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A CINEMA IN MINIATURE
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Prior to the 20th century there were numerous economies of the moving image. They are well documented, zoetropes, magic lanterns and so on. Historians believe that they were simply precursors or prototypes of what we now commonly call "cinema". We think of sitting in the darkness of the theater as giant projected images wash over us.
In its classical form, cinema signifies the creation of an illusionistic world that exists apart from us, governed by its own temporal laws, its own spatial laws and above all oblivious to us. A great machine that effaces all traces of its own production. And if we are to enter into it, we must leave our corporeal selves behind. Capturing us in its glare, it holds us still and obliterates us in the dark. An experience perhaps most vividly expressed by Joseph Roth in his novel "Right and Left". I quote, "He prefered the cinema. He loved the innocent darkness of the auditorium, and the illuminated shadows of the protagonists. He loved the isolation in which each person sat, because everone seemed to be pressed upagainst the screen....They left their bodies - like coats in a cloakroom - on the seats."
But even today stubbornly refusing to give up the ghost are clues to another kind of cinema. |
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TOYS BECOME ACTORS IN THE GREAT DRAMA OF LIFE, SCALED DOWN INSIDE THE CAMERA OBSCURA OF THE CHILDISH BRAIN (1)
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Just as Walter Benjamin wrote that the history of dreams has yet to be written, so too does the history of the toy cinema.
We might begin where these two histories are introduced to each other by Proust. |
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"At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered. Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinnertime to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, its substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it has become quite endurable. Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, filled with an infamous design, issued from the little triangular forest which softened with dark green the slope of a hill, and advanced fitfully towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood dreaming, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their color without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the accompanying patter read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golos horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steeds, overcame every material obstacle everything that seemed to bar his way by taking it as an ossature and absorbing it into himself; even the doorknob on which, adapting themselves at once, his red cloak or his pale face, still as noble and as melancholy, floated invincibly would never betray the least concern at this transvertebration.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel such melancholy things." (2)
A solitary reverie in the flicker of an oil lamp lantern. A phenomena of a cinema of the bedroom that can only take place with a toy projector. It is important to notice that these ghosts who pass effortlessly through the billowing curtains invade the childs real room, transporting it in time and space. An economy radically different to that of classical cinema which creates the illusion of another reality into which the viewer can only enter imaginatively at the cost of effacing his own world. |
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AUTO-MAGIC PICTURE GUN AND THEATER
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| The toy cinema with its tiny unstable images is a world that a child enters into, perhaps in the same way that Benjamin describes the child's relationship with postage stamps, "Like Gulliver the child travels among the lands and peoples of his postage stamps. The geography and history of the Lilliputians, the whole science of the little nation with all its figures and names, is instilled in him in his sleep." (3) |
| The very name: |
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Benjamin tells us that this journey begun in the bedroom continues in dream; the missing frames are filled in, in the minds eye. As though the tiny flare of the flashlight bulb leaves a residue of afterimages.
(1) Baudelaire, Charles. "The Philosophy of Toys" Essays on Dolls (trans.) Idris Parry and Paul Keegan. London: Syrens, 1994 p16
(2) Proust, Marcel. Swanns Way, In Search of Lost Time Volume I (trans) C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Modern Library Paperback 1998
(3) Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street and Other Writing (trans.) Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso 1979 p.94 |