Shapes of Things to Come
The Beginnings of Movie Magic, Illuminated by Lantern Light

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 1, 2007

Watching Herman Bollaert and his crew of projectionists manipulate his 19th-century magic lantern is a bit like watching a very old and finicky sailboat being steered into the wind. There is a lot of fussing and fiddling, turning and cranking, all in the service of a charmingly antiquated technology. If you would rather take a powerboat than sail, or watch "The Matrix" on DVD than spend an evening with hand-painted slides of country cottages and windmills, there's really no point in showing up this evening at the French Embassy, where Bollaert and his Belgian troupe of musicians and lanternists are performing a bit of visual archaeology.

Bollaert's contraption, a three-lens wooden box from 1880, was made during the great era of magic-lantern shows. Its basic technology was in use during the 17th century, and quite possibly much, much earlier. But in the 19th century, with the growth of all forms of popular entertainment, lanterns became the precursors of the cinema. Slides with moving parts created special effects. Popular novels were presented in narrated slide shows, and science was taught to professionals and amateurs alike through projected images. Musicians often accompanied such popular entertainments, which could include a survey of historic places, short parables and stories, religious spectacles and Gothic horror shows.

The technology was basic -- limelight (made by superheated limestone) or kerosene flames were used to project the images onto screens -- but its impact was long-lasting. The magic lantern enjoyed popularity well into the 20th century, fading only as cinema took over. It persisted in the form of school slide shows and filmstrips, and is still the animating spirit behind projected PowerPoint presentations. Whole generations of Americans got their first glimpse of human sex organs in health class through a filmstrip projector -- a descendant of Bollaert's machine -- which cast lurid pictures into the semi-darkness, into a room of tittering, blushing and sometimes salivating adolescents.

Bollaert's show is more innocent. The Belgian lanternist trained to be an actor and director, but got hooked on magic lanterns when he discovered a toy model decades ago. Maybe it was 1950, or 1960, he can't remember. An indifference to precise dates seems emblematic of someone who has devoted his life to living in the past.

"This is a very rare object," he says of his machine. "It is very difficult to find a piece like this."

Yesterday he presented 160 slides and other special effects, with a handful of musicians performing onstage by candlelight. It ended with a singalong led by Bollaert, who was dressed in a whimsical and natty old outfit, looking as if he had just wandered off the set of a vaudeville act. The band (piano, trumpet and clarinet) played a pastiche of old favorites. On-screen, bees buzzed around a hive to strains of Rimsky-Korsakov, a water mill turned to the triplets of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata.

The show is a series of effects and short vignettes. Some of them are so simple they sound like basic signifiers of some archaic visual language. "Woman Unmasks." "Man Juggles." "Building Burns." "Mouse Jumps Into Mouth of Snoring Man." When cinema first solved the problem of making photographic images move on-screen, the results were almost as basic: Men leave building, train crashes, woman dances.

And yet, even in the rudimentary gestures of the magic lantern, you see the beginnings of montage, the language of editing images that is now so familiar we can hardly see its operation. In a series of slides depicting the Greek cynic Diogenes being tormented by two malicious little boys, we see the philosopher being rolled in his barrel in multiple slides from various angles, the kind of visual prolongation and elaboration that would become essential to cinematic storytelling.

The most sumptuous of Bollaert's effects was a 10-slide series of kaleidoscope images, colored wheels and flowers and morphing shapes, choreographed into a long dance that is trippy still, all these years later. His simplest slides were static painted or photographed images.

Perhaps the most effective are the ones that are structured like songs, simple progressions that mimic the basic, one-idea form of a short chanson. The seasons change. The moon comes out. The sails of a windmill turn. Often the imagery is as bluntly sentimental as a painting by Thomas Kinkade. But there is nothing like a century of distance to add poetry to what would be banal today, and many of these painted and moving images have a strangely lyrical quality.

All of this would be just arcana from the past, except that the magic lantern has become a fetish object for intellectuals. Early in his vast and navel-gazing novel "Remembrance of Things Past," Marcel Proust includes a long passage about a toy magic lantern that once cast shadows of knights and heroines on the wall of his bedroom. Whole books have been written unpacking this metaphor, which seems to presage the events of a novel in which the illusions of life are stripped away in favor of a more prosaic but real world, constructed through the memory and sensation and psychic buzzings known only to one man (and that man dying).

Proust was hardly the first to the gate. Philosophers of the 18th century who were wrestling with the basic questions of perception and consciousness flocked to the magic lantern for analogies. For some, the projected images were the essence of falseness, the very sort of thing philosophy should dispel. For Arthur Schopenhauer, in the 19th century, the magic lantern was a metaphor for his weirdly Eastern idea that while the world is made up of a multiplicity of images and objects and things, they are all manifestations of something singular and unitary. The slides are us and everything around us; the light source was the primal, unifying thing, an idea he called "will."

It's difficult to coax the contemporary mind into the position of someone of two or three centuries ago, who found the basic images projected by lanterns to be amazingly lifelike (aesthetically), emotionally powerful (artistically) and profoundly troubling (philosophically). But like the water wheel set turning by Bollaert's expert hand, things will come full circle. With the rise of ever more complex virtual realities, once again the philosophical mind is set puzzling over the nature of the real. But now, in our world of Xboxes and Wii consoles, one is hardly aware of the machine that creates the representation, there is no tactile connection between the image and its master, and the boat of illusions sails forth with no hands on deck.

The Lanterna Magica Galantee Show will be repeated tonight at 7 at the French Embassy, 4101 Reservoir Rd. NW. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online at http://www.la-maison-francaise.org.