding that arose because of linguistic barriers.
While the precise content of Williams’ narration remains uncertain, his bodily presence offers a more secure position through which to reconstruct the role of the narrator. In the films analyzed by Doane, the voice that the audience hears is a mechanical reproduction of the actor on screen. Here, the source of diegetic sound is Williams himself. In this way, Williams’ body functions more like the actor’s body in theatre. Diana Taylor characterizes the moment of performance, the “repertoire,” as the embodiment of the “archive,” materials that both inform and record the performance.[9] Interpreting the magic lantern show as a moment of repertoire foregrounds the ways that the projected image visualizes the archive of biblical stories, depictions of those stories in Western art, and the visual tropes of phantasmagoria. However, the ontological status of the projected image as intangible and two-dimensional makes it impossible for the visual elements of the lantern show to fully embody the archive. The narrator lends physicality to the projected image through his voice, bridging diegetic and real space through his embodied remediation of the source texts.
Narration, and the audience’s embodied auditory experience, ultimately foregrounds Williams’ role in creating the illusion that the projected image of Christ was more than a representation. The image of Christ registers as phantasmagoric in the ways that it appears to speak and in the ways that it encourages misinterpretation. Moments of hypermediation would have exposed the boundaries between real and diegetic space by calling attention to the mechanisms and persons who made the representation of Christ possible. In the total darkness of the lantern show, the audience would have been encouraged to displace the embodied voice of the narrator onto the phantasmatic body of Christ. Narrative tactics in the source texts would have supported the immersive viewing experience created by the setting’s low-lighting.
The Problem of Presence
Erring on the side of immersion made Christ appear as if he were physically present— as if he appeared in the flesh. As a term, "presence" gestures to the ways that the phantasmatic body skirts the distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic space. Although it is perceivable, the projected image never actually materializes, for it exists solely on the surface of the screen. Nevertheless, the figures depicted through projected images convey a sense of physical presence thanks to the narrator’s embodied voice and the absence of visual cues that distinguish the boundaries of the diegetic world. In Ludwig Vogl-Beinek’s reading of late-nineteenth-century lantern adaptations of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, the spoken narration that accompanied photographic images of the Ghost of Christmas Present emphasized the presence of Need and Want. By lending physicality to these representations of poverty, lanternists encouraged the audience to financially contribute to charity.[10]The technologies and narrative tactics available to Williams were even more well suited to generating a sense of presence than those analyzed by Vogl-Beinek. Carpenter and Westley made the phantasmagoria lantern commercially viable through their innovative lens making and slide printing process, but its oil lamp and relatively short throw meant that the lantern was most effective in total darkness. The slider of Christ crucified was designed to create the most immersive viewing experience possible by surrounding the illuminated figure with opaque black paint, masking the presence of the lantern and the screen. The source texts for the scriptural sliders suggests that the spoken narration encouraged the audience to collapse temporal and geographic distance between themselves and the diegesis of the figures on screen.
So why did Williams actively break this illusion by asserting Christ was “only a representation”? This uncharacteristically hypermediated moment suggests that the audience’s reaction made Williams feel deeply uncomfortable. Williams does not seem to be responding to the audience’s tears. The inclusion of the audience’s weeping in the published account suggests that crying was perceived as an appropriate response by a British readership. Given Williams’ eagerness to acquire a lantern, it would seem that he too would be pleased to see that the climax of the show such an emphatic response. Since Williams does not directly address the audience’s expression of emotion, I would argue that Williams discomfort is rooted in an effect that he could only see in the context of a lantern show— Christ’s presence.
Williams affirmation of the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic space reveal that magic lantern shows threatened to undermine the Protestant theology driving his missionary work. The technologies and narrative strategies that Williams adopted encouraged the audience to collapse distinctions between Christ’s person and representations of him. If the audience perceived Christ as physically present, the image of Christ would share the ontological status of the Eucharist in Catholic mass. This apparent transubstantiation from representation to actual body of Christ resonated with Jesuit missionaries whom Williams vocally critiqued. In fact, Williams’ specifically requested images of martyrs to give the Islanders “a dread of Popery”. Eliding the difference between representation and deity not only aligned Williams with Catholic theology, but it also risked creating new idols for the islanders to worship. Christ’s apparent presence threatened to transform the projected image into an embodiment of deity. This would have been especially embarrassing for Williams in light of his efforts to collect wooden goods for the London Missionary Society Museum. Despite the significant theological ramifications of Christ’s presence in the projected image, this moment of misinterpretation was not enough to deter Williams from giving other lantern shows, nor did it temper his appreciation for Mr. Walker for giving him the lantern and slides.
[1] According to Mervyn Heard, this account is usually attributed to Sir David Brewster, but the detail, vocabulary, and structure of the version written by Brewster is so close to Nicholson’s that Nicholson is likely Brewster’s source (Phantasmagoria, p. 134).
[2] Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. p. 124.
[3] “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry vol. 15, no. 1, Autumn 1988. pp. 26-61. Print. p. 51.
[4] “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story-Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination.” Comparative Critical Studies vol. 6, no. 3, 2009: 333-346. Print.
[5] Sexuality and the Gothic magic lantern: Desire, eroticism and literary visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
[6] Castle, p. 29.
[7] “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Film Theory and Criticism. 5th ed. Leo Braudy and Marhsall Cohen, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 363-375. Print. pp. 363-4.
[8] Doane, p. 365
[9] The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
[10] “Body and Screen: Corporeality in Live Performances of the Historic Art of Projection.” Domitor. Stockholm, Sweden. 2016.
