Moheard's Blog

Stephen and I started a modest publishing enterprise The Projection Box in 1995 at the time of the Centenary of Cinema celebrations. Stephen is an expert in pre-cinema and early film — the hardware rather than the motion pictures themselves.  (He’s recently been advising on cinematic props for Martin Scorsese’s new film The Invention of Hugo Cabret.) We published monographs by other specialists, such as the history of the Kinora — a home viewing device available around 1912 — and Phantasmagoria, the story of ghost projection.

We’re members of The Magic Lantern Society, a group of people from around the world who are interested in not only lanterns, but other myriad optical inventions from before cinema was born. Early projection has a fascinating history, and even what we call today, optical toys, were marvels in their time, studied and analysed in learned terms by philosophers, academics and mathematicians. Zoetropes, phenakistiscopes, flip books, all give the impression of movement. You might be amazed at the hundreds of designs for children’s film projectors, most of which use different methods to throw a moving picture (or usually a series of still images) onto the wall / sheet / ceiling.

Although it was not a projector, I was given a present of a small blue plastic television toy for one birthday. I had to wind a short piece of film round, with each frame appearing in sequence on the screen. My television set couldn’t show a movie but it was still a desirable object – and remains so still in my memory.

To see a magic lantern show is a wonder of wonders! Our friend Mervyn Heard (no relation) presents brilliant shows around the world — he is one of the best performers we have in this country, and has performed at most of the major London art galleries, as well as in a Tokyo department store! Find out more on his website: http://www.heard.supanet.com

The subjects of the glass pictures (slides) used in the magic lantern, cover anything you could think of: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, Temperance dramas, raging conflagrations, angels in heaven, erupting volcanoes, travel, astronomy, even pornography!

Many slides reproduce movement by using various mechanisms; thus we can see eyes swivel, a nose grow longer, a skeleton frantically dance, fishes swimming in a bowl. Bodies are comically decapitated, windmill sails turn, swans dip beaks into a stream, day turns into night and the lamps are lit in cottage windows, ghosts appear through walls, and beautiful flowers wither and die. Today, we can imagine the nineteenth-century audiences enthralled by the travelling lanternist and his patter. Other visual amusements were the itinerant showman’s peepshow: peer into the mysterious darkened box to see changing scenes of wondrous delight revealed, artfully manipulated by strings and flaps.

The cover of this book published by the Magic Lantern Society, incorporates a slide of a ferocious tiger. (Sorry, the title is no longer available.)

http://www.magiclantern.org.uk