Media Archaeology
Archaeologies of the Screen
Tracing the evolution of “archaeology” in film and media studies exposes the critical context of my approach to magic lantern shows, particularly my interest in lanterns, slides, and documents as historical records. Below, I describe key moments in conversations about the mechanisms which generate the screen experience. From its inception as a field, film studies has devoted significant attention to the material history of the moving image. Franz Paul Liesegang pioneered this vein of scholarship; born in 1873, Liesegang witnessed first-hand the radical changes to the entertainment industry precipitated by Thomas Edison’s vitascope. Perhaps Liesegang’s personal encounters with a range of moving image technologies in his childhood prompted him to look beyond the screen for cinema’s mechanical antecedents. In his landmark study Zahlen und Quellen: zur Geschichte der Projektionskunst und Kinematographie (1926), Liesegang offered a narrative of technological evolution through convergence.[2] He grouped cinema’s forerunners into three families of apparati: the magic lantern, the phenakistoscope, and the photographic camera. Categorizing pre-cinema technologies in this manner enabled Liesegang to describe how each device solved a mechanical problem. The magic lantern refined image projection; optical toys like the phenakistoscope and zoetrope simulated movement through rapid transitions between a sequence of stills; and the camera captured images through photographic processes.[3]Liesegang’s approach to film history was adopted and expanded by subsequent histories of the moving image, most notably C.W. Ceram Archaeology of the Cinema (1965) and Laurent Manonni’s The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (French: 1994, English: 2000). Both Ceram and Mannoni appropriate the object-oriented nature of “archaeology” as a method to describe their focus on the mechanisms which created moving images. Where Liesegang, Ceram, and Manoni differ is the centrality of photography in their respective archaeologies. Ceram characterizes early cameras, stroboscopic optical toys, and magic lanterns as “serious” forerunners of film due to their mechanical similarities with film cameras and projectors; he dismisses magic lantern slides as “dubious” ancestors because they “did not show genuine motion, but merely ‘change of position’ (18). Responses to Ceram have tended to take two forms: the first critiqued Ceram’s narrow focus on photographic and cinematic equipment. The second built modes of analysis that use the apparati responsible for creating the screen experience as the primary node through which to study the cultural context of film. This dissertation draws from both of these directions in scholarship to expand the scope of media archaeology.
Archaeologies like Manoni’s responded to Ceram’s relegation of the lantern to the sidelines by shifting from “cinema” as the primary area of focus to visual phenomena supported by a range of technologies. Manoni used the framework of the “great art of light and shadow” to reinscribe the lantern within film’s pre-history. He gave mechanical magic lantern slides pride of place by describing their use in phantasmagoria and their appearance as dissolving views. More recent studies, including Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet (2007) and several essays by Erki Huitomno, reframed media archaeology by focusing on technologies of the screen.[4] Scholarship in this vein traces the evolution of the screen from its canvas roots in pictorial art, dioramas, and panoramas; to its role in the magic lantern show as a passive receptacle of projected image; to the computer monitor as an interactive interface. Like the most recent turn in studies of the screen, I place the lantern on a continuum of technologies that produce screen experiences like the one you are experiencing now. And like the scholars mentioned above, I draw from prose and illustrations contained within nineteenth-century textual sources to support my analysis of improved phantasmagoria lanterns and their accompanying copper-plate printed slides. The dissertation’s digital form not only makes it possible to represent lanterns and slides in a visually-oriented format, but the website also opens up fruitful comparisons between the nineteenth-century magic lantern show and digital remediation of ephemera in a web-based environment as screen experiences. In particular, I am interested in exploring the ways that screen technologies in their Victorian and current form facilitate embodied interactions with the material represented on screen.
This interest in screen-viewing practices resonates with a second vein of scholarship that responds to Ceram, whose object-oriented approach to the screen’s history sparked the rise of apparatus theory within film studies. While not explicitly archaeologies of the cinema or the screen, they share Ceram’s interest in the mechanical apparti. Jean-Louis Baudry’s seminal essays, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” (1970) and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” (1975), drew heavily from Freudian psychoanalysis to examine the ways that moving image technologies disseminate and reinforce cultural ideals through the embodied practices of film viewing. For Baudry, screen technologies promote a voyeuristic mode of viewing that is not only structured by the viewing space but also by formal cinematic features like editing and sound. Like the Foucauldian panopticon, these embodied viewing practices reinforced cultural narratives about power and normativity through an act of the surveillance of the part of the viewer. Baudry and his interlocutors, particularly Jean-Luis Comolli, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, privilege the audio-visual content of films within in their analyses. These semiotic approaches to film implicate larger cultural forces in the act of film viewing, but they lack historical or geographic specificity.
Toward an Archaeology of Mediation
Apparatus theory’s interest in viewing practices opens up a space for screen history to perform cultural history. Such an approach would use the materials of screen archaeology to excavate the screen experience as a site for the dissemination of cultural ideals within specific contexts. When read in this light, eyewitness account in letters and published missionary narratives not only document the mechanical development of screen technology but also portray these technologies in action. In this section, I draw from media studies, anthropology, and ethnography to develop a mode of reading textual sources as representations of audio-visual experiences. Specifically, theories of mediation help me to identify the forces that shaped the production of the materials that I will study in this dissertation.
As texts, eyewitness accounts remediate the magic lantern show in a formal sense. Bolter and Grusin characterize remediation as the presence of medium in another.[5] Missionaries evoke the visuality and aurality of the screen experience by describing images and spoken narration; in this way, the letter structurally mimics the magic lantern show by presenting a series of narrated vignettes. For example, John Williams’ account of his lantern show, which I analyze in greater detail here, takes this formal remediation one step further by preserving the technological affordances of Carpenter and Westley’s sliders. Williams describes a sequence of three images: the Nativity, Jesus’ presentation at the temple, and the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. This detail not only captures the content of his lantern shows but also reflects the fact that the scriptural sliders had three images embedded in a single wooden frame. Williams’ letter does not offer a complete account of the sequence of images that he presented. This omission foregrounds the ways that even the most precise and robust first-hand account can overlook elements of the magic lantern show. By translating a multi-sensory experience into a textual form, the myriad attractions of the magic lantern show as a performance medium are inevitably—and irrevocably— lost.
Theories of mediation from anthropology and ethnography suggest that these omissions are not simply the result of translating one medium into another. Instead, these gaps reveal the limited perspective of the author. As cultural critic Fredric Jameson has argued, works of art (and by extension, pieces of performance art) are ‘mediated’ in that they are viewed through a matrix which includes the viewer’s personal experience and cultural context (1981, 39). Eyewitness accounts ossify the author’s own biases and interests, making it impossible to fully extricate the author’s perspective from the sequence of events described in the text. In this way, the letter becomes a record of a moment of mediation that occurred during the magic lantern show. More recent studies by William Mazzarella, Webb Keane, and Arjun Appadurai have expanded Jameson’s approach to describe mediation as a set of embodied practices that express cultural ideals in material forms.[6] Appadurai’s essay “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity” is worth discussing at length because it offers the most robust framework through which to approach the interconnectedness of mediation, materiality, and the forces that shape both.[7] For Appadurai, mediation and materiality
Materiality implies physicality, but Appadurai uses this term more expansively, i.e. speech can serve as materiality. Appadurai’s conception of mediation as an embodied act parallels Diana Taylor’s characterization of repertoire, or moments of performance, as the embodiment of the archive, the physical materials that both inform and record those moments.[8] However, Appardurai’s model accounts for a greater range of contributors to mediation as a process, whom he refers to as “mediants.”[9]cannot be usefully defined except in relationship to each other. Mediation, as an operation or embodied practice, produces materiality as the effect of its operations. Materiality is the site of what mediation — as an embodied practice — reveals (224).
Although Appadurai discusses mediants, mediation, and materiality in relation to Bollywood films’ representation of slum life and the screening of those films in Mumbai, this context resonates with cultural dynamics at play in nineteenth-century magic lantern shows. Offering an extended comparison between these two contexts fleshes out the anthropological approach to mediation that I will adopt in the chapters to follow. Appardurai’s first move is to triangulate the relationship between film, religion, and setting. Mediation as a framework
To apply Appadurai’s framework to a nineteenth-century context, the magic lantern can be read as a technology of religion in a very literal sense in that it introduced the main tenets of Christianity in audiences in Africa and the South Pacific. As I will demonstrate in the chapters to follow, visual content and spoken narration portrayed Christ as the Messiah, the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. In this way, the screen experience became a moment of formal mediation in that it translated textual sources into an audio-visual format. Simultaneously, the magic lantern becomes a vehicle for mediation in Appadurai’s conception of the term, for it is situated between Christianity as a religious practice and the expression of those practices in the visible world. The magic lantern not only functioned as a technology of religion but also a technology of empire. In addition to its role in the magic lantern show, the projector itself functioned as novelty item due to its scarcity in Africa and the South Pacific. The lantern conveyed the invisible orders of British trade practices and political authority alongside other trade goods and technological wonders brought by the missionaries.[10] Thus, the lantern showcased the technological sophistication of an object produced in Britain and—as a corollary—suggested the commercial potential of joining British trade networks. The lantern as the apparatus and as a novelty item projected a vision of stability onto spaces made unstable by the arrival of British missionaries and other agents of colonialism. Missionaries often crossed paths with people who would not be considered indigenous to the regions in which Europeans encountered them.[11] For this reason, audiences of magic lantern shows are most accurately described as “local” rather than “indigenous.”tells us that Bollywood films are a technology of religion, if we agree to see religion as primarily a form of mediation between the visible and the invisible orders, in this case the invisible order of family, kinship, territory, and belonging that can be found only in the visible order of housing, however insecure, unstable, and temporary such housing might be.
Appadurai’s model accounts for local audiences in moments of mediation. In the case of Bollywood films, this framework also
Appadurai’s distinction between films and film viewing separates the representation of Mumbai in film and the embodied experience of seeing and hearing that representation in the movie theatre. For the local audiences of these films, the geographic distance between the spaces they negotiate on a daily basis and the setting of the events on screen is minimal. Before the widespread use of photography, it would have been difficult for missionaries to have offered an on-screen representation of the local settings in which they gave their lantern shows. Manufacturers in England dominated the slide-making market, meaning that they had little to no contact with lantern audiences abroad. Even though local audiences were geographically removed from the world represented on-screen and the slide-making process, the lantern show as a screen experience functioned as a vehicle for audiences to communicate and contest messages about faith, political power, and wealth being taught by missionaries, often in ways that the missionaries did not anticipate. Far from being a one-way transmission of religious thought, magic lantern shows created opportunities for the audience to respond. Missionaries’ letters capture moments of these responses, ranging from loud sobbing to lavish displays of wealth to raucous joke-telling. While no project can fully recover local perspectives and voices through the textual and material archive, reading audiences of magic lantern shows as “mediants” gives non-Europeans agency in moments of mediation facilitated by the lantern. In doing so, this dissertation challenges the Eurocentrisim of previous screen histories by recovering the contributions of local audiences to nineteenth-century screen experiences.allows us to see films and film viewing as a vital part of Mumbai’s infrastructure, which allows ordinary, often poor, citizens to communicate and contest messages about the power, wealth, security, and transportation that flow all around them and that often seem impossible for them to share in, in a just manner.
Combining an archaeology of the screen with formal and anthropological models of mediation results in what I characterize as an “archaeology of mediation.” Within this framework, projection equipment, paper, and webpages serve a double function. First, they shape the embodied practices of mediation through their technological affordances. If we were to examine this website as a site of mediation, for example, we have to take into account the ways that HTML, CSS, and Javascript shaped the writing process. Anecdotally, as someone who has written content for a document-based dissertation and then heavily revised that content for a web-based environment, the dissertation’s web-based form dramatically changed my writing process. Far from being a purely mechanical exercise, designing the dissertation with the mechanical possibilities and limitations of Scalar in mind generated new avenues for critical inquiry. Because I was thinking about visual layout and navigation as I was writing content, I began to ask questions about role of form in the nineteenth-century material that I was studying. This evolution is represented through the iterations of the dissertation as it moved from document to web-based form as well as in my documentation of this process in the chapter on the dissertation’s form.
This brings us to the second role of technology in mediation— these devices are the mechanisms which capture the embodied process of mediation as materialities. For both Appadurai’s approach to Bollywood films and my own analysis of magic lantern shows, materiality is not necessarily equivalent to physicality. Rather, materiality serves as a more general term to describe the products of mediation and the loci in which mediation takes place. Technologies of mediation record moments of mediation with a variety of recording mechanisms and with varying degrees of automation. Some technologies enable moments of mediation while leaving little physical evidence that an act of mediation has taken place. The soot left by oil lamps and limelight is often the only physical record that we have of the slide’s role in a magic lantern show. Without supporting material like a program with a listing of the show’s content, an eyewitness account, or notes in the lanternist’s hand, it is difficult to pin slides to specific performances. In this way, the slide functions as a passive recording device that captures little information about the contexts in which it was used. Others technologies are designed to record through direct physical interaction. Carpenter and Westley’s scriptural sliders, for example, use both tactile and chemical processes to etch mediation into materiality; their copperplate-printed outlines represent a mechanically reproduced image while brush-strokes betray the presence of the artist’s hand. Still other technologies are designed to automatically record without direct intervention. Scalar tracks changes to webpages over time by saving versions of each page as they are edited.[12] The material expression of meditation—slides, letters, published accounts, this website— reflects the affordances of those mechanical processes.
As an extension of Appadurai’s approach, I take into account are the layers of mediation that accrue when magic lantern shows are represented in letters, published versions of those letters, and in digital versions of these texts. Each layer reflects the technological affordances of the layer underneath. The sliders that Williams used in his lantern show functioned as a technology of mediation in the ways that they brought the invisible order of Christianity into the visible world. Because each slide contained a series of three or four images, those images had to be projected in the order that they appear within the wooden frame. Williams letter to his son, which describes his lantern show in detail, preserves the sequence of these images. In this way, the letter formally remediates the visual content of the magic lantern show through its narrative structure. At the same time, the letter captures Williams mediating the magic lantern show and its context through the embodied process of writing. The network of mediants who were part of the lantern show are represented in textual form, but their presence is mediated through Williams’ perspective, the technological affordances of writing apparati, and the literary conventions of letters as a genre of writing. As the letter’s recipient, Williams’ son become part of the network of mediants who shape and respond to the embodied act of mediation that occured in the letter’s composition. The appearance of this letter in Williams’ posthumous biography represents yet another layer of mediation, this time on the part of the editor. Here, the editor chooses portions of Williams letter to include and omit based on his perspective, the affordances of print, and the narrative conventions of Victorian biographies. At this stage, the number of mediants expands exponentially to include the nineteenth-century readers of the biography and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars who analyze the published text. Finally, the website serves as the materiality of my own mediation of nineteenth-century slides, Williams’ letter, and its appearance in print. It is inflected by my training as a Victorianist and digital humanist; it is a product of many mediants, including my committee, mentors, colleagues, archivists, collectors, magic lanternists, technologists, and playwrights as well as the mediants who shaped the production of the material that I study. The website takes the affordances of Scalar and websites more generally into account while also following the literary conventions of a document-based dissertation.
As the examples above suggest, my approach to magic lantern shows goes one step beyond the models developed by Bolter, Grusin, and Appadurai by taking into account the way that genre shapes embodied acts of mediation. With regards to Victorian travel literature, the affordances of genre are most clearly seen when authors use the same technology of mediation to represent their embodied experience of a place, but the materialities of that embodied act are shaped by the affordances of different genres. Literary critic Justin Livingstone has examined this dynamic at work in the publications of David Livingstone’s contemporaries who represented their experiences of Africa through travelogues and adventure fiction, which Justin Livingstone describes as the “fiction of exploration”:
Henry Morton Stanley’s My Kalulu and How I Found Livingstone share the same technology of mediation—the book—, but the travelogue and the fiction of exploration as genres of writing offer different narrative possibilities through which to mediate their experience of Africa. To apply this model to missionaries, I demonstrate in the chapters to follow that differences between the published and unpublished descriptions of magic lantern shows are not simply the products of different technologies of mediation. Rather, I argue that these editorial changes also reveal the effect of genre on acts of mediation.In fiction, explorers not only found a means of mediating the practical considerations of African transit to would-be discoverers, but a narrative mode by which they could revisit, reimagine and mythologize exploration (3).[13]
So then, to perform an archaeology of mediation is to excavate layers of mediation through an analysis of materialities. In the chapters to follow, I examine lanterns, slides, letters, published accounts, and their digital counterparts as platforms for and records of embodied acts of mediation. This mode of interpretation undertakes three tasks. First, an archaeology of mediation recognizes mediation as an embodied act. Second, it accounts for the ways that the affordances of technologies and the constraints of literary genres shaped the expression of mediation through materiality. Third, it identifies the mediants who participated in this process.
[1] Although screen media are predominantly visual, I use the term “screen experience” to refer to the embodied practices of viewing. “Experience” also de-privileges the visual in order to include sound and touch as part of the audience’s interaction with the material on screen.
[2] Liesegang’s work was translated into English by Hermann Hecht in 1986 and published as Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography by the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.
[3] Following Liesegang’s model, Rudolph Thun framed his archaeology of the cinema around six technological innovations in his work Entwicklung der Kinotechnik (Berlin, 1936). Subsequent histories, including Georges Sadour’s Histoire générale du cinéma, volume 1 (Paris, 1948) and Friedrich Pruss von Zglinicki’s Der Weg des Films (Berlin, 1956), also offer comprehensive surveys of magic lanterns, phenakistoscopes, and zoetropes as well as shadow European and Asian shadow puppet theatre.
[4] Huhtamo’s first reframes cinema studies in “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31-82. He develops his approach to screen technology in “Screen Tests: Why Do We Need an Archaeology of the Screen?” Cinema Journal, 51:2 (2012): 144–148. and, most recently, in “The Four Practices?: Challenges for an Archaeology of the Screen.” Screens, edited by Dominique Chateau and José Moure, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2016, pp. 116–124. Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (MIT: 2006) offers an equally expansive accounts of media from cave painting to the internet. Shifting away from the continuum model, Jussi Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology? (London, Polity Press, 2012) examines moments of profound technological change, including the development of sound in film, the debut of television, and the expansion of the internet.
[5] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.
[6] See William Mazzarella. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 33, 2004, pp. 345–367. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25064857. And Webb Keane. Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter. University of California Press, 2007.
[7] Arjun Appadurai. “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity”. Public Culture 1 May 2015; 27 (2 (76)): 221–237. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2841832
[8] Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
[9] Appadurai sees “mediant” as a subcategory of what Bruno Latour’s refers to as “actants” within actor-network theory. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.
[10] Technological novelties included watches, photographs, and static electricity generators. David Livingstone writes in Missionary Travels that “It was pleasant to see great numbers of men, women, and buys come, without suspicion, to look at the books, watch, looking glass, revolver, etc” (623-4).
[11] For example, Livingstone’s first expedition was backed by the Kololo who had been pushed out of South Africa during the Mfecane, a period of warfare sparked by Shaka Zulu’s expansion of the Zulu Kingdom. The Kololo were part of the Sotho trapped between Shaka Zulu, the British, and the Boers. Rather than remain in South Africa, the Kololo headed north under the leadership of Sebetwane, whom David Livingstone met in 1851 in what’s now southwestern Zambia.
[12] The number of versions is visible in the footer of each webpage. However, this number does not reflect the true number of iterations since I do the bulk of my drafting in Googledocs, which has its own automated version management system.
[13] Justin D. Livingstone. “Travels in Fiction: Baker, Stanley, Cameron and the Adventure of African Exploration”, Journal of Victorian Culture, (August 2017) DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1356586. Livingstone discusses Stanely’s fiction in greater detail in “A romance of slavery: exploration, encounters and cartographies of violence in H. M. Stanley’s My Kalulu”, Studies in Travel Writing, 21:4, (August 2017) 349-368, DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2017.1406904
