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OR THE PARLOR PHANTASMAGORIA |
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the phantoms came out to greet him. |
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| The legendary phantasmagorias of the end of the 18th century opened the cinematic spectacle up to the third dimension that permitted apparitions to coexist in our own world, with a power that has rarely been witnessed since. Etienne Gaspard-Robertson projected specters onto smoke rising from braziers. The images came from moving magic lanterns and the spiraling smoke gave a goulish kind of life to those figures who had died in the French Revolution such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre. The climax of the performance was the projection of a skeleton, "The fate that awaits us all". Audiences were terrified. | ||
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| Today we think of virtual reality as a kind of hi-tech computer simulation of recent origin. Yet its roots go back two hundred years to these extraordinary spectacles which opened up new dimensions where human beings and illusionary beings could mingle in the same space. Soon Ghost Shows became all the rage where live actors interacted with lantern projections thrown onto the stage. The only special hardware requirement being a large sheet of plate glass. | ||
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| Position of image in a plane mirror. Let a candle be placed exactly as far in front of a pane of window glass as a bottle full of water is behind it, both objects being on a perpendicular drawn through the glass. The candle will appear to be burning inside the water. This experiment explains a large number of familiar optical illusions, such as "the figure suspended in midair", "bust of a person without a trunk", "stage ghost" etc. In the last case the illusion is produced by causing the audience to look at the actors obliquely through a sheet of very clear plate glass, the edges of which are concealed by draperies. Images of strongly illuminated figures appear to the audience to be in the midst of the actors. (1) | ||
| You see, you too can try it at home and by the middle of the 19th century middle class Victorians began purchasing magic lanterns and books like "The Magic Lantern: How to Buy and How to Use it" by "A Mere Phantom" (1866) showed everyone how to make their own "Parlor or Drawing-Room Phantasmagoria." Though Ghost Shows died out the with coming of cinema, the indefatigable English inventor Theodore Brown brought them back with his all new improved version, the Kinoplastikon in 1913. Again this apparatus was based on the principle of reflected projection only substituting motion pictures for the old lantern slides. It was an invention at once too early and too late. The entertainment consisted of moving life size virtual figures interacting with real ones in 3D space in tableau based on academic oil paintings such as "The Voice of her Mother" and " Spirit of the Lake", in a form of a holographic style illusionism that is still the subject of science fiction. Subsequently the spectral actors performed alone on a real stage. By all accounts the effect was astonishing, "Never before had I witnessed such a moving picture spectacle. It was practically the illusion of life, remarkable and astonishing, almost uncanny in its realness. If the inventor can present picture plays in such a manor then his fortune is made and other projection systems will be rendered obsolete. This Kinoplastikon will revolutionize cinematography and undoubtedly is the most important improvement yet applied to motion pictures." (2) Well as you know, Theodore Browns invention did not revolutionize cinematography perhaps because as Ive said it was both too early and too late. It harked back to the Ghost Shows of the previous century and to the very earliest Edison films which showed Vaudeville actors performing their routines against a black background from a fixed camera position. By 1913 these were most definitely old hat. The Kinoplastikon was the last gasp of what Noël Burch has termed the great Frankensteinian dream of the 19th century; the recreation of life, the symbolic triumph over death. A dream of total representation that was in its essence a spiritualist fantasy. Indeed it was simply the mechanization the production of phenomena that materializing mediums had been creating for some time. By 1913 cinematic representation had taken a completely different direction. Instead of integrating illusions within the real world, directors used editing and the moving camera to create a whole other fictional space, that depending on a knowledge of film as a language. These two forms of representation, classical cinema and the ghost show are in direct contradiction. In cinema the viewer is presented with a kind of "God's eye view" of a fictional world. In order to attain this they much give up their own embodied perspective. Which in the ghost show, interactivity and embodiment are primary, for the pleasure of the spectacle depends precisely on the fact that the projected phantoms come to us, they coexist with real space. Perhaps this extraordinary coexistence was simply more believable to a 19th century audience, they were closer to the spirit world, more attuned to the marvelous. It is important to remember that both classical cinema and the ghost show share the same technology, the projection apparatus. It is not technology that drives art, the "forces of progress" acting like some sort of runaway train, but it is equally driven by our unconscious wishes and desires, how we think through the apparatus. Yet somehow I believe that these ghost shows may yet be harbingers of virtual realities to come. The closest contemporary equivalent I have experience is Gary Hills "Tall Ships" (1992) an interactive video installation in which life size black and white projections of people walk towards us out of the darkness, yet as soon as we approach them, they turn and retreat once more into the void. Philosophically, the parlor phantasmagoria was a particularly rich toy for, as Terry Castle has pointed out "it concealed a profound epistemological confusion. The confusion derived from the ambiguous notion of the ghost. What did it mean to see a ghost? Were ghost themselves real or illusory? Inside the mind or outside it ?". Actual phantasmagoric spectacles, had enforced on its audience a peculiar kind of split consciousness on exactly this point. Promoters like Robertson prefaced their shows with popular rationalist arguments: real specters did not exist, they said; supposed apparitions were merely "leffect bizarre de limagination ". Nonetheless, the phantoms they subsequently produced has a strangely objective presence. They floated before the eye just like real ghosts. And in a crazy way they were real ghosts. That is to say, they were not mere effects of imagination; they were indisputably there; one saw them as clearly as any other object of sense. The subliminal power of the phantasmagoria lay in the fact that it induced in the spectator a kind of maddening, irrational perception; one might believe ghosts to be illusions, present in the minds eye alone, but one experienced them here as real entities, existing outside the boundary of the psyche. The effect was unsettling like seeing a real ghost" (3) |
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| As the 19th century continued the rationalists and demystifiers argued that ghosts as physical entities do not exist, they are nothing but mental images or projections.
In 1866 J.H Brown of Brighton published the above book with the sole purpose of debunking spiritualist claims and proving that ghosts were in fact nothing more than afterimages. "It is a curious fact that, in this age of scientific research, the absurd follies of spiritualism should find an increase of supporters; but mental epidemics seem at certain seasons to affect our minds, and one of the oldest of these moral afflictions - witchcraft - is once more prevalent in this nineteenth century, under the contemptible forms of spirit-rapping and table-turning. the modern professor of these impostures, like his predecessors in all such disreputable arts, is bent only on raising the contents of the pockets of the most gullible portion of humanity, and not the spirits of the departed, over which, as he well knows, notwithstanding his profane assumption, he can have no power". To prove his point, Mr. Brown provides sixteen leaves of plates containing pictures of specters in both black and white and color. The observer is requested to stare at the drawings for a quarter of a minute and then turn their eyes to a blank wall, "the spectre will soon begin to make its appearance, increasing in intensity then gradually vanishing". You can print out the pictures below and try it for yourself. For those who wish to be overwhelmed by monstrous afterimages, "the spectres may be easily made to appear life sized - or colossal, by having the plate nearer the eye while receiving the impression, and by increasing the distance between the observer and the surface against which they are seen." (4) Yet however coolly scientific Mr. Brown purports to be, he nevertheless admits to the blurring of the boundaries between the purely physiological and the psychological production of phenomena. He notes that, "All the senses are more or less subject to deception, but the eye is preeminently so; especially in the case of individuals who are in ill health, because the sensibility of the retina is then generally much exalted as is the imagination: See HYPNOGOGIC CINEMA |
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Yet again the operator of the parlor phantasmagoria and whoever wished to stare and Mr. Brown's spectral images for long enough was transformed into both the magician and the deceived. See: |
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| Describing "Ghosts of the minds eye or Phantasma" in his philosophical dialog "The Philosophy of Mystery", Walter Cooper Denny, senior surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Children, concluded that a ghost was, "nothing more than an intense idea" and that seeing a phantom was "an act of thinking". Once again mental projection. See: HYPNOGOGIC CINEMA | ||
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| At the same time as families were making their own Phantasmagorias another type of parlor cinematic spectacle became popular, the séance, which when exceptionally successful could result in a full body materialization of a deceased person!
Some people will simply dismiss these accounts as pure hocus pocus which fall into the realm of conjuring and thus into the above category of ghost show. And yet there were many that believed they were in the presence of a completely different type of phenomena. Obviously at this distance the "truth" of these séances can never be objectively established. What is interesting is the construction through desire of a whole different spectacular construction, founded yet again on the presence of absence. Ill end with a quote from the 19th century medium Elisabeth dEspérance from her book, whose title alone is so fantastically cinematic, "Shadow Land or Light from the other Side". Here she describes what it felt like to produce a phantom, "The stronger and livelier she became the less inclination I had to think or reason, but the power of feeling became intensified to a painful extent; I do not mean in the physical sense, but the mental, my brain became a sort of whispering gallery where the thoughts of other persons resolved themselves into an embodied form and resounded as though actual substantial objects." |
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| Leila as she appeared partially and fully materialized by the medium Elizabeth d'Esperance on 13 March 1890. Photographed by magnesium light. | ||
| (1) Graham, Frank B.S.,M.S.,M.E.,E.E. Audels New Electric Library Vol IX New York: Theo. Audel &Co.1931 (2) John Cher writing for the Bioscope 20 March 1913 quoted in Stephen Herbert Theodore Browns Magic Pictures: The Art and Inventions of a Multimedia Pioneer London: The Projection Box, 1997 p.82. This book is an incredible, fully illustrated account of Theodores unending inventiveness. Email s-herbert@easynet.co.uk (3) Castle, Terry "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie" Critical Inquiry 15 Autumn 1988 pp.49-50 (4)Brown, J.H. Spectropia or Surprising spectra illusions: showing ghosts everywhere, and of any color London, Griffith and Farran, 1866 (5) Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago Press 1989. p.222 |