C&W Scripture Slider No. 8
1 2018-08-20T17:04:15+00:00 Mary Borgo Ton users/2BlueFish! 6a775e7f93db4e4e6947fe3f00ce9724b7a7edb3 1 1 The Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, Christ brought to the Temple plain 2018-08-20T17:04:15+00:00 Mary Borgo Ton users/2BlueFish! 6a775e7f93db4e4e6947fe3f00ce9724b7a7edb3This page is referenced by:
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2018-12-03T15:17:31+00:00
"A Light to Lighten the Gentiles"
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Carpenter and Westely’s Scenes from the Gospels
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2019-06-14T19:42:47+00:00
When taken as a sequence, the sliders that depict scenes from the Gospels emphasize three aspects of Christ: his roles as the Messiah who fulfills Old Testament prophecy, as a teacher with the highest moral authority, and as Savior who has power over physical and spiritual death. The four images mentioned explicitly in Williams' letter—the Nativity, Christ brought to the temple, the Flight to Egypt, and the Crucifixion—serve as key moments in this overarching narrative.
Though I will focus on the image's visual composition, presenting textual sources alongside their visual counterparts creates a window through which to tentatively reconstruct the sequence as an audio-visual experience, particularly as a remediation of scripture. As I discuss here, Carpenter and Westley included a single verse to accompany each slide. Audiences familiar with Bible stories, particularly as portrayed in the first seven sliders of the lecture set, would spot visual parallels between figures from the Old Testament and Christ. To an uninitiated audience, the passages from which these scenes are taken make this connection explicit; for this reason, it is likely that Williams' quoted or paraphrased a longer passage of scripture than the solitary verse that accompanied the slide in Carpenter and Westley's catalog. Williams’ context and proclivity for studying Polynesian languages suggests that he gave the narration for the lantern show in Samoan. As a seasoned translator, Williams would have been able to provide Samoan approximations for the transitions and metaphors in the King James translation of the Bible. For clarity, I will quote from the King James version of the passages depicted in Williams lantern show.
As I will show, reading scripture throughout could register as hypermediated screen experience because the passages include references to other portions of the Bible. Phrases like “for thus it was written”, which appears in Matthew 2:5, emphasize the text as the medium through which prophecies were recorded and preserved. Such transitions preserve the textuality of scripture, even though it is being presented in an audio-visual format. Other narrative cues couch intertextuality in more embodied terms. Transitions like “that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet” (Matthew 2:17) remediates the implied act of speaking through an aural medium, the narrator’s voice. Respeaking prophecy, particularly during the opening sequence of scriptural slides, ultimately downplays the role of text as mediator and structures a more immersive audio-visual experience. Overall, the scriptural passages that accompany the slides offer more opportunities to remediate conversations between the figures on screen than to describe prophecies as text. This tendency suggests that the lantern show as a whole oscillated between immediacy and hypermediacy but erred on the side of immersion, an effect that would have significant theological ramifications for Williams. The lantern show's predilection toward immediacy is further reinforced by the total darkness required to operate an improved phantasmagoria lantern.Christ as Messiah
The sequence opens with five images that portray Christ as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, starting with the Annunciation.
A version in the author's care and in the National Science Museum's copy depict Mary and the Angel Gabriel surrounded by clouds that resemble the bilious incense in the Holy of Holies and Christ's post-resurrection appearance to the disciples gathered in Emmaus. As one of the few images in the set which consistently contains scenery, the Annunciation's relatively bright composition conveys a sense of Christ's role as the light of the world through blinding radiance. In the accompanying passage for the image, the angel Gabriel paraphrases Isaiah who described the coming Messiah as the son of God, the heir to the throne of David, and king who would reign forever (Isaiah 9:6-7, Luke 1:28-38). Compositionally, this image is the most explicitly typological in the New Testament portion of the set in the ways that it creates parallels between Christ and figures in the Old Testament. The swaddling-sized piece of white cloth draped over the side of the basket at Mary's feet parallels Moses in the tar-coated reed basket. Seeing Jesus as a type of Moses emphasizes Christ role as a deliverer; the movement of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land finds ultimate fulfillment in the holy family's flight to Egypt and eventual return to Judea after Herod's death.
The source passage for this image of the Nativity—Luke 2:16—contains no direct references to the Old Testament, but other Gospels make the parallel more explicit. Matthew's account of the Magi includes Micah's prophecy:
If this depiction of the nativity contains typological imagery, the reference is rather oblique. The shepherd's fur clothes and wavy grey hair seem almost feminine, for they are strikingly similar to Eve's appearance in the first slide of Carpenter and Westley's scriptural set. If read as a double of Eve, the shepherd's presence conveys as sense of two mothers—Eve as the mother of all living and Mary as the mother of the Savior. The re-engraving of this image contrasts the humble setting of the stable with the shepherd’s kneeling and marveling at the child, emphasizing Christ as a figure worthy of worship.But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah...out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting (Micah 5:2, Matthew 2:6).
In the original engraving, Christ's body language echoes the cherub-like Christ in Renaissance art. Christ's upward gaze towards the Eve and the shepherd conveys compassion. Pacific Islanders might have seen similarities between god child and the carved wooden idols collected by Williams, including the fisherman's god in Henry Anelay's watercolor. In this scene, Jesus is approximately the same size as a portable wooden figure; his bent knees and hands clasping his chest find a South Pacific counterpart in the bulbous belly and chest of the fisherman's god. This posture is repeated in the next image, Christ brought to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth.
Simeon, a man of Jerusalem who was just and devout, holds Christ in his arms. Although his words of praise are not included in the verse listed in Carpenter and Westley's catalog, the passage from which this verse is taken would offer an irresistible visual pun for magic lantern adaptations of this moment.[1] According to Luke's account, Simeon sees Jesus and exclaims,
Including Simeon's prayer in the spoken narration that accompanied this image would not only clarify the narrative importance of the scene, but it would also call attention to the lantern show's South Pacific context. This image depicts Christ as “a light to lighten the Gentiles” both spiritually and literally. Since the Pacific Islanders in the audience would fall into the category of Gentile, quoting this passage breaks the fourth wall in the theatrical sense; Williams could inscribe his audience within this scriptural narrative by explicitly referencing their non-Jewish identity. Furthermore, the projected image of Christ illuminated by the magic lantern offered a means for spiritual enlightenment through its role as the sole source of light in the context of the lantern show. Such a moment would offer a break from an immersive viewing experience by foregrounding the presence of the audience and the mechanisms that create this visual experience.Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel (Luke 2:29-32).
The next image returns the audience to a more immersive experience by inviting the narrator to emphasize the sound of his voice. The source passage in Matthew cites two prophecies: Hosea 11:1, which foretells the holy family's eventual return to Judea following their flight to Egypt, and Jeremiah 31:15, which finds its ultimate fulfillment in the slaughter of the innocents (Matthew 2:16). Each of these is predicated by a phrase which represents prophecy as spoken; first,
and second,...that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying... (Matthew 2:15)
In the text, these narrative cues remediate the aurality of the act of prophesying (“that which was spoken”) and Matthew's reiteration of these prophecies, “saying”. In King James' English translation, “saying” implies a presentism that contrasts with the past tense of the prophecy's creation. If he included these verbal cues in his narration, Williams would become the embodiment of Hosea and Jeremiah by giving voice to their prophecies, using sound to collapse distinctions between the moment represented on screen, the preceding moment of prophecy, and the subsequent presentation of these moments in the lantern show....then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying... (Matthew 2:17)
In the image of Mary, Christ, and St. John the Baptist, the figures on screen collapse narrative time through embodiment, particularly through their clothing. St. John's furry mantle and pilgrim's staff foreshadow his role as a “voice in the wilderness”, a fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy (Isaiah 40:3, Matthew 3:3). As an adult, he would have “raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins” (Matthew 3:4). Carpenter and Westley's slide maps his adult appearance onto his younger self through the visual vocabulary of his clothing. These garments not only anticipate his activities as an adult but create a visual parallel with Adam and Eve, the shepherds in the Nativity scene, and the Prodigal Son.Christ as Teacher
The transition between Christ's childhood and his adult life is visually jarring—an image of Christ's baptism by St. John would be a more natural scene to follow the one above; keeping the same figures on screen would maintain continuity while conveying the passage of time. Instead, the first image in the sequence depicts Jesus interacting with a liminal figure who is neither fully Jewish nor fully Gentile. Structurally, the woman at the well is part of the double frame that encapsulates Jesus' parables. On the outer edges are two images of fallen women that bookend two miraculous scenes on the Sea of Galilee. Such nesting rests Christ's moral authority on his power over nature.
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well models a positive response to the gospel message. The woman raised cultural differences between Samaritans and Jews in the ways that they worship (John 4:19-24). Despite these distinctions, she recognized Jesus as the Messiah based on his supernatural knowledge of her life. Jesus tells her that
The woman was so astonished by the accuracy of this statement that she gathers the town together, and the townspeople invite Jesus to stay for two days. As a result of the woman's actions “many more believed” (John 4:41). The implication for the audience to share the message that they are hearing through the magic lantern shows with others....thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband (John 4:18).
The image of Christ calming the storm may have been of particular interest to a South Pacific audience for they depict Christ as seafarer. Since Williams was giving his lantern show on a small island, it is entirely possible that the audience would have been within earshot of the ocean. If so, the sound of the waves crashing over the beach elides the historic and geographic distance between the Sea of Galilee and the South Pacific.
This parable positions liminal figures as emulatable models. The Good Samaritan practices charity in contrast to others who refused to help the mugged man. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, the image invites an action from the audience; in this case, to offer food, clothing, and financial support to those in need. The scene's bucolic setting emphasizes the moral teachings of this parable above the others through its careful attention to visual detail, for this style of image would have taken more time and care to paint than simply filling in the background with opaque, black paint.
Out of all the images in this set, the Lord of the Vineyard and the Labourer is perhaps the most obtuse, for it seems to match the title but not the source text. The verse quoted in Carpenter and Westley's catalog is part of a parable about a king who hosts a wedding party for his son. When the original invitees would not attend, he sends servants to fill the banquet hall with anyone they could find. Upon encountering a guest who is not appropriately attired, the king commands that his servants
The language of calling and choice foreground the theological concept of predestination, wherein God chooses whom he will save....bind [the guest] hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen. (Matthew 13-14)
It seems more likely that this image is a representation of an earlier parable, also in Matthew, about a vineyard owner who hired laborers throughout the day and pays them all the same wage (Matthew 20:1-16). The composition of this image seems to be a closer match, for the man's outstretched palm looks ready to receive payment after a hard day's work with his sickle, and the rolled up scroll suggests the Lord's ledger. If this is the parable in view, it offers the audience a much more agential role in their salvation, for they would receive the same reward as all who profess faith in Christ no matter how late in life they convert.
What's unique about this image is that it uses depth to move the audience through the narrative of the prodigal son. The figures in the foreground, particularly the prodigal son, encapsulate the narrative arc of the first part of the parable. The shaggy fur pelt not only signals the prodigal son's poverty after squandering his inheritance but also visualizes his fall from grace by echoing the garments of Adam and Eve. His modest apparel contrasts the colorful robes of his father, the imposing stone grotto, and the finery of the feast laid out on the table behind them. The celebration is so sumptuous that a servant consults a list to make sure everything is in its place. Navigating from foreground to background not only parallels the actions described in the text but it also gives the audience the opportunity to excavate the underlying meaning of the parable. The joyful reunion of the prodigal son with his father reinforces the call to profess faith in Christ through the visual vocabulary of the feast. The re-engraved version of this image is much more sentimental. By eliminating the portico of the house, the scene focuses more intently on the father embracing his son. The image creates depth through the discarded pouch at the son’s feet, a marker that he has left his old life by the wayside.
The Trial of Peter's Faith moves back into the frame narrative which encapsulates the parables by returning to the Sea of Galilee. Here, Christ demonstrates his power over nature by walking on water and saving Peter when he begins to sink into the waves. Due to the engraver's almost comical mistakes, the real miracle seems to be that Christ is standing upright despite the fact he stands with arms akimbo and feet at impossible angles. A more cynical viewer would not be amazed to see a head detached from its body given Christ's dislocated and distorted limbs. The re-engraved version of this image corrects this issue by presenting Christ at the center of the image facing the audience with open arms.
Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist completes the sequence of images depicting Christ's ministry by anticipating the violence of Christ's crucifixion in John the Baptist's decapitation. Unlike Dandeson Crowther's comic slipper slide, there's no indication that Williams' audience interpreted this image as cannibalistic. For Williams, both the scriptural set and the martyrological slides contain graphic content. Williams hoped that images of Protestants suffering at the hands of Catholics would prevent his Samoan audience from converting to Catholicism should a priest arrive on the island. While not as explicitly graphic, Carpenter and Westley’s set includes an undercurrent of violence. The image of John the Baptist and of the Crucifiction are the most graphic, but the flight to Egypt gestures to the threat posed by Herod and his jealousy. These images seem rather sanitized when compared to the flames and impliments of torture depicted in illustrations of Actes and Monuments. I would argue that the violence contained in the scriptural portion of the set was not intended to function as a scare tactic; using negative reinforcement in this portion of the show risked deterring potential converts from professing faith in Christ. Instead, I would argue that the explicit and implied violence in the scriptural portion of the set heightened the graphic nature of the martyrological slides.The scriptural sliders create tension through threats of physical harm that builds to and is made explicit in the martyrological slides.
If read in this light, the images of John the Baptist foreshadow the gorey deaths visualized in the slides to follow. Williams may have devoted more time in his narration to setting up John the Baptist as the first Martyr. The scriptural sliders set up John the Baptist as pathetic in the ways that it creates an emotional tie with the figure on screen before introducing his death. The image of John the Baptist as a child not only serves a narrative function in that it introduces John as a major figure in the life of Christ but it also evokes a sense of domesticity and motherly love through Mary’s presence. Such an image of motherhood is contrasted by Herodias and Salome, who revel in John’s death.Christ as Savior
The sequence of images that depict Christ's crucifiction and resurrection employ the visual vocabulary of radiance to express Christ deity.
As the climax of the magic lantern show, the image of Christ crucified emphasizes his broken body through the absence of scenery. Jesus' humanity is further foregrounded by the graphic detail of his dribbling blood. The verse that accompanies this image in Carpenter and Westley's catalog indicates that this image captures Jesus' final words and death:
By this point in the evening, the visual rhythm of the sliders would have conditioned the audience to expect at least two, if not three, more images. Such expectations would mean that this image is not the end of the story; instead, it functions as a pivotal turning point.When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. (John 19:30)
The halo that wreaths Christ's head in the moment of his death is repeated in the blinding radiance of
Though not explicitly identified as an angel, the light emanating from him (and the added wings) in this visual representation parallel the appearance of Gabriel in the annunciation. The discrepancy between scripture and the image may have been an engraver's error, for he may have engraved an image of a man sitting on the right side, but the image was reversed when printed. This mistake could also be due to the way the glass was inserted within the wooden frame....a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment... (Mark 16:5)
Without scenery, Christ's body becomes the focal point for the audience and the figures on screen. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary gaze at the wounds in Christs feet, side, and hands, inviting the audience to adopt a similar posture of wonder and worship.
The blinding radiance of the image of the Disciples at Emmaus echoes the bright composition of the opening image of the gospel sequence. The earthenware jug and the food on the table indicate a more domestic scene, creating a parallel between the altar-like table in this image and Mary's prie dieu in the Annunciation. The billowing clouds in this image conflate Christ's appearance to the disciples at Emmaus and his Ascension on the mount of Olives. As part of a missional magic lantern show, it would appropriate to end with the Great Commission, in which Jesus commands
Quoting this passage would not only foreground the presence of the missionary who followed this command, but it also brings Christ into the space of the audience through the missionary's voice. By restating the Great Commission aloud, the missionary momentarily embodies Jesus in order to simulate for the audience the disciple's experience of hearing Christ's command with the assumption that the audience would profess faith in Christ and share their newfound beliefs with others.Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. (Matthew 28:19-20)
When taken as a whole, the sequence privileges immersion, even as it remediates scripture. For Williams, this effect ultimately undermined Williams' beliefs, so much so that parts of his letter were excised when published.
Why is this page black?[1] A late Victorian New Testament in Samoan indicates that the metaphor of Christ as a bright light was preserved in translation. To what extent this metaphor carries with it the same connotations in Samoan as in English is unknown to me. -
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Media Archaeology
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Excavating Mediating Technologies
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2019-08-15T16:07:57+00:00
This dissertation reframes conversations about the screen’s technological history through its method as well as its content. Previous scholarship within film studies, which I will describe below, has used the term “archaeology” as a framework for exploring the material history of projection and the moving image. Over time, the scale of these “archaeologies of the cinema” has expanded from technologies that pre-date film to “archaeologies of the screen” that discuss the most recent developments in virtual reality and web-based screen experiences.[1] Paper-based technologies, including letters, advertisements, catalogs, and periodical literature, have played a supporting role in these histories by serving as records of the magic lantern’s manufacture, circulation, and use in lantern shows. This dissertation not only introduces new material into archaeologies of the screen but also develops a new method for approaching the mechanisms that have been foundational for these conversations. This dissertation performs what I characterize as an “archaeology of mediation” that focuses on magic lantern shows given by missionaries. I draw on conceptions of mediation as a function of form and as an embodied practice. In doing so, I argue that lanterns, slides, paper, and webpages are best understood as the material expression of embodied cultural practices. As an archaeology, the dissertation excavates the layers of mediation that accrue when nineteenth-century magic lantern shows are represented through projection equipment, letters, published accounts, and webpages. Excavating moments of mediation through materialities acknowledges the presence of local and indigenous people in magic lantern shows, thereby foregrounding the contributions they made to nineteenth-century screen experiences.
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 -
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How to Navigate This Dissertation
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Welcome to “Shining Lights”! This dissertation was written by Mary Borgo Ton for her Ph.D. in British Literature at Indiana University and was defended successfully as a fully digital project on August 16th, 2019. Please join the author in celebrating the generosity of private collectors, museums, and special collections who have provided material for this project by honoring the website's Terms of Use & Copyright.
Before you being your journey through the material, here is a quick tour of the website's key features.The Path
The blue buttons at the bottom of each page will guide you through the website’s content. This “path” offers a reading experience that mimics the progression of a dissertation in document form. Clicking the blue button at the bottom of the page will take you to the next section in the sequence. The grey buttons perform a similar function, but they jump to the next chapter.The Tool Bar
The toolbar at the top of the page contains a drop down menu with an outline of the dissertation’s content. To view the table of contents, press the button that looks like a bullet point list. If you’re looking for a specific page, click the magnifying glass, type the title of the page that you're looking for, and press enter. A window will appear with the results. To search the content of these pages, click “all fields & metadata” in the search pop up window.Citations
Citations of primary sources and scholarship appear as footnotes, Scalar notes, and hyperlinks.
Footnotes contain bibliographic information, brief summaries of scholarly sources, and short annotations. To make a footnote appear, click on the blue number at the end of this sentence.[1] To make it disappear, click anywhere on the screen. Footnotes also appear at the bottom of the page that they annotate.
Scalar notes provide additional visual material to accompany the text. To see one of Carpenter and Westley’s magic lantern slides, click the grey note. Scalar notes also contain longer annotations that are stored as separate pages, like this note on the serendipitous preservation of a letter.
Hyperlinks, which appear as blue text, connect to other pages in this website or on external sites. Clicking on the blue text will take you to these pages. To retrace your steps, click the “back” button on your browser. For external sites, you can also click “Return to Shining Lights” on the left hand side of the header at the top of the page.
Click the blue button at the bottom of the page to go to the introduction.[1] This is a sample footnote. - 1 media/000021_01edited.png media/000021_01edited.png 2018-08-21T18:47:14+00:00 Scripture Slider no. 8 3 Christ in infancy plain 2018-08-21T18:48:01+00:00 Placeholder text