In this episode, we visit the year 1659 to explore "a small invention with big implications" for the future of cinema. Guest expert Dr. Jeremy Brooker, chair of the Magic Lantern Society, explains the history and purpose of magic lanterns and their influence on early filmmakers. Film historian Ian Christie also shares a short introduction to the history of English Music Hall performance and its influence on film comedy.
What did people watch before movies?
In our modern lives, I think it’s deceptively easy to get into a mindset of imagining our ancestors just patiently waiting for someone to invent cinema so they’d have something to entertain themselves.
But, in reality we know that humans have been seeking out ways to entertain themselves since the first cave dweller figured out how to make his friends and family laugh at shadows on the cave wall. When cinema arrived in 1895, it was just the latest in a long line of entertainment options we’ve created to keep ourselves amused on this little planet of ours.
The story of film comedy is about invention and evolution. Cinema itself is an amalgamation of new technologies and older repurposed inventions. It is both technology and art working in partnership.
Comedy is the same way in that there are many branches on comedy’s family tree before we get to the particular descendant we call film comedy.
So, in the spirit of providing context to the history of film comedy, every so often we may venture off the main timeline to go back and look at some of these technologies and art forms that paved the way for the movies that make us laugh today. And that’s why this episode finds us dropping into the middle of the 17th century, about two-and-a-half centuries before the Lumière brothers first recorded their comedy film L’Arroseur arrosé.
Some links of interest from this episode:
Guest Links:
Jeremy Brooker: magic lantern performance and research website
Ian Christie: website - Twitter
Films Referenced in This Episode: (Links can be found on the Movie Listings page)
Chaplin (dir. Richard Attenborough) - 1992.
The Countryman and the Cinematograph (dir. Robert W. Paul) - 1901.
La Lanterne magique (dir. Georges Méliès) - 1903.
A Night in the Show (dir. Charles Chaplin) - 1915.
The Omen (dir. Richard Donner) - 1976.
Rough Sea at Dover (dir. Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul) - 1895.
Books Referenced in This Episode: (Links can be found on the Resources page)
Christie, Ian. Robert W. Paul and the Origins of British Cinema.
Other Resources and Links of Interest Mentioned in This Episode:
The Magic Lantern Society: website - Twitter
How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo (magic lantern performance created by The Great Snazelle) - YouTube
Wikipedia articles: Christiaan Huygens - Loie Fuller - Restoration Theatre
Magic Lantern Society article on The Great Snazelle (pdf)
Episode Sponsor - Offbeat Agent
Episode Credits -
Shane Rhyne, host and writer: Website - Bandcamp - Twitter - Facebook
Saint Thomas LeDoux, theme music composer: Bandcamp - Instagram
Kyle Tollett, audio editing and engineering.
Tamara Rhyne, media/communications: Twitter - Facebook
Andy Forrester, logo design: Website
additional music in this episode by Pontus Tidemand: Website/License
ACTING FUNNY
Season 01 - Episode 03 - "What Are Magic Lanterns? (1659)"
Featured Film: None
[MUSIC begins: Acting Funny theme music]
SHANE RHYNE:
Welcome to Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy films seriously. I’m your host, Shane Rhyne- a standup comedian, voice actor, and movie lover.
I’m hoping to see what I can learn about the 125-year history of film comedy, one year at a time, with the help of experts from around the world. Each episode of Acting Funny focuses on a single year where I’ll spotlight one film from that year to see what I can learn about the movies and people who make us laugh.
And, I’m inviting you to join me as I learn from scholars, comedians, filmmakers and experts on a variety of topics. I hope together we’ll learn more about comedy, films, and ourselves.
Today, Acting Funny is going to the movies in the year 1659.
[MUSIC ends: Acting Funny theme music]
SHANE:
Wait a minute. Hold up. Did I just say 1659?
Yes, indeed, I did.
I assure you there is nothing wrong with the Acting Funny flux capacitor. We’re still on course to explore the history of comedy films from 1895 to the present day, but I thought we needed a slight detour to put some of this first season in a better context.
And so, in the spirit of modern Hollywood, we’re interrupting our normal timeline to have what I’m calling a prequel episode. It’s a little different this time. We’re not discussing a specific film in this episode, because, well, 1659.
But, I do have a pair of amazing guest experts to help me learn about two interesting and important topics. Dr. Jeremy Brooker, an independent researcher and chair of the Magic Lantern Society, is going to help me learn how a young Dutch scientist in 1659 almost threw away his invention that helped pave the way for modern film making.
In our second segment, I’ll share an excerpt from a conversation with British film historian Ian Christie about a form of entertainment with roots dating back to the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660.
Before we can get back to the movies, we need to explore magic lanterns and music halls. And that’s what we’re going to do, right after a musical message from this episode’s sponsor.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE: OFFBEAT AGENT]
SHANE:
Today’s episode is sponsored by Offbeat Agent. The Offbeat Agent is Matt Ward, a comedian and real estate agent in Ohio. Buying or selling a home can be stressful, having someone who can keep you smiling through the process can be invaluable. Follow him on Instagram at offbeatagent. That’s offbeatagent at Instagram to learn more about Matt Ward and how he can help you buy or sell your next home in Ohio. He’s totally not a douche.
[MUSIC begins: Offbeat Agent jingle]
[MUSIC ends: Offbeat Agent jingle]
SHANE:
What did people watch before movies?
In our modern lives, I think it’s deceptively easy to get into a mindset of imagining our ancestors just patiently waiting for someone to invent cinema so they’d have something to entertain themselves.
But, in reality we know that humans have been seeking out ways to entertain themselves since the first cave dweller figured out how to make his friends and family laugh at shadows on the cave wall. When cinema arrived in 1895, it was just the latest in a long line of entertainment options we’ve created to keep ourselves amused on this little planet of ours.
The story of film comedy is about invention and evolution. Cinema itself is an amalgamation of new technologies and older repurposed inventions. It is both technology and art working in partnership.
Comedy is the same way in that there are many branches on comedy’s family tree before we get to the particular descendant we call film comedy.
So, in the spirit of providing context to the history of film comedy, every so often we may venture off the main timeline to go back and look at some of these technologies and art forms that paved the way for the movies that make us laugh today. And that’s why this episode finds us dropping into the middle of the 17th century, about two-and-a-half centuries before the Lumière brothers first recorded their comedy film L’Arroseur arrosé.
So, let me just cue up a little theme appropriate mood music…
[MUSIC begins: Harpsichord music]
If you’ve ever sat through a seemingly eternal PowerPoint presentation at work or school or in some civic meeting, you’ve likely entertained a thought that you’d sure love to meet the guy who invented PowerPoint and share a few choice words with him.
Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am going to introduce you to that man in this episode. The bad news for you is that he has been dead for about 325 years and is quite immune to any of your choicest words.
His name is Christiaan Hugyens and, no, he did not invent PowerPoint itself, but he did invent the base technology that PowerPoint is built upon and if you witnessed a presentation using one of his so-called magic lanterns in the 17th century or later, you’d recognize a presentation technology still in use in the 21st century.
Humans first figured out how to control fire about a million years ago. Very likely a few hours after that, humans began trying to figure out how to manipulate light and shadows to project images on their cave walls to entertain and educate each other. Thus began a long tradition of entertainment and education across several millennia through hand shadows, shadow puppets, and also techniques using light projected through pinholes known as camera obscura.
Mostly though, these techniques were limited by the brightness of the light source, which usually meant the intended audience would be quite small. There were also problems of course with image sharpness and focus (for instance camera obscura images are projected upside down).
Because of the camera obscura, the concept of a magic lantern is not unknown to our ancestors in the 17th century, but it will take our new friend Christiaan Huygens to introduce the concept of lenses to make the magic lantern a truly useful device for projecting better images onto a wall.
And, his improvements on the concept would set the stage for the next evolutions of the technology, as light sources improved from regular flame to limelight in the 18th century to electricity in the late 19th century, toward movie projectors, slide projectors, and, yes, even the concept of PowerPoint in our era.
Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern was no one-off success. It was part of an amazing streak of creativity and genius that he’d been on in his late twenties.
I mean, take a look at what he was up to in the few years leading up to 1659.
In 1655, at the age of 26, he and his brother Constantijn began grinding lenses to make new and improved telescopes. This would prove quite helpful that same year when he became the first person to identify that the rings of Saturn were separate from the planet itself. In the same year, he also discovered Saturn’s moon Titan and was the first person to observe and make sketches of the Orion nebula. So, that was a pretty good year. When I was 26, I was following the daily plot developments of the OJ Simpson trial. So, we were putting our time to different uses.
Speaking of time, in 1656, at the age of 27, Huygens invented the pendulum clock. No big deal, it would only be the most accurate way of measuring time for the next three centuries until we learned how to crack open atoms.
It was also in this year that he completed work on formulating the laws of elasticity.
In 1657, at the age of 28, he wrote the first treatise on probability theory.
In 1659, at the age of 30, he developed the formulas for measuring both centripetal and centrifugal force.
And, in that same year at the age of thirty, he invented the magic lantern by combining lenses with a rudimentary light projector. In the mind of Huygens, this particular invention was nothing much more than a curiosity, a literal throwaway idea that he first considered not telling anyone about at all. But, for all of us movie fans in the future, it was much more important than a mere novelty.
The magic lantern has already made a few cameo appearances in the first two episodes of this podcast. In our 1895 episode, Martin Barnier of the University Lumière-Lyon 2 told us that the Lumière brothers were aware of other inventors who had been trying to figure out how to use the concepts of a magic lantern to project moving film images.
And in our second episode exploring the world of Georges Méliès, Dr. Matthew Solomon from the University of Michigan showed us that magic lantern shows were a technology very familiar to theater managers such as Méliès in his development of sketch-based magic performances.
Méliès even wrote and produced a film in 1903 called La Lanterne magique (or as you’ve likely guessed in English, The Magic Lantern) in which the magic lantern’s images take on a new life of their own as we watch via the magic of film.
And, the magic lantern plays an important part in the lives of our 1897 and 1898 featured personalities. So, I thought it would be a good time to learn more about how the magic lantern came to be and how it played such an influential role in the lives of all of these characters from our 19th century explorations.
Fortunately, I found the perfect person to teach me about magic lanterns. His name is Dr. Jeremy Brooker, a kind and patient gentleman, who is an independent researcher on the history of magic lanterns. He also currently serves as the chair of the Magic Lantern Society, an international organization based in the UK with membership of scholars, collectors, active magic lantern artists, and general enthusiasts for the history of magic lanterns.
Dr. Brooker himself is a magic lanternist, performing magic lantern entertainments, primarily based around musical performances, using original glass slides and equipment from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries alongside modern slides of his own creation.
He has performed at museums, festivals, and theaters throughout Europe, at academic conferences in the United States and Great Britain, and has developed slide sequences for use on television for a BBC children’s drama, Station Jim, and a BBC documentary on pioneer filmmaker Robert Paul and author H.G. Wells.
I interviewed Dr. Brooker remotely from his home in Great Britain.
[MUSIC ends: Harpsichord music]
JEREMY BROOKER:
Hi, Shane. My name is Jeremy Brooker. I’m from England and I’m a magic lantern performer and the chair of the Magic Lantern Society and researcher, but most of all, a performer.
SHANE:
So people still perform magic lanterns? I was under the impression this was an old technology from the 17th century. People still do this?
JEREMY:
Yeah, we’ve got quite a lively society in the UK and there’s another society in the US doing pretty much the same thing. All kinds of people use this. Sometimes using old material, sometimes crazy new material. And there are artists involved, certainly in our society. We just had an award which was open to anybody to apply and all kinds of crazy ideas that people came forward with for this award.
SHANE:
Wonderful. I guess then let’s back up for just a minute and let me ask you the question, “What is a magic lantern?”
JEREMY:
I think the thing about magic lanterns is it’s basically very simple. I mean, it’s just a box with a light in it. You put something transparent in front of it with some lenses and you can make it very big. And so, it’s a small idea, but it has huge implications, because it meant that you could carry a show with you. You’d just need the lantern itself and then these very small pictures which you could blow up to an enormous size.
So, initially the size of the audience and the size of the auditorium was determined by the brightness of the light. And really, after the 1830s when they have really bright white lights they could use, then you could go anywhere. You could set up absolutely anywhere. You could create a whole theater environment, create a whole entertainment, without any kind of infrastructure at all, really.
SHANE:
So, if you had a magic lantern and you had some slides. What did you call them? Were they slides that you called them?
JEREMY:
Yeah, they’re called slides because they literally used to slide in front of the lens and slide out again.
SHANE:
Ok. So you would have those and you could just travel anywhere that had room for you to put up a show. Was that how it worked? Was it mostly itinerant performers running around?
JEREMY:
Yeah. I think really from the beginning it had this kind of dual identity because there were people doing kind of serious things with it. And there were people who were doing what you might call entertainment. And those kinds of parallel lines really carried on right through.
It was invented by people who were scientists. It was originally in cabinets of curiosities as something that demonstrated the principles of optics.
SHANE:
Ok.
JEREMY:
But, it always sat a little uncomfortably there because it’s not like a telescope or microscope. You can’t actually find out anything. You can tell somebody about something, but apart from this reflexive thing of saying, “This is how lenses work,” it didn’t go anywhere. People felt a little ambivalent about it from that point of view and they talked about how it could be an education medium. There was always that side of things, but very early on showmen realized you could make demons and jokes and all kinds of things.
SHANE:
Well that’s interesting. So, it started off basically as kind of a demonstration tool for scientists and then everybody else looked at the technology and said, “Oh, we think we know what we could do with this, also.”
Toy isn’t the right word, but an entertainment. It’s something we can use to make something creative with.
JEREMY:
Yeah. Again, the distinction is not as great as I made it sound.
SHANE:
Sure.
JEREMY:
The very first magic lantern that we know about was from this guy called Christiaan Huygens who was a Dutch polymath, he was a mathematician, astronomer. He invented the pendulum clock. One of these astounding figures. But he invented the magic lantern and he was a bit embarrassed about it.
We have these correspondences with his brother where he said, “Look, don’t make too much out of it, because it’s not something I’m very proud of.”
But we have from his sketchbook, we have the very first magic lantern slide we know about. And it was a skeleton. The actual slide doesn’t exist of course, but we have this drawing and you can see what was supposed to happen. You have a skeleton and he would lift his arm up to his head as if he was going to take his hat off. And he takes it away again and his head comes away at the same time. So, right at the beginning you’ve got this thing that’s great for jokes. Even in the hands of quite a serious scientist, the only thing he could really think to do with it was to make this really quite funny visual gag.
SHANE:
(laughs) So, almost, not quite, but almost animated? It’s not purely an animated cartoon, but by moving the slide you’re making the image change and move?
JEREMY:
Yes. Some slides work by substitution. You have something then [whooshing sound] something else appears very quickly. But, other slides have continuous movement of one sort or another. So, in that case it’s a levered piece of glass that rotates a partial circle so the arm can move and another one with the head.
SHANE:
Oh, ok.
JEREMY:
And then you move it. There are continuous movements. The interesting thing, I find, is that when people remember magic lantern slides they’ve seen, they remember there being more movement than there actually was. So, in a sense they come across as animation. I think you could make a good analogy with GIF animation where there’s not that much movement, but it’s enough to give the impression of a fully moving image.
SHANE:
That makes sense, because it does seem like technology kind of reinvents itself over time. The magic lantern, by comparing it to a GIF that makes a lot of sense to me. I think about early cinema and I think about the first YouTube videos and how similar they were to each other. They’re almost the same, shot for shot sometimes. It’s somebody playing with a hose, feeding their baby, or a train pulling into a station. And whenever a new technology comes around we seem to find a new way to do the same thing over and over again.
JEREMY:
That’s right. I think we tend to get a little bit hung up on technology. Well, actually, it’s more often about showmanship: what’s funny, what’s scary. And showmen tape into the same kind of primal instincts right along the way.
SHANE:
Speaking of what’s funny, what was a typical- let’s say we’re in the late 19th century, 1880s, 1890s- what does a typical magic lantern show look like? What’s going on there?
JEREMY:
Like all simple questions, there’s really not a simple answer.
SHANE:
(laughing) Sure.
JEREMY:
Because that’s a little bit like if you’d said, “Oh in the 1980s they had video cameras, what did people do with them?” And you could say, “Well, pretty much anything you can think of, and maybe some more as well.
So, in that period you’ve got people doing really quite boring lectures on church architecture with black-and-white slides, which must have been pretty excruciating at the time. You try to read the scripts now, they’re terrible. So at one extreme, you’ve got that.
You’ve got people in churches and even people giving sermons with magic lantern slides to liven up and really engage the audience on that side of things.
And then you’ve got entertainers. To mention two, there’s Loie Fuller. You may have come across a kind of archetype art nouveau. And she was an American dancer who went to Europe and had huge successes with these dances with these voluminous clothes, these serpentine dances. And she’d extend her arms so that she had this mass of fabric and then a projection onto her, so she became a living screen.
SHANE:
Wow.
JEREMY:
So, there’s quite experimental stuff going on. Then there’s a guy called The Great Snazelle and he was a real rather eccentric kind of guy. But he went around doing these performances-- he was a good singer. So, some of it he was singing. Just parlor songs with magic lantern slides illustrating the song. But then, he was also doing quite funny stories that he’d written. One of his famous ones is called “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo.” And it’s like a narrative with a load of slides. And a guy arrives in a pub and there’s nobody there and he says, “Where is everybody.” And they say, “Oh, they’re in the back room where Bill Adams is telling the story of how he won the Battle of Waterloo.” And he goes there and this guy tells this very tall tale about his role in the Battle of Waterloo. And it’s just a mad, crazy, funny story. And that’s how you do.
So, you can see even in that period, in just the 1890s there are an enormous range of people doing an enormous range of things.
SHANE:
So, at the beginning you described something that sounds very much like modern PowerPoint, just people using it to illustrate something they’re talking about. It could be entertaining, it could be very boring. Most likely to the boring side. But, it also has this entertainment--
Now, who was the second fellow you just mentioned? The Great-- what was that name?
JEREMY:
Snazelle. S-N-A-Z-E-L-L-E.
SHANE:
Ok.
JEREMY:
Snazelle.
SHANE:
I’ll have to look him up. I’ve not heard his name before.
JEREMY:
Yeah. Yeah. I did a bit of research on him myself at one time.
SHANE:
Well, one of the things I’ve been learning as I’ve been teaching myself about the history of comedy film is that magic lantern performances and performers have an influence on what we would now call cinema, the invention of cinema, along with magicians and other folks as well. What do you think are some of those influences that you’re aware of, how magic lantern influenced the performance of cinema in those early days.
JEREMY:
Another complex question.
SHANE:
Sure.
JEREMY:
The whole problem comes down to this thing where people look at magic lantern and say it’s a pre-cinema device. Because it is, if you think of a film projector with old fashioned celluloid film going through a gate and imitating movement and all that. It is essentially a magic lantern. It’s a light in a box with a transparent medium and a lens. So, yes, it is. But, it’s not like anything as simple as that.
And I can’t remember the last time I saw a film projected in that way. Even the smallest cinemas have digital projectors. It’s quite a rarity. You have to go out of your way to see a film showing.
So magic lantern and film kind of co-existed and interacted really right through until you started having Kodak carousel projectors and PowerPoint and all that. There’s a whole line of development which comes through magic lantern which is in parallel and completely independent of film.
So, to come back to answering your question, in that early period, let’s say from 1895-6 up until the first World War, that period. They didn’t make film projectors that didn’t also show magic lantern slides.
SHANE:
Oh! Ok.
JEREMY:
Just maybe towards the end of that period, that was just starting to happen. Because the films were very short. They often broke down. You needed something that you could keep on the screen. So a lot of the early projectors you read about, they’d say “If it all goes wrong, you turn it round so you can fiddle with this bit and the slide will automatically fit in front of the lens so that you’ve got something on the screen for them to look at while you sort out the problems.”
SHANE:
Oh that’s very clever. I like that idea.
JEREMY:
Yeah. That was absolutely standard. If you look at old projectors, you can find lots of them online, you can see they’ve got the single light source in the box- which moves, somehow or other moves. So you can be showing films, move it back and show lantern slides. It was very much a kind of integrated performance.
SHANE:
Interesting. I did not know that part about the dual role. It makes sense, though. The technology is roughly the same idea for both. It’s just what you’re putting through the lens, I guess.
So, who were some of the practitioners from that era that I should probably become or make myself more aware of. I’ve seen a few names. George Albert Smith, I believe was a magic lantern performer?
JEREMY:
Yes. Yes. Again, we come against that word “performer.” Because everybody used magic lanterns.
SHANE:
Sure. Ok.
JEREMY:
Muybridge was using magic lanterns in his lectures when he was demonstrating his zoopraxiscope. Méliès was a magic lanternist as well as obviously a pioneer film maker. They were all, they were the same people. They were using magic lanterns and using films, but for different purposes.
SHANE:
Ok. Well that makes sense to me. Well let’s talk a little bit about what your research has led you to. What have you found in your research of magic lanterns and particularly with comedy, I guess. What stands out to you? Another simple question with a hard answer, I’m sure.
JEREMY:
Well, I think there are probably two questions in there. One is what I do and the other is this whole notion of comedy. So, maybe I’ll take them separately.
SHANE:
Ok.
JEREMY:
My background is in music and music performance. So, most of my large scale performances have involved magicians in some kind of interactive way. One project I was working on recently was a Frankenstein phantasmagoria, which is a kind of ghost show. In the old days they used to have a glass harmonica as the accompaniment, which is something you’d have to look up. It’s glass bowls inside of each other on a spindle and you damp your fingers and you could play chords and some quite fast runs and it’s just an eerie sound. And it has it’s little flash in the late 18th century, Mozart, Beethoven, all sorts of surprising people wrote pieces for this weird instrument. And it was supposed to drive people mad. That was the idea, because it’s a very pure sound that was supposed to drive people to insanity.
But I found this guy who invented a musical instrument where he has wine glasses and they rotate on turntables. And he operates them on a computer and he brings these little leather “fingers” in which can touch onto these glass things. So, we created an entertainment.
Do you know what I mean? I like this kind of work. I work collaboratively with musicians to create something. So, that’s kind of my thing.
SHANE:
Sure.
JEREMY:
There’s not much particularly to do with what you’re saying which is this thing of comedy in magic lantern slides. I suppose at its simplest, there are some magic lantern slides that are just like GIF animation and are just funny. The most famous one is this picture of a bedroom and you know it’s night and there’s a cat outside and there’s a guy in bed with a big bushy beard. And you have what’s going to happen. A little rat appears and it goes up the counterpane towards his mouth. And then his mouth starts moving, you can see him snoring. And then eventually the mouse, or the rat, goes into his mouth. And you can keep repeating that cycle, going faster and faster and slower, and you can have the mouse coming out again, going back in again.
It’s a performative thing. You can add sound effects. You can have music. Maybe you can even have a dialogue. I’m not quite sure what it would be. But it’s a visual joke. And I think one of the things that interests me about it is that if it’s funny- which I think it is- it’s as funny now as it was then in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason. It doesn’t involve some special knowledge about some piece of equipment or something that people don’t wear anymore. It’s something which is very immediate and very funny. It works perfectly with any audience anywhere I’ve ever used it.
There the humor, I guess, is the expectation that you’re in on the fact that he’s about to swallow a rat and he’s asleep and he doesn’t know. I guess it’s some uncomfortable sort of humor there. And then other magic lantern slides, it’s more a kind of surprise. You’re sitting there. There’s a guy sitting at a table, you’re not sure what’s going to happen, and suddenly the piece of meat he’s about to eat comes alive and starts attacking him with a knife and fork. Certainly a surreal sort of humor, but again if it’s funny, it’s probably funny as it ever was. There are two different kinds of jokes, but they’re the same in that it’s something that’s done, that you can do in a different way, but it’s essentially always the same.
You can never tell how somebody uses stuff. It’s not like film where you turn it on, it runs through, and it stops. It’s a performative medium. It’s going to be different every time for a different audience. Some people just laugh at things and you’re not quite sure why, you know? And it’s something that’s in their head. Or you see a particular performer doing something in kind of a funny way and you say, “Actually that was really funny. I’ve never really picked up on that before.”
SHANE:
That’s interesting because that’s a lot like stand-up comedy, I think, in a way. You can tell a joke to different audiences and they’ll in different ways. Sometimes I’ll have a moment where I’ll just throw away a line which is really meant to just get me from one joke to the other and that’s where people laugh. And I’m always like, “Well that wasn’t meant to be the funny part.” And then I learn, well, if I do it this way, then it is the funny part and adapt from there.
It’s interesting then that as a magic lanternist you’re also reacting on the fly to the audience reaction as well, which is something cinema can’t do, but certainly magic lantern allows you the opportunity to improvise as you go.
JEREMY:
Yes. Yes. I think that’s right. I suppose that’s the thing about being an experienced performer, is that you can not just be doing your thing, you can be reading the room. That’s the same in music or any performative medium. It’s the same, but different, like jazz, you can write something fixed and something free. In music improvisation you need a kind of framework, some sort of reference, but at the same time you can’t just prepare a performance which is always going to work in every situation.
SHANE:
You mentioned something a moment ago about surreal humor and it struck a thought in me about another conversation I’ve been having about early cinema. There’s the mythology behind early cinema in that it was frightening to people to see these images moving, but it seems to me that if the audience was familiar already with magic lanterns- which it seems they would be- that the idea of a moving image shouldn’t have been that startling to them. It may be just the quality of it was different, but it should be something that just frightened people to see a train coming into the station or something like that.
JEREMY:
No, I think you’re absolutely right. I think there are a lot of other examples, like phantasmagoria which are these kind of ghost shows around the late 18th century. They have pictures of people drawing swords as if they thought the spectres were real. And of course the famous story of the train coming out of the- people thought the train was going to come out of the screen and hit them. There are similar ones in the diorama where people are supposed to have fainted because of the realism of the illusion.
And I used to think it was just a showman’s hyperbole, because that’s the kind of thing you say. In the 1950s they used to-- in fact when The Omen was released they had nurses sitting in the foyer because it was so frightening that people might die or might collapse. I don’t think people did, but it was a bit of showmanship to create this kind of mythology.
But I think it’s something a bit more subtle than that. I think it’s the person writing about the experience, when it’s a completely new medium, when it’s something people haven’t experienced before, there’s almost guiding them in the way you’re supposed to feel or might be supposed to think about it.
It’s a quite subtle idea, but yes people had seen moving images, but the thing that people were impressed by were the trees moving in the background. They weren’t so impressed by what we think of as the foreground action. They were impressed by that kind of thing. So, one of the big hits of early cinema was R.W. Paul’s film of waves breaking on the beach at Dover. It’s not anything more than that. It’s just waves breaking, but people couldn’t believe - because there was a degree of realism. They had seen black-and-white. They had seen it in photography, but that movement was kind of magical.
SHANE:
Yeah. I’ve seen that film. Actually, I was just looking at it last night and it’s one of those where, me today, I’m looking at it and saying “What is the big deal about this? It’s waves crashing on the beach.” But for them, this was a new level of realism that they had not seen.
Someone could have easily written, “It was if I could feel the water splashing on my face.” Now he didn’t maybe actually believe the water was splashing on his face, but that would be what other people- what a writer might be trying to get across to other people who had not yet seen it.
JEREMY:
Well that’s right. I think again you have to see it in the context of its time because there are a lot of people who are just starting to do experimental things with photography. Night photography was quite a specialist’s area of work and filming boats moving very fast at sea or waves breaking, that kind of instantaneous photography. People were having to invent special sorts of cameras to catch that movement. People hardly got used to the idea that you could take a picture of a wave breaking, that you could catch that instant. And then suddenly it’s “Well not only that, but I can show you what happens next.” I think it was appreciated on that level. Rather than people thought they were going to get their feet wet.
SHANE:
Yes-
JEREMY:
I don’t think anybody did.
SHANE:
Yeah, that’s the thing. Whenever I see these stories of people in fear and panic of a train on the screen I always felt like that had to be hyperbole because it just struck me that they know what they’re looking at to a degree. They may not have ever seen a motion picture before, but the concept was not like it was delivered from aliens from outer space. They knew what was happening. They knew this technology was evolving.
JEREMY:
Yeah. I think we often make an assumption that people were naive in the past, that people were less educated than people are now. And it’s true in the sense that we’ve seen things they didn’t see that they would be amazed by. But, when you come across something new and you see it for the first time, there’s the moment when you think “Wow! That’s amazing.” And you’re just in the moment, you’re completely overawed by it. But, quite quickly you move past that and start thinking, “Oh. I wonder how they do that. Oh, I see. I wonder whether…”
And you’re instantly thinking behind the scenes and I don’t think people have ever been any different.
SHANE:
Sure. I think it’s interesting because R.W. Paul, who we mentioned a little earlier, even makes a film about that around the turn of the century, The Countryman at the Cinema, where it’s kind of making fun of that whole idea. Where the countryman sees the train coming and panics, but we’re meant to laugh at this story that has already been widely circulated for five or six years that they’re in on the joke. They’re making this movie. They’re in on the joke of this. No one really believed it. Only this rube countryman would actually be afraid of the train coming through the cinema.
JEREMY:
Yes. I think the joke is that country people are a bit stupid, rather than that anyone would think that films would come to life.
But there is the kind of Pygmalion myth, isn’t there? That thing where you create an artwork which comes to life because you’ve made such a realistic thing. That kind of mythos was very prevalent around that period, around 1900 in a lot of different media, often cinema.
SHANE:
I want to thank you very much for teaching me something today. It has been eye opening for me to learn about your thoughts on the magic lantern and the roles of what the lanternists did, and the technology and how it blends into what I think someone called “the constellation of cinema.” It’s not just one invention of the camera and the projector. There’s all these other pieces of the puzzle that go into making what we would now call cinema. It’s no one single invention. It’s no one single person. It’s all these little pieces- magic lanterns and magicians, vaudeville and British music halls, and all these other aspects of it that have to all come together at the right time and I appreciate you taking your time with me to talk about this piece of it.
JEREMY:
Thank you very much for having me.
SHANE:
I want to thank Dr. Jeremy Brooker for taking the time to teach me about magic lanterns today. You’ll find links to Dr. Brooker’s website, with information about his performances and research, in the show notes. I’ve also included links to the Magic Lantern Society and links of interest regarding some of the people we discussed in our conversation, including a YouTube video of a recreation of the Magic Lantern comedy performance of How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo. You can find the show notes in the episodes section of the podcast website at actingfunnypodcast.com.
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SHANE:
The magic lantern is crucial to the development of technologies that will allow for film to be projected to audiences in the 1890s. And, as the lanterns themselves become more complicated with two, three, or even four lenses, the ability of the operator to add levels of complexity to their performances and storytelling increases, introducing ideas in magic lantern performances that will eventually become a part of the cinematic language such as dissolves, substitutions or jump cuts, and more.
In upcoming episodes, we’ll meet filmmakers who relied heavily on their experience with magic lanterns as they explored the potential of film.
Film comedy relies on more than just technological advances to exist. There must also, naturally, be comedy. And just as the magic lantern’s fingerprints are all over Victorian-era cinema, there is a particular style of comedy performance that leaves its mark on film comedy as well.
Like the magic lantern, the English music hall’s influence on film comedy extends well into the early 20th century. And like the magic lantern, the English music hall owes its existence in part to events of the mid-17th century.
In 1660, just a year after Christiaan Huygens invented the magic lantern in the Netherlands, a ship set sail from that same country bound for Dover, England. It’s primary passenger was a man just about the same age as Huygens. His name was Charles II, and he was returning from exile to reclaim his title as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The Restoration would bring about many changes to the politics and culture of Great Britain, but we’re going to focus on one specific thing: live theater. During the rule of Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived republic dictatorship, live theatrical performances had been banned in England. Cromwell was a Puritan and live theater, among many other enjoyable activities, was not something the Puritans encouraged.
With the return of a crown to the throne also came the return of live theater, but with a catch. Theaters had to be licensed by the King in order to perform drama. And plays to be presented were subject to approval by and censorship from the royal offices.
It’s worth noting here that this licensing applied strictly to dramatic performances. So, if a theater were hoping to produce a live performance of say, Shakespeare’s King Lear, then it would need to be performed at a properly licensed theater.
There is, as you have no doubt noticed a giant loophole that you could throw a creme pie through: comedy.
Comedy remained largely untouched by these licensing laws for a variety of reasons and comedy traditions began to evolve and thrive in Britain, including holiday pantomimes or pantos which were themselves an evolution of Italian Renaissance era street performances. By the late 18th century and early 19th century, one particular form of entertainment began to take hold- a catch-all variety program of music, dance, comedy, and more. Over time it became known as English music hall and it is a tradition that carried forward into the mid-20th century.
We’ll dive deeper into the history of the music hall in future episodes, but I wanted to share an excerpt of an interview I had with film historian Ian Christie in which we briefly discussed the music hall’s history.
Ian Christie is a fellow of the British Academy, a film historian and professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, the University of London. He is also a presenter on film history on the BBC and is the author of several books on film, including Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema.
We’ll hear the longer interview with Ian Christie about Robert Paul in our 1898 episode. I spoke with Ian remotely from his home in London.
[Music ends: Harpsichord music]
SHANE:
You’ve mentioned it a couple of times- the English music hall- and can you explain to me- I know what American vaudeville is, I assume music hall is close. But can you explain to me what is the English music hall?
IAN CHRISTIE:
Well, in Britain we always say it’s like American vaudeville.
IAN & SHANE:
(laugh)
IAN:
But, I think that’s probably not true. It’s just the nearest kind of equivalent. So, the music hall tradition goes back into the early 19th century really. It’s kind of the product of that there was a strange licensing system in Britain. The theater was kept under very tight control, actually by Lord Chamberlain who could censor plays. Theaters had to be licensed and only licensed theaters were allowed to present spoken drama.
So, in a way the music hall grows up out of a desire to have live stage entertainment without breaking the rules and those rules are comparatively strict in the early days. If you haven’t got a license you have to be presenting a show which is not spoken drama.
So, big emphasis on comedy, songs, dancing, burlesques, ballets. If you look at a musical program from, let’s say, the middle of the late 19th century you’d see about 50 items on the program. And the program itself would roll on for about four or five hours and the audience would come and go during it.
And these music hall theaters were very vertical. They would have maybe five or six different levels. And of course the top was the cheapest one and the bottom one was the most expensive. And they all had huge bars and drinking alcohol was a big big part of going to the music hall.
In fact, there’s a wonderful story about the Empire Music Hall which is the one where the Lumière brothers kicked off in London. The bar, the main bar of the Empire Music Hall, was a notorious pick-up joint. Basically it’s where bright young men, or not-so-bright young men, would head off in search of a lady companion for the evening. It was a well-known fact. There was a huge trade in prostitution at this time. In fact, there’s a letter by a young Winston Churchill no less, the future prime minister, to his mother saying that, “We, the young men of the Empire, tore down the barriers that were trying to prevent us from actually enjoying our normal pastime.”
SHANE:
(laughs)
IAN:
He was one of those young men who was in there for a good time!
SHANE:
Alright.
IAN:
Perhaps the most famous music hall star of all- he’s famous because we know his later career was Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin started his career in the music hall. He was part of a troupe called, what was it, The Seven, or Eight, Lancashire Lads. And he was ten, eleven, or twelve at the time, and they would do a clog dance. They were dancing in wooden clogs. And then he graduated to comedy routines, solo comedy routines.
His most famous one, which is Richard Attenborough’s wonderful biography of Chaplin, the film biography was done in one of these music halls. It shows him as a drunken member of the audience. It’s a great, great scene because there he is all dressed up in his top hat. He’s in a side box beside the stage and he is interrupting the master of ceremonies on the stage. And the more interrupting he does, the drunker he gets, and eventually he falls onto the stage.
SHANE:
(laughs)
IAN:
It’s fantastic. I mean, it must have been fantastic to see. And that’s the sort of background that Chaplin came out of, which he then put to work when he stepped in front of the camera in 1914.
SHANE:
Now when you say “no spoken drama” did that also mean no spoken comedy, or did they have to use pure pantomime, silent comedy or were they allowed to have speaking roles there?
IAN:
They did speak and they did sketches. I don’t know what the strict definition was, but the general idea was you could not perform a full-scale play.
SHANE:
So, you could do The Mummngbirds, but not King Lear. I got it.
IAN:
The music hall came out of a tradition of having to present something that’s not drama. Of course it’s not only that. It’s also presenting something that is generally popular and popular not just with uneducated audiences, with working class audiences, I mean there was a working class audience for the music hall for sure. But, there was also a middle class and an upper class audience for this kind of rough and ready humor.
And the great singers of the music, the people like Marie Lloyd and people like that, would sing really quite sophisticated and quite suggestive songs which were appreciated on many levels.
Harry Lauder, who was the great Scottish comedian, and who toured very extensively in America, as well. Harry Lauder who was a comic Scotsman all dressed up in tartan with a crooked stick. He was the highest paid music hall and vaudeville performer in the world in the early 20th century. And he was paid a fortune.
SHANE:
I want to thank Ian Christie for taking the time to teach me about English music halls today. You’ll find links to Ian’s website, with information about his research, in the show notes, as well as links to his book Robert Paul and the Birth of British Cinema. I’ve also included links to Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 film A Night in the Show, which is based on his famous music hall skit The Mummingbirds, as described by Ian in the interview and depicted in the film biography Chaplin.
You can find the show notes on the Acting Funny website at actingfunnypodcast.com/episodes and selecting the episode listing for today’s show entitled “What Are Magic Lanterns?”
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As I’m learning about the magic lantern, I realize it has things to teach me not only about the people who made the movies, but also the people who watched the movies, too.
As I discussed with Dr. Brooker, it’s sometimes a common assumption for us in the modern day that our ancestors did not understand the newest technology. But, that assumption requires us to forget that these technologies- such as moving pictures- were not completely new to our predecessors. They had familiarity with the technologies that came before, that paved the way for the new technologies.
Think forward for a moment to 100 years or so from now, sometime in the early-to-mid 22nd century. And imagine that someone is trying to teach himself or herself about podcasting’s early days in the 21st century. It might be quite easy for them to assume this new medium was confusing or alien to us, but that would require our 22nd century resident to forget that we here in this day and age had witnessed the evolution of radio over previous hundred years, and the evolution of the Internet over the past fifty years, and the evolution of social media over the past thirty years back to the origins of SixDegrees.com in the 1990s. They would have to take into account our familiarity with how computers and smartphones evolved and the development of bridging technologies such as iPods and mp3 players.
And when they look at all of those things together, they might begin to realize that podcasting was not something that just appeared out of nowhere, but was instead a logical progression of mankind’s constant tinkering with technology to expand how we collect and disseminate information to communicate with one another and how we educate and entertain ourselves.
And so while someone in the early 21st century might express a moment of wonder in first encountering a podcast, or video blog, or Twitch stream, or anything of the sort, they would also rather quickly absorb the idea and make it a part of their new normal existence. There would be that moment of magic of “Wow. I didn’t realize it could do this,” which would quickly give way to “Cool. Now that I know that it can do this, what can we use it for? And what’s next after that?”
And, it’s the same with moving pictures, which were originally called animated photography. It’s easy to think audiences were shocked by moving pictures, but the groundwork had been laid for the audience through a century or more of new technological inventions, some longer lasting than others, including Huygens’ magic lantern, Daguerre’s photography, and Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope.
The magic lantern, though, is- I think- one of the key elements, though. Not only does the magic lantern teach our upcoming filmmakers how to assemble and present their stories, but I think it also does much to teach our upcoming audiences how to receive those stories.
Another key element is the English music hall, which will have an influence on American vaudeville and French cabaret, among other performance styles. And for several of our immediate upcoming episodes, we’ll see how the magic lantern and the music hall worked in tandem to provide early filmmakers with skills behind and in front of the camera to produce a wonderful new world of comedy on film.
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SHANE:
Once again, I want to thank the guests for this episode. Dr. Jeremy Brooker of the Magic Lantern Society and film historian and author Ian Christie from Birkbeck College, the University of London.
You will find links relating to my guests and various projects we discussed in the show notes for this special 1659-themed episode. Visit the extras section of ActingFunnyPodcast.com and you’ll find a listing of movies mentioned in this episode, as well as links to information about books and other media also referenced today.
Thanks also to the Offbeat Agent, Matt Ward, for sponsoring today’s episode. Visit him on Instagram at offbeatagent.
And join me next time as we continue to explore the lives and works of people who have been acting funny for the past 125 years.
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In the next episode, we’re returning to our normal timeline and entering the film world of 1897 to meet George Arthur Smith and Laura Bayley, a husband-and-wife team with backgrounds in magic lanterns, music hall, and mesmerism, as they establish what may very well be the first film production company devoted exclusively to making film comedy. You can get an early introduction to this amazing couple now on the Acting Funny blog.
Be sure to like, follow, or subscribe to Acting Funny on your favorite podcast listening service so you’ll know when the next episode is available. And, leave a review, if you can on your podcast service, so you can help other people find out about the podcast, too.
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SHANE:
A fun way to keep up with each episode of Acting Funny is to subscribe to The Banana Peel, a free monthly newsletter that gives subscribers an early peek at upcoming episode topics and guests, highlights blog posts from the website, and includes other useful news from the world of comedy films then and now.
To subscribe, simply visit the Acting Funny website at actingfunnypodcast.com, then complete the newsletter subscription form on the bottom of any page. You’ll get a welcome email to let you know your subscription has been added and then once a month I’ll send you news about future episodes and more.
And, it’s easy to forward to your friends who also might like to learn about Acting Funny and the films we’re discussing here.
Once again, you can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter by visiting Acting Funny Podcast dot com.
[MUSIC begins: Acting Funny theme music]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy films seriously. This episode was written and produced by me, Shane Rhyne. The theme music was written and performed by Saint Thomas LeDoux. Sound editing and engineering is provided by Kyle Tollett. Additional music for this episode was created by Pontus Tidemand.
The show’s logo was designed by Andy Forrester. Social media and communications are managed by Shane Rhyne and Tamara Rhyne. You can find links and info about these people on the show’s credits page at actingfunnypodcast.com.
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[END episode]