Post by Admin on Feb 23, 2021 11:53:59 GMT -5
(There are some notes put in by a blogger)..
„Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.“
(Jim Morrison, 1969)
The Lords
Notes on vision
Look where we worship.
Where did people worship during the sixties of the 20th century?
Where do we worship now?
Is there a difference?
Is the cinema still one of the temples where we worship?
For an interesting interview with Jim Morrison (Tony Thomas & Jim Morrison 1970 Interview), see:
We all live in the city.
The city forms - often physically, but inevitably
psychically - a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center. Drive toward outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prosti-
tution. But in the grimy ring immediately surround-
ing the daylight business district exists the only
real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night
cinemas.
“A game is a closed field, a ring of death with sex at the centre, and performing is the only game I’ve got.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, The Doors in Their Own Words, Pengee Books, New York, 1991, p. 45)
Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing
for omniscience. To spy on others from this
height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of
our lens like rare aquatic insects.
"Players" - the child, the actor, and the gambler.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of an alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession.
“Play is an open event. It’s free. Little kids are like dogs. They run around, touch things, sing a song. Well, actors play like that, and musicians too, and you dig watching someone play, because that’s the way people are supposed to be – free, like animals. Animals don’t build war machines and invest millions of dollars in attacking other countries whose political ideas don’t happen to agree with their own.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 94)
“Your politics, or your religion, is what you devote the majority of your time to. It might be a woman. It might be a drug. It might be money or alcohol… might be literature.” (Ib., p. 80)
“We’re like actors, turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a half-formed shadow of our lost reality.” (Ib., p. 92)
What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?
There are no longer "dancers", the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence...
We are content with the "given" in sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.
“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth, but it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard. We cripple ourselves with lies. Most people have no idea of what they’re missing, our society places a supreme value on control, on hiding what you feel. It mocks primitive culture and prides itself on the suppression of natural instincts and impulses.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 80)
Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the
Philadelphia Zoological Garden, male performers
from the University. The women were professional
artists' models, also actresses and dancers,
parading nude before the 48 cameras.
"Eadweard James Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.
He emigrated to the United States as a young man and became a bookseller. He returned to England in 1861 and took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867, and in 1868 his large photographs of Yosemite Valley made him world famous. Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875. In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. In his later years he travelled back to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. In 1904, the Kingston Museum, containing a collection of his equipment, was opened in his hometown."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
This site also contains some very interesting ‘moving pictures’, based on original photos of Muybridge.
"Between 1883 and 1884 Muybridge began using forty cameras, a Dallmeyer lens, and an electro-magnetic shutter to take photographs of men and horses.
In 1885 he took pictures of various animals in the Zoological Gardens of Philadelphia and in the following year he concentrated on the study of children, men, and women walking and running, of athletics, and of soldiers on the march. Some of these are reproduced in his books: Locomotion (1887), Animals in Motion (1891), and The Human Figure in Motion (1901)."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
The original source for the above quote is: Olive Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions. A study of the animated and projected pictures which preceded the invention of cinematography, Hutchinson & CO. (Publishers) LTD, London, 1963. It is evident that Jim Morrison must have been familiar with this source material (cfr. infra for proof).
Films are collections of dead pictures which are
given artificial insemination.
Film spectators are quiet vampires.
Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All
energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull,
a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood.
Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects
that he could behead a kingdom with one blow.
Cinema is this transforming agent. The body
exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a
dry stalk to support these two insatiable
jewels.
"Caligula" was the popular nickname of Gaius (31 August 12 AD – 22 January 41 AD), Roman emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD.
There are few surviving sources on Caligula's reign, although he is described as a noble and moderate ruler during the first six months of his rule. After this, the sources focus upon his cruelty, sadism, extravagance, and intense sexual perversity, presenting him as an insane tyrant.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
On one occasion the people cheered the team he opposed; he cried angrily: "I wish all you Romans had only one neck!" (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, Ch. 30, see: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Suetonius)
In the movie Caligula (1979, directed by Franco Rossellini and Bob Guccione, and with Malcolm McDowell as Caligula) this becomes: “If only all Rome had just one neck”
Of course Jim Morrison never could have seen this movie, based on a script by Gore Vidal, since he died in 1971.
Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.
Each film depends upon all the others and drives
you on to others. Cinema was a novelty, a scientif-
ic toy, until a sufficient body of works had been
amassed, enough to create an intermittent other
world, a powerful, infinite mythology to be dipped
into at will.
“The good thing about film is that there are no experts. Anybody can assimilate the whole history of film by himself, which you can’t do in any of the other arts. There are no experts, so in theory, any student knows as much as any professor.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 85)
On the other hand, already in July 1972 the film historian David Robinson stated that “today the sheer bulk of cinema is so immense. It is practically impossible even to estimate the number of films of all kinds made since 1895, but the figure may well be in the region of a quarter of a million. If we suppose that a bare five per cent of these are worth passing attention (and in fact the cinema’s proportional record of artistic successes is probably no lower than that), the task of covering all movie history, from Lumière to Andy Warhol, from German Expressionism to the Cinema Nôvo of Brazil, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Ghana and Vietnam, is overwhelming. And the bulk increases faster and faster, as more and more film-makers find the possibility of expression, in almost one hundred territories of the world.
Apart from the problem of quantity, of course, cinema history is generally more complex than that of any other art.” (David Robinson, The History of World Cinema, Stein and Day Publishers, New York, 1973, p. xiii)
Even if we take into account that in the course of time a lot of films have been destroyed, in order to recycle the silver from the celluloid, or just have perished, the number of movies that exist today, i.e. in 2014 must be huge, beyond any one person’s grasp. Indeed, we may truly speak of an “infinite mythology to be dipped into at will.”…
Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered
by their regular, indomitable appearance.
The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
“The first time I discovered death… me and my mother and father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either hit another car or something – there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so I had to stay in the car while my father and grandfather went to check it out. I didn’t see nothing – all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, and all of a sudden I realized that they didn’t know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear… and I do think, at that moment, the souls of those dead Indians – maybe one or two of ‘em – were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it…” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 10)
The modern East creates the greatest body of films.
Cinema is a new form of an ancient tradition - the
shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation
of it. Born in India or China, the shadow show
was aligned with religious ritual, linked with
celebrations which centered around cremation of the
dead.
"Like the theatre, the cinema originated in ritual, but from the beginning it exhibited characteristics which sharply differentiated it from the drama. The drama was always three-dimensional, but the actual furniture of the scenes existed only through the ability of the actors to command the spectator's imagination. They represented gods or mythical heroes and showed a developing conflict which ended in either tragedy or comedy and moved the audience to sympathetic tears or laughter. But the earliest moving pictures were, like those of today, two-dimensional spectacles; they had no substance, and their effects, far from depending upon the power of the actor, were often produced without the aid of living persons; they sought to arouse no emotions but those of astonishment, terror, and awe, and the terror they hoped to inspire was not the cathartic terror of the drama caused by participation in another's suffering, but a nightmarish terror of the unknown. For these first productions, visions summoned up by sorcerer-priests, aimed at presenting phenomena beyond the grasp of the human mind.”
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that
cinema belongs to women. Cinema is created by
men for the consolation of men.
The shadow plays originally were restricted to
male audiences. Men could view these dream shows
from either side of the screen. When women later
began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend
only to shadows.
"Shadow puppetry originated during the Han Dynasty when one of the concubines of Emperor Wu of Han (who reigned from 181-87 BC, FD) died from an illness. The emperor was devastated, and he summoned his court officers to bring his beloved back to life. The officers made a shape of the concubine using donkey leather. Her joints were animated using 11 separate pieces of the leather, and adorned with painted clothes. Using an oil lamp they made her shadow move, bringing her back to life. Shadow theatre became quite popular as early as the Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD, FD) when holidays were marked by the presentation of many shadow plays. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD, FD) there were 40 to 50 shadow show troupes in the city of Beijing alone. In the 13th century, the shadow show became a regular recreation in the barracks of the Mongolian troops. It was spread by the conquering Mongols to distant countries like Persia, Arabia, and Turkey."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play
"In the 17th century the shadow theatre was known in Italy; from there it spread to other western European countries. The French called them ombres chinoises, although they were black silhouettes, instead of coloured like those of the Chinese. Dominique Séraphin opened a shadow show in Versailles in 1774, later moving it to the Palais Royal in Paris. Until 1859 his descendants presented specially written plays, such as The Broken Bridge. Sophisticiated plays were produced by a group of artists, musicians and writers who regularly met at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. Other cabarets imitated them, and shows were given until 1923." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968, Vol. 20)
Seemingly contrary to what Jim Morrison claims, the same source states: "The shadow play in China, for which a legendary origin in the Han dynasty is claimed, became a favourite entertainment for court ladies." (Id.)
A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus,
and Mayhew's showman, exhibiting at Islington
Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.
Mayhew is Henry Mayhew and the showman is an unknown travelling artist who was interviewed by Mayhew. (FD)
"Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 – 25 July 1887) was an English social researcher, journalist, playwright and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical and humorous magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine's joint-editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city's poor."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mayhew)
"These travelling showmen generally worked with a Punch and Judy frame with a piece of calico stretched in front of it and three candles behind. During the day they would perform the Punch and Judy puppet show and at night they would exhibit the shadows, usually after seven o'clock. The best pitch of all was Regent Street, but Leicester Square was a very good place and so was Islington. The showmen were in the habit of going out in couples. The one interviewed by Mayhew spoke the various parts in different voices, standing in front and playing the pandanean pipe ('That's the real word for the pipe, from the Romans, when they first invaded England'). His partner manipulated the figures, which appear to have been jointed in much the same way as the Turkish shades.
It was sometimes a dangerous business manipulating the shadows by candle-light, especially when the crowd was disorderly. Once when Mayhew's showman was performing at Islington Green some drunken people knocked over the whole show and it went up in flames with his mate inside."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Note that Jim Morrison almost exactly copies the above quote. Fortunately for Mayhew's showman, he didn't die in the turmoil... as Morrison seems to think. Only his mate was burned. The showman had to keep on living, in order to be interviewed by Mayhew...
In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his
Pleorama. The audience was transformed into
the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire,
screaming, sailor, drowning.
"It was in 1832 that Gropius introduced his attempts at still-further-heightened realism, calling the show the Pleorama to distinguish it from the Diorama. He had taken the theme from the architect Langhaus of Breslau. The auditorium was constructed to resemble a small ship holding about thirty people, which sailed across the Bay of Naples or down the Rhine from Mainz to St. Goar, the movement of the picture and auditorium conspiring to give the impression of a changing viewpoint. This novel entertainment was, however, no more successful than Daguerre's Swiss chalet, though the fact that only thirty, instead of the usual two hundred or so, spectators could be admitted to the exhibition at a time may have made it uneconomical. Gropius, in any case, abandoned the Pleorama and went on showing his dioramas until 1850."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail
for debt, was struck by the effect of light shining
through the bars of his cell through a letter he
was reading, and out of this perception he in-
vented the first Panorama, a concave, transparent
picture view of the city.
(The Edinburgh artist's name was not Robert Baker, but Robert Barker. FD)
"The invention of the Panorama is usually attributed to Robert Barker, an Edinburgh painter. In about 1785 he was put into prison for debt and was confined to a cell lit by a grating let into the wall at the junction of wall and ceiling. One day he was reading a letter and to see more clearly carried it below the grating. The effect when the paper was held in the shaft of light falling from the opening was so astonishing that Barker's imagination was set working on the possibilities of controlled light flung from above upon pictures of large dimensions. He had already seen the amazing results achieved by Loutherbourg with lights behind the picture. He now conceived of something much more ambitious.
Barker's new picture entertainment was patented on June 19th, 1787, the patent referring, however, not to the 'Panorama', a word which had not yet been coined, but to 'an entire new contrivance or apparatus called by him "La nature a coup d'ceil" '. Later in the same year the artist exhibited a large semi-circular view of Edinburgh in that city. The huge concave picture, which the audience could glimpse out of the corners of their eyes as well as straight in front of them, must have had something of the effect of the modern cinerama.
But this was only a stage in the development of the Panorama proper, which Barker first showed at his premises in Leicester Square in 1792. It was a view of the English Fleet at anchor between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, and consisted of an enormous canvas attached to the inside of a rotunda 16 ft. high and 45 ft. in diameter, which revolved slowly round the spectators seated in the centre. An engraving of the machinery of a panorama reproduced in the Journal de Genie Civil in 1800 shows that it much resembled the structure of a post mill. Placed in semi-darkness in the middle of a circle which recalled the magic circles formerly described by sorcerers and conjurers of spirits, the audience gazed across a gulf of as much as 12 ft. at a continuous, moving view of an entire region, drawn with such ingenious perspective and so skilfully lit from above that, according to contemporary reviewers, the illusion was perfect."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
“An Edinburgh portrait painter, Robert Barker, conceived the idea of surrounding the spectator with a gigantic cylindrical painting, ingeniously illuminated to enhance the illusion of reality. The craze for ‘Panoramas’ – as Barker’s invention, patented in 1787, was called – rapidly spread throughout all the capitals of Europe. Panoramas continued to flourish into the 1860s and 1870s; and as late as 1960 a 50-year-old panorama of the battle of Borodino was successfully re-launched in Moscow.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 2)
This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama,
which added the illusion of movement by shifting
the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.
Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's
Park, a rare survival, since these shows depended
always on effects of artificial light, produced
by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended
in fire.
“Some years before Barker, in 1781, the Alsatian painter and scene designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg opened in London the Eidophusikan, an entertainment in which a form of painting created, like stage settings, out of three-dimensional elements, was enhanced by ingenious and romantic effects of lighting. De Loutherbourg’s ideas were further elaborated by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851) who with Claude-Marie Bouton opened his first Diorama in Paris in July 1822 and his second in Regent’s Park, London, in September 1823. In the Diorama, a picture of which certain parts were more or less translucent was illuminated from before and behind by a highly sophisticated arrangement of lamps and shutters to produce effects of changing light (dear to the age of Turner and Constable) and transformations.
The popularity of the Diorama was reflected in the production of miniature adaptations in the form of peep-shows for parlour use.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 5)
"Meanwhile a new entertainment, or rather another and grander version of the Eidophusikon, had been introduced to the public by Jacques Mande Daguerre, better known as the author of the daguerreotype, and Charles Marie Bouton. Both these men had worked as assistants to Prevost, Bouton as a painter and Daguerre as an expert in lighting and scenic effects. Their invention consisted of gigantic transparent pictures exhibited under changing light. The screens, of which there were usually two adjoining each other at an angle, remained stationary, while the auditorium, a cylindrical room with a single opening in the wall like the proscenium of a theatre, slowly turned, moving the spectators from one part of the picture to another and from one picture to another and giving the impression that the image was animated. The first Diorama, a plain building with long windows, was designed by Daguerre himself and erected in the rue Sanson in the heart of Paris. On the opening day, July nth, 1822, two dioramas were exhibited: The Valley of the Sarnen in Canton Unterwalden, Switzerland, by Daguerre and The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, by Bouton.
Scarcely any of the immense number of panorama and diorama paintings executed during the nineteenth century survive. Depending, as they almost always did, on effects of artificial light, produced by means of lamps and gas jets, the great majority, like the buildings which housed them, ended in flames.
The Regent's Park Diorama, (is) the only surviving building of its kind in London."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Here also, as in the Mayhew quote, Morrison only slightly changes his original source material.
Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles
without substance. They achieved complete
sensory experiences through noise, incense,
lightning, water. There may be a time when
we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the
sensation of rain.
"The magic lantern was invented by Athanasius Kircher in about 1640 and he outlines its principles in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, first published in 1645. Kircher was a scientist of considerable repute, but he was also a Jesuit priest and from the little that is known about him he seems to have had much in common with the magician-priests of earlier ages. He discloses the same talent for showmanship, the same power of exciting and terrifying his audiences, and it was he who applied the epithet 'magic' to his apparatus.
The spectators of Kircher's shows were not placed as they usually were in
Victorian times and always are today — on the same side of the screen as the lantern: his screen was between the viewers and the lantern and was made of transparent taffetas. His pictures were painted on long strips of glass, every part of which was made opaque except the figures. By the skilful manipulation of his lantern Kircher could make these figures appear at one moment as big as giants, the next as small as dwarfs; they would advance, retire, dissolve into seeming nothingness, and then return in utterly different forms. On one occasion Kircher made mysterious handwriting materialize on the wall of a room from which he and his instrument were excluded; and on another, by combining the effects of the magic lantern with those of the newly invented polished cylindrical mirror (which is capable of creating a normal image from a distorted picture), the Jesuit stunned his audience by favouring them with a vision of the Ascension. No wonder he was regarded as a sorcerer.
Father Kircher was the last recorded ordained priest openly to concern himself with optics, and with him the link between religion and the summoning of spectral figures by means of mirror and lantern is severed. The art of projecting images was henceforth classified as an entertainment. Yet the effect it produced was very often as shattering as if it had been the work of supernatural agencies.
The Phantasmagoria, which functioned by means of a screen set up after the manner of Kircher between lantern and audience, was named by M. Philipsthal in 1802 when he exhibited it with enormous success in London and Edinburgh. It was not an altogether new form of entertainment, but Philipsthal, a mysterious character reported to have dabbled in alchemy after having been trained as a doctor, was a better showman than his predecessors and rivals.
Philipsthars was the best-known but by no means the only phantasmagoria
entertainment of the period. A Mr. Robertson, who had an establishment in Paris (in the Cour des Capucins on almost the same site where the first cinematograph theatre was to be opened more than a century later), varied his effects by introducing along with his pictures the direct, moving shadows of living persons, thus giving the impression of people going about on a dark night or in moonlight. According to the Lady's Magazine of 1802, some of the phantasmagoria shows seem to have appealed to very much the same kind of audience as the more exciting and spectacular of modern films. The proprietor of a phantasmagoria theatre in Dorset Mews put on a striptease act which would certainly have been marked 'X' today, although his audience was said to consist chiefly of 'young girls, boys, and women' (at half-a-crown-a-head admission). Parents complained at their children frequenting such a place and because the performance started so late that it was often after midnight when the girls and boys arrived home, and 'sometimes they did not come at all'. The showman and several of his assistants were apprehended and the magistrate took a serious view of the case, denouncing the Phantasmagoria as an evil and committing the proprietor to Bridewell."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
“Of all the optical entertainments of this period, the magic lantern was the most popular; and it is with the magic lantern that the technology of the cinema proper begins. The magic lantern worked upon the principle that a brightly illuminated object placed before an objective or magnifying lens will project its inverted image onto a screen in a darkened chamber, the image being enlarged according to the relative distances of the screen and the object from the lens. The principle is still employed in the cinema projector: in its basic form the most elaborate projector is still a magic lantern, while the film and film moving apparatus is a sophisticated equivalent of the simple lantern slide.
The magic lantern had been known at least since the seventeenth century, and throughout most of Europe was toured from village to village by itinerant showmen./…/From the start the lantern showman was dissatisfied with the still image: and over the decades there were constant attempts to give movement to the phantoms on the screen. Some of the most elaborate were those of the Belgian showman Etienne Robertson in Paris in the 1790s and his follower Philipstahl in London in the early years of the nineteenth century. Their favourite device was the Phantasmagoria, a system for moving the lantern nearer or further away from the screen while automatically maintaining the focus. The effect was a dramatic enlargement or diminution of the images on the screen, suited to the Gothick flavour of their entertainments. A disciple of Philipstahl, Henry Langdon Childe, developed the effects that could be obtained by projecting two dissolving or superimposed images. Both the Phantasmagoria and Childe’s Dissolving Views were later to indicate directions of cinema technique.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 6 & 9)
(For more information on phantasmagoria, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasmagoria
and for more information on the magic lantern:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern)
Cinema has evolved in two paths.
One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its
goal is the creation of a total substitute
sensory world.
The other is peep show, which claims for its
realm both the erotic and untampered obser-
vance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or
voyeur's window without need of color, noise,
grandeur.
"The aerial images projected by magicians with the aid of concave mirrors, and the phantoms flung upon the screen by the lantern, were the distant ancestors of the fantastic, irrational, magical aspects of the film. The early peepshows and the panoramas and dioramas which developed from them provided a more prosaic element: they were the forerunners of modern travelogues and newsreels."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not
with painting, literature, or theater, but with
the popular diversions - comics, chess, French
and Tarot decks, magazines, and tattooing.
Cinema derives not from painting, literature,
sculpture, theater, but from ancient popular
wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation
of an evolving history of shadows, a delight in
pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its
lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning
with Priests and sorcery, a summoning of phantoms.
With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and
fire, men called up dark and secret visits from
regions in the buried mind. In these seances,
shades are spirits which ward off evil.
"Pliny the Elder relates that the god Hercules would regularly show himself, gigantic in stature, among the vapours of the fire kindled in his temple at Tyre; Aesculapius often displayed himself to his worshippers at Agrigento, while the temple at Enginium, also in Sicily, was so celebrated for apparitions of the two divinities Hera and Aphrodite that the shrine became a place of seasonal pilgrimage. Iamblichus informs us that it was the priests, who were also magicians, who were responsible for these appearances, and that they were always accompanied by smoke and vapours; he describes one occasion in particular when a conjurer named Maximus produced a monstrous figure of Hecate who made an overwhelming impression on an audience already trembling with fear by laughing aloud with heaving shoulders and diabolical grimaces.
It has long since been known that these illusions were created by means of
various metal mirrors, most commonly of silver. Such mirrors, generally known as Chinese mirrors, were useful aids in producing mysterious effects, but it was the concave mirror upon which the magician depended for his most staggering results.
Its surface was elliptical, so that if any object was placed in one focus of the ellipse an inverted image of it would appear in the other focus. To a spectator rightly placed, this image would seem as if suspended in the air, and if the mirror and object were both hidden from his view the effect would take on the character of the supernatural. The difficulty of getting a living person to assume an inverted position, which must often have been necessary, was overcome by employing a second concave mirror. The size of the aerial image was in proportion to the distance of the real object from the mirror; thus by varying the distance of the object the size of the image could be increased or diminished.
It is probable that it was by means such as this that the Witch of Endor
conjured up the shade of Samuel for Saul; and when the Emperor Basil of
Macedonia was vouchsafed a sight of his dead son through the agency of a
priest celebrated as a miracle-worker it must have been an aerial image that he saw of a painting of the boy on horseback. As the picture approached the mirror, the image advanced into the Emperor's arms, only, of course, to elude his affectionate grasp and vanish. Effects such as this have their counterparts in the modern cinema theatre, where a train or a car will rush at terrifying speed straight at the spectator."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
The spectator is a dying animal.
It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator
in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes.
The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures
his existence.
Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and
camera give us. Not falsified by "seeing."
Early film makers, who - like the alchemists -
delighted in a willful obscurity about their craft,
in order to withhold their skills from profane
onlookers.
Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of
Ars Magna, and its heir, the cinema.
The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of
mechanical hermaphrodite.
Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists
sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between
men and planets, plants and gestures, words and
weather. These disturbing connections: an in-
fant's cry and the stroke of silk; the whorl
of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard;
a woman's head lowered in sleep and the morning
dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which
transcend the sterile signal of any "willed"
montage. These juxtapositions of objects, sounds,
actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine
in an unheard-of way, impossible ways.
Film is nothing when not an illumination of
this chain of being which makes a needle poised
in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter,
which gives each thing its special divinity and
sees gods in all things and beings
Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge
or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can
only try to enslave others. But gradually, special
perceptions are being developed. The idea of the
"Lords" is beginning to form in some. We
should enlist them into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious noc-
turnal appearences. The Lords have secret entrances,
and they know disguises. But they give themselves
away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in
the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a
glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us
books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Es-
pecially the cinemas. Through art they confuse
us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns
our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted
and indifferent.
“TV is the invisible shield against bare reality. Twentieth century culture’s disease is the inability to feel reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, rock idols and they have wild emotions over symbols; but in the reality of their own lives, they’re emotionally dead.” (Jim Morrison, 1969, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 85)
„Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.“
(Jim Morrison, 1969)
The Lords
Notes on vision
Look where we worship.
Where did people worship during the sixties of the 20th century?
Where do we worship now?
Is there a difference?
Is the cinema still one of the temples where we worship?
For an interesting interview with Jim Morrison (Tony Thomas & Jim Morrison 1970 Interview), see:
We all live in the city.
The city forms - often physically, but inevitably
psychically - a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center. Drive toward outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prosti-
tution. But in the grimy ring immediately surround-
ing the daylight business district exists the only
real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night
cinemas.
“A game is a closed field, a ring of death with sex at the centre, and performing is the only game I’ve got.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, The Doors in Their Own Words, Pengee Books, New York, 1991, p. 45)
Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing
for omniscience. To spy on others from this
height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of
our lens like rare aquatic insects.
"Players" - the child, the actor, and the gambler.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of an alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession.
“Play is an open event. It’s free. Little kids are like dogs. They run around, touch things, sing a song. Well, actors play like that, and musicians too, and you dig watching someone play, because that’s the way people are supposed to be – free, like animals. Animals don’t build war machines and invest millions of dollars in attacking other countries whose political ideas don’t happen to agree with their own.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 94)
“Your politics, or your religion, is what you devote the majority of your time to. It might be a woman. It might be a drug. It might be money or alcohol… might be literature.” (Ib., p. 80)
“We’re like actors, turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a half-formed shadow of our lost reality.” (Ib., p. 92)
What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?
There are no longer "dancers", the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence...
We are content with the "given" in sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.
“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth, but it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard. We cripple ourselves with lies. Most people have no idea of what they’re missing, our society places a supreme value on control, on hiding what you feel. It mocks primitive culture and prides itself on the suppression of natural instincts and impulses.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 80)
Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the
Philadelphia Zoological Garden, male performers
from the University. The women were professional
artists' models, also actresses and dancers,
parading nude before the 48 cameras.
"Eadweard James Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.
He emigrated to the United States as a young man and became a bookseller. He returned to England in 1861 and took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867, and in 1868 his large photographs of Yosemite Valley made him world famous. Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875. In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. In his later years he travelled back to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. In 1904, the Kingston Museum, containing a collection of his equipment, was opened in his hometown."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
This site also contains some very interesting ‘moving pictures’, based on original photos of Muybridge.
"Between 1883 and 1884 Muybridge began using forty cameras, a Dallmeyer lens, and an electro-magnetic shutter to take photographs of men and horses.
In 1885 he took pictures of various animals in the Zoological Gardens of Philadelphia and in the following year he concentrated on the study of children, men, and women walking and running, of athletics, and of soldiers on the march. Some of these are reproduced in his books: Locomotion (1887), Animals in Motion (1891), and The Human Figure in Motion (1901)."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
The original source for the above quote is: Olive Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions. A study of the animated and projected pictures which preceded the invention of cinematography, Hutchinson & CO. (Publishers) LTD, London, 1963. It is evident that Jim Morrison must have been familiar with this source material (cfr. infra for proof).
Films are collections of dead pictures which are
given artificial insemination.
Film spectators are quiet vampires.
Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All
energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull,
a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood.
Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects
that he could behead a kingdom with one blow.
Cinema is this transforming agent. The body
exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a
dry stalk to support these two insatiable
jewels.
"Caligula" was the popular nickname of Gaius (31 August 12 AD – 22 January 41 AD), Roman emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD.
There are few surviving sources on Caligula's reign, although he is described as a noble and moderate ruler during the first six months of his rule. After this, the sources focus upon his cruelty, sadism, extravagance, and intense sexual perversity, presenting him as an insane tyrant.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
On one occasion the people cheered the team he opposed; he cried angrily: "I wish all you Romans had only one neck!" (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, Ch. 30, see: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Suetonius)
In the movie Caligula (1979, directed by Franco Rossellini and Bob Guccione, and with Malcolm McDowell as Caligula) this becomes: “If only all Rome had just one neck”
Of course Jim Morrison never could have seen this movie, based on a script by Gore Vidal, since he died in 1971.
Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.
Each film depends upon all the others and drives
you on to others. Cinema was a novelty, a scientif-
ic toy, until a sufficient body of works had been
amassed, enough to create an intermittent other
world, a powerful, infinite mythology to be dipped
into at will.
“The good thing about film is that there are no experts. Anybody can assimilate the whole history of film by himself, which you can’t do in any of the other arts. There are no experts, so in theory, any student knows as much as any professor.” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 85)
On the other hand, already in July 1972 the film historian David Robinson stated that “today the sheer bulk of cinema is so immense. It is practically impossible even to estimate the number of films of all kinds made since 1895, but the figure may well be in the region of a quarter of a million. If we suppose that a bare five per cent of these are worth passing attention (and in fact the cinema’s proportional record of artistic successes is probably no lower than that), the task of covering all movie history, from Lumière to Andy Warhol, from German Expressionism to the Cinema Nôvo of Brazil, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Ghana and Vietnam, is overwhelming. And the bulk increases faster and faster, as more and more film-makers find the possibility of expression, in almost one hundred territories of the world.
Apart from the problem of quantity, of course, cinema history is generally more complex than that of any other art.” (David Robinson, The History of World Cinema, Stein and Day Publishers, New York, 1973, p. xiii)
Even if we take into account that in the course of time a lot of films have been destroyed, in order to recycle the silver from the celluloid, or just have perished, the number of movies that exist today, i.e. in 2014 must be huge, beyond any one person’s grasp. Indeed, we may truly speak of an “infinite mythology to be dipped into at will.”…
Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered
by their regular, indomitable appearance.
The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
“The first time I discovered death… me and my mother and father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either hit another car or something – there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so I had to stay in the car while my father and grandfather went to check it out. I didn’t see nothing – all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, and all of a sudden I realized that they didn’t know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear… and I do think, at that moment, the souls of those dead Indians – maybe one or two of ‘em – were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it…” (Jim Morrison, 1968, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 10)
The modern East creates the greatest body of films.
Cinema is a new form of an ancient tradition - the
shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation
of it. Born in India or China, the shadow show
was aligned with religious ritual, linked with
celebrations which centered around cremation of the
dead.
"Like the theatre, the cinema originated in ritual, but from the beginning it exhibited characteristics which sharply differentiated it from the drama. The drama was always three-dimensional, but the actual furniture of the scenes existed only through the ability of the actors to command the spectator's imagination. They represented gods or mythical heroes and showed a developing conflict which ended in either tragedy or comedy and moved the audience to sympathetic tears or laughter. But the earliest moving pictures were, like those of today, two-dimensional spectacles; they had no substance, and their effects, far from depending upon the power of the actor, were often produced without the aid of living persons; they sought to arouse no emotions but those of astonishment, terror, and awe, and the terror they hoped to inspire was not the cathartic terror of the drama caused by participation in another's suffering, but a nightmarish terror of the unknown. For these first productions, visions summoned up by sorcerer-priests, aimed at presenting phenomena beyond the grasp of the human mind.”
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that
cinema belongs to women. Cinema is created by
men for the consolation of men.
The shadow plays originally were restricted to
male audiences. Men could view these dream shows
from either side of the screen. When women later
began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend
only to shadows.
"Shadow puppetry originated during the Han Dynasty when one of the concubines of Emperor Wu of Han (who reigned from 181-87 BC, FD) died from an illness. The emperor was devastated, and he summoned his court officers to bring his beloved back to life. The officers made a shape of the concubine using donkey leather. Her joints were animated using 11 separate pieces of the leather, and adorned with painted clothes. Using an oil lamp they made her shadow move, bringing her back to life. Shadow theatre became quite popular as early as the Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD, FD) when holidays were marked by the presentation of many shadow plays. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD, FD) there were 40 to 50 shadow show troupes in the city of Beijing alone. In the 13th century, the shadow show became a regular recreation in the barracks of the Mongolian troops. It was spread by the conquering Mongols to distant countries like Persia, Arabia, and Turkey."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play
"In the 17th century the shadow theatre was known in Italy; from there it spread to other western European countries. The French called them ombres chinoises, although they were black silhouettes, instead of coloured like those of the Chinese. Dominique Séraphin opened a shadow show in Versailles in 1774, later moving it to the Palais Royal in Paris. Until 1859 his descendants presented specially written plays, such as The Broken Bridge. Sophisticiated plays were produced by a group of artists, musicians and writers who regularly met at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. Other cabarets imitated them, and shows were given until 1923." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968, Vol. 20)
Seemingly contrary to what Jim Morrison claims, the same source states: "The shadow play in China, for which a legendary origin in the Han dynasty is claimed, became a favourite entertainment for court ladies." (Id.)
A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus,
and Mayhew's showman, exhibiting at Islington
Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.
Mayhew is Henry Mayhew and the showman is an unknown travelling artist who was interviewed by Mayhew. (FD)
"Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 – 25 July 1887) was an English social researcher, journalist, playwright and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical and humorous magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine's joint-editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city's poor."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mayhew)
"These travelling showmen generally worked with a Punch and Judy frame with a piece of calico stretched in front of it and three candles behind. During the day they would perform the Punch and Judy puppet show and at night they would exhibit the shadows, usually after seven o'clock. The best pitch of all was Regent Street, but Leicester Square was a very good place and so was Islington. The showmen were in the habit of going out in couples. The one interviewed by Mayhew spoke the various parts in different voices, standing in front and playing the pandanean pipe ('That's the real word for the pipe, from the Romans, when they first invaded England'). His partner manipulated the figures, which appear to have been jointed in much the same way as the Turkish shades.
It was sometimes a dangerous business manipulating the shadows by candle-light, especially when the crowd was disorderly. Once when Mayhew's showman was performing at Islington Green some drunken people knocked over the whole show and it went up in flames with his mate inside."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Note that Jim Morrison almost exactly copies the above quote. Fortunately for Mayhew's showman, he didn't die in the turmoil... as Morrison seems to think. Only his mate was burned. The showman had to keep on living, in order to be interviewed by Mayhew...
In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his
Pleorama. The audience was transformed into
the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire,
screaming, sailor, drowning.
"It was in 1832 that Gropius introduced his attempts at still-further-heightened realism, calling the show the Pleorama to distinguish it from the Diorama. He had taken the theme from the architect Langhaus of Breslau. The auditorium was constructed to resemble a small ship holding about thirty people, which sailed across the Bay of Naples or down the Rhine from Mainz to St. Goar, the movement of the picture and auditorium conspiring to give the impression of a changing viewpoint. This novel entertainment was, however, no more successful than Daguerre's Swiss chalet, though the fact that only thirty, instead of the usual two hundred or so, spectators could be admitted to the exhibition at a time may have made it uneconomical. Gropius, in any case, abandoned the Pleorama and went on showing his dioramas until 1850."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail
for debt, was struck by the effect of light shining
through the bars of his cell through a letter he
was reading, and out of this perception he in-
vented the first Panorama, a concave, transparent
picture view of the city.
(The Edinburgh artist's name was not Robert Baker, but Robert Barker. FD)
"The invention of the Panorama is usually attributed to Robert Barker, an Edinburgh painter. In about 1785 he was put into prison for debt and was confined to a cell lit by a grating let into the wall at the junction of wall and ceiling. One day he was reading a letter and to see more clearly carried it below the grating. The effect when the paper was held in the shaft of light falling from the opening was so astonishing that Barker's imagination was set working on the possibilities of controlled light flung from above upon pictures of large dimensions. He had already seen the amazing results achieved by Loutherbourg with lights behind the picture. He now conceived of something much more ambitious.
Barker's new picture entertainment was patented on June 19th, 1787, the patent referring, however, not to the 'Panorama', a word which had not yet been coined, but to 'an entire new contrivance or apparatus called by him "La nature a coup d'ceil" '. Later in the same year the artist exhibited a large semi-circular view of Edinburgh in that city. The huge concave picture, which the audience could glimpse out of the corners of their eyes as well as straight in front of them, must have had something of the effect of the modern cinerama.
But this was only a stage in the development of the Panorama proper, which Barker first showed at his premises in Leicester Square in 1792. It was a view of the English Fleet at anchor between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, and consisted of an enormous canvas attached to the inside of a rotunda 16 ft. high and 45 ft. in diameter, which revolved slowly round the spectators seated in the centre. An engraving of the machinery of a panorama reproduced in the Journal de Genie Civil in 1800 shows that it much resembled the structure of a post mill. Placed in semi-darkness in the middle of a circle which recalled the magic circles formerly described by sorcerers and conjurers of spirits, the audience gazed across a gulf of as much as 12 ft. at a continuous, moving view of an entire region, drawn with such ingenious perspective and so skilfully lit from above that, according to contemporary reviewers, the illusion was perfect."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
“An Edinburgh portrait painter, Robert Barker, conceived the idea of surrounding the spectator with a gigantic cylindrical painting, ingeniously illuminated to enhance the illusion of reality. The craze for ‘Panoramas’ – as Barker’s invention, patented in 1787, was called – rapidly spread throughout all the capitals of Europe. Panoramas continued to flourish into the 1860s and 1870s; and as late as 1960 a 50-year-old panorama of the battle of Borodino was successfully re-launched in Moscow.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 2)
This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama,
which added the illusion of movement by shifting
the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.
Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's
Park, a rare survival, since these shows depended
always on effects of artificial light, produced
by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended
in fire.
“Some years before Barker, in 1781, the Alsatian painter and scene designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg opened in London the Eidophusikan, an entertainment in which a form of painting created, like stage settings, out of three-dimensional elements, was enhanced by ingenious and romantic effects of lighting. De Loutherbourg’s ideas were further elaborated by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851) who with Claude-Marie Bouton opened his first Diorama in Paris in July 1822 and his second in Regent’s Park, London, in September 1823. In the Diorama, a picture of which certain parts were more or less translucent was illuminated from before and behind by a highly sophisticated arrangement of lamps and shutters to produce effects of changing light (dear to the age of Turner and Constable) and transformations.
The popularity of the Diorama was reflected in the production of miniature adaptations in the form of peep-shows for parlour use.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 5)
"Meanwhile a new entertainment, or rather another and grander version of the Eidophusikon, had been introduced to the public by Jacques Mande Daguerre, better known as the author of the daguerreotype, and Charles Marie Bouton. Both these men had worked as assistants to Prevost, Bouton as a painter and Daguerre as an expert in lighting and scenic effects. Their invention consisted of gigantic transparent pictures exhibited under changing light. The screens, of which there were usually two adjoining each other at an angle, remained stationary, while the auditorium, a cylindrical room with a single opening in the wall like the proscenium of a theatre, slowly turned, moving the spectators from one part of the picture to another and from one picture to another and giving the impression that the image was animated. The first Diorama, a plain building with long windows, was designed by Daguerre himself and erected in the rue Sanson in the heart of Paris. On the opening day, July nth, 1822, two dioramas were exhibited: The Valley of the Sarnen in Canton Unterwalden, Switzerland, by Daguerre and The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, by Bouton.
Scarcely any of the immense number of panorama and diorama paintings executed during the nineteenth century survive. Depending, as they almost always did, on effects of artificial light, produced by means of lamps and gas jets, the great majority, like the buildings which housed them, ended in flames.
The Regent's Park Diorama, (is) the only surviving building of its kind in London."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Here also, as in the Mayhew quote, Morrison only slightly changes his original source material.
Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles
without substance. They achieved complete
sensory experiences through noise, incense,
lightning, water. There may be a time when
we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the
sensation of rain.
"The magic lantern was invented by Athanasius Kircher in about 1640 and he outlines its principles in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, first published in 1645. Kircher was a scientist of considerable repute, but he was also a Jesuit priest and from the little that is known about him he seems to have had much in common with the magician-priests of earlier ages. He discloses the same talent for showmanship, the same power of exciting and terrifying his audiences, and it was he who applied the epithet 'magic' to his apparatus.
The spectators of Kircher's shows were not placed as they usually were in
Victorian times and always are today — on the same side of the screen as the lantern: his screen was between the viewers and the lantern and was made of transparent taffetas. His pictures were painted on long strips of glass, every part of which was made opaque except the figures. By the skilful manipulation of his lantern Kircher could make these figures appear at one moment as big as giants, the next as small as dwarfs; they would advance, retire, dissolve into seeming nothingness, and then return in utterly different forms. On one occasion Kircher made mysterious handwriting materialize on the wall of a room from which he and his instrument were excluded; and on another, by combining the effects of the magic lantern with those of the newly invented polished cylindrical mirror (which is capable of creating a normal image from a distorted picture), the Jesuit stunned his audience by favouring them with a vision of the Ascension. No wonder he was regarded as a sorcerer.
Father Kircher was the last recorded ordained priest openly to concern himself with optics, and with him the link between religion and the summoning of spectral figures by means of mirror and lantern is severed. The art of projecting images was henceforth classified as an entertainment. Yet the effect it produced was very often as shattering as if it had been the work of supernatural agencies.
The Phantasmagoria, which functioned by means of a screen set up after the manner of Kircher between lantern and audience, was named by M. Philipsthal in 1802 when he exhibited it with enormous success in London and Edinburgh. It was not an altogether new form of entertainment, but Philipsthal, a mysterious character reported to have dabbled in alchemy after having been trained as a doctor, was a better showman than his predecessors and rivals.
Philipsthars was the best-known but by no means the only phantasmagoria
entertainment of the period. A Mr. Robertson, who had an establishment in Paris (in the Cour des Capucins on almost the same site where the first cinematograph theatre was to be opened more than a century later), varied his effects by introducing along with his pictures the direct, moving shadows of living persons, thus giving the impression of people going about on a dark night or in moonlight. According to the Lady's Magazine of 1802, some of the phantasmagoria shows seem to have appealed to very much the same kind of audience as the more exciting and spectacular of modern films. The proprietor of a phantasmagoria theatre in Dorset Mews put on a striptease act which would certainly have been marked 'X' today, although his audience was said to consist chiefly of 'young girls, boys, and women' (at half-a-crown-a-head admission). Parents complained at their children frequenting such a place and because the performance started so late that it was often after midnight when the girls and boys arrived home, and 'sometimes they did not come at all'. The showman and several of his assistants were apprehended and the magistrate took a serious view of the case, denouncing the Phantasmagoria as an evil and committing the proprietor to Bridewell."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
“Of all the optical entertainments of this period, the magic lantern was the most popular; and it is with the magic lantern that the technology of the cinema proper begins. The magic lantern worked upon the principle that a brightly illuminated object placed before an objective or magnifying lens will project its inverted image onto a screen in a darkened chamber, the image being enlarged according to the relative distances of the screen and the object from the lens. The principle is still employed in the cinema projector: in its basic form the most elaborate projector is still a magic lantern, while the film and film moving apparatus is a sophisticated equivalent of the simple lantern slide.
The magic lantern had been known at least since the seventeenth century, and throughout most of Europe was toured from village to village by itinerant showmen./…/From the start the lantern showman was dissatisfied with the still image: and over the decades there were constant attempts to give movement to the phantoms on the screen. Some of the most elaborate were those of the Belgian showman Etienne Robertson in Paris in the 1790s and his follower Philipstahl in London in the early years of the nineteenth century. Their favourite device was the Phantasmagoria, a system for moving the lantern nearer or further away from the screen while automatically maintaining the focus. The effect was a dramatic enlargement or diminution of the images on the screen, suited to the Gothick flavour of their entertainments. A disciple of Philipstahl, Henry Langdon Childe, developed the effects that could be obtained by projecting two dissolving or superimposed images. Both the Phantasmagoria and Childe’s Dissolving Views were later to indicate directions of cinema technique.” (David Robinson, o.c., p. 6 & 9)
(For more information on phantasmagoria, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasmagoria
and for more information on the magic lantern:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern)
Cinema has evolved in two paths.
One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its
goal is the creation of a total substitute
sensory world.
The other is peep show, which claims for its
realm both the erotic and untampered obser-
vance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or
voyeur's window without need of color, noise,
grandeur.
"The aerial images projected by magicians with the aid of concave mirrors, and the phantoms flung upon the screen by the lantern, were the distant ancestors of the fantastic, irrational, magical aspects of the film. The early peepshows and the panoramas and dioramas which developed from them provided a more prosaic element: they were the forerunners of modern travelogues and newsreels."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not
with painting, literature, or theater, but with
the popular diversions - comics, chess, French
and Tarot decks, magazines, and tattooing.
Cinema derives not from painting, literature,
sculpture, theater, but from ancient popular
wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation
of an evolving history of shadows, a delight in
pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its
lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning
with Priests and sorcery, a summoning of phantoms.
With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and
fire, men called up dark and secret visits from
regions in the buried mind. In these seances,
shades are spirits which ward off evil.
"Pliny the Elder relates that the god Hercules would regularly show himself, gigantic in stature, among the vapours of the fire kindled in his temple at Tyre; Aesculapius often displayed himself to his worshippers at Agrigento, while the temple at Enginium, also in Sicily, was so celebrated for apparitions of the two divinities Hera and Aphrodite that the shrine became a place of seasonal pilgrimage. Iamblichus informs us that it was the priests, who were also magicians, who were responsible for these appearances, and that they were always accompanied by smoke and vapours; he describes one occasion in particular when a conjurer named Maximus produced a monstrous figure of Hecate who made an overwhelming impression on an audience already trembling with fear by laughing aloud with heaving shoulders and diabolical grimaces.
It has long since been known that these illusions were created by means of
various metal mirrors, most commonly of silver. Such mirrors, generally known as Chinese mirrors, were useful aids in producing mysterious effects, but it was the concave mirror upon which the magician depended for his most staggering results.
Its surface was elliptical, so that if any object was placed in one focus of the ellipse an inverted image of it would appear in the other focus. To a spectator rightly placed, this image would seem as if suspended in the air, and if the mirror and object were both hidden from his view the effect would take on the character of the supernatural. The difficulty of getting a living person to assume an inverted position, which must often have been necessary, was overcome by employing a second concave mirror. The size of the aerial image was in proportion to the distance of the real object from the mirror; thus by varying the distance of the object the size of the image could be increased or diminished.
It is probable that it was by means such as this that the Witch of Endor
conjured up the shade of Samuel for Saul; and when the Emperor Basil of
Macedonia was vouchsafed a sight of his dead son through the agency of a
priest celebrated as a miracle-worker it must have been an aerial image that he saw of a painting of the boy on horseback. As the picture approached the mirror, the image advanced into the Emperor's arms, only, of course, to elude his affectionate grasp and vanish. Effects such as this have their counterparts in the modern cinema theatre, where a train or a car will rush at terrifying speed straight at the spectator."
archive.org/stream/movementintwodim00cook/movementintwodim00cook_djvu.txt
The spectator is a dying animal.
It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator
in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes.
The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures
his existence.
Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and
camera give us. Not falsified by "seeing."
Early film makers, who - like the alchemists -
delighted in a willful obscurity about their craft,
in order to withhold their skills from profane
onlookers.
Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of
Ars Magna, and its heir, the cinema.
The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of
mechanical hermaphrodite.
Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists
sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between
men and planets, plants and gestures, words and
weather. These disturbing connections: an in-
fant's cry and the stroke of silk; the whorl
of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard;
a woman's head lowered in sleep and the morning
dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which
transcend the sterile signal of any "willed"
montage. These juxtapositions of objects, sounds,
actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine
in an unheard-of way, impossible ways.
Film is nothing when not an illumination of
this chain of being which makes a needle poised
in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter,
which gives each thing its special divinity and
sees gods in all things and beings
Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge
or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can
only try to enslave others. But gradually, special
perceptions are being developed. The idea of the
"Lords" is beginning to form in some. We
should enlist them into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious noc-
turnal appearences. The Lords have secret entrances,
and they know disguises. But they give themselves
away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in
the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a
glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us
books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Es-
pecially the cinemas. Through art they confuse
us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns
our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted
and indifferent.
“TV is the invisible shield against bare reality. Twentieth century culture’s disease is the inability to feel reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, rock idols and they have wild emotions over symbols; but in the reality of their own lives, they’re emotionally dead.” (Jim Morrison, 1969, quoted in: Andrew Doe & John Tobler, o.c., p. 85)