Magic Lantern Stories

A new exhibit from La Cinémathèque Française explores the lost world of magic lantern shows. Take some time to explore it online. This manner of telling stories was superseded, on the one hand by film, which takes over this storytelling style, and on the other hand by slide shows, which took up the educational side. I can remember a small projector that would show a strip of images which could be advanced as a cassette story was read. There would be a “beep” sound when one was supposed to go on to the next image. The magic lantern was a predecessor to that kind of show, but the “magic” of the earlier shows had flowed into cinema. In my memory image strips were purely educational or religious.

Searching on Google Books I came across old advertisements for projectors (see image at right). Also there were extensive catalogs listing “lecture sets.” These would come with slides and also a “reading” that would accompany them. Looking at the sheer number of offerings, you get a sense of how big this lost world was.

One argument made by this exhibition is that the techniques we associate with film are everywhere in evidence in the magic lantern. An example of that is here in a 19th century equivalent to a music video for a religious song “The Holy City.” In a first image we see a woman reclining on a couch:

plate #2 of "The Holy City"

Next her world expands dramatically as we see a scene from “old Jerusalem”:

plate #3 of "The Holy City"

That’s the kind of mental projection that we are used to from film, but which is near impossible in theater. Grand things could happen in a magic lantern show. By the end of this particular series the woman will have see the heavenly Jerusalem as well.

There is so much to see in this online exhibit, but I want to come back to the notion of these magic lantern shows as analogous to music videos. From this page you can browse a list of popular or religious songs that have slides accompanying them. The format of music accompanied by images that form a narrative of some kind has proven to be very powerful. The combination of music, visual stimuli, and narrative seems to be exactly what we need to hold our attention. Listening to a song our mind is prone to wander, but with something to anchor our visual attention we are fully there. That might serve as a reminder that much of what appears brand new in technology has usually been around in some form or other for a long time. Whatever human need that gets met by technology was met in other ways in the past.. we just need to be creative in digging up past outlets for the imagination.