Simone Natale, “A short history of superimposition: From spirit photography to early cinema.” Early Popular Visual Culture 10.2 (2012): 125-145. (Author’s draft)
A short history of superimposition: From spirit photography to early cinema Simone Natale, University of Cologne, Germany
Abstract
As several scholars have noted, the use of superimposition effects in cinema to conjure such apparitions as ghosts, fairies, devils, and other fantastic creatures finds a significant precedent in spirit photography, a spiritualist practice by which the image of one or more spirits was “magically” captured on a photographic plate. However, arguing for a relationship of direct filiation between spirit photography and the tricks employed in film remains problematic, especially given that spirit pictures were entangled with matters of religious belief. This article calls for a more solid insertion of spiritualism’s visual culture into the pre-history of film practice, giving three main cases in support of the relationship between spirit
photography and early cinema. Firstly, the commercial use of spirit photographs within the spiritualist movement suggests that the circulation of these images was not exclusively informed by matters of belief. Secondly, the popularization of exposures of spirit photography operated by numerous stage magicians in the late nineteenth century can contribute towards explaining the insertion of multiple-exposure techniques in the technical expertise of early filmmakers. Thirdly, a documented case in which spirit photographs were presented to a paying public in the vein of magic lantern entertainments demonstrates that the spiritualist visual culture intersected the nineteenth-century tradition of the projected image, too. Thus, by sketching a history of superimposition effects in photography, stage magic, magic lantern, and cinema, this article claims that visual representations of ghosts in the
nineteenth century constantly wavered between religion and spectacle, fiction and realism, and still and moving pictures.
Keywords: spirit photography; magic lantern; spiritualism; stage magic; trick movie; trick photography; early cinema; nineteenth century.
In 1946, André Bazin published an essay in the French journal L’Ecran français titled “The Life and Death of Superimposition.” This short critical piece, based on the analysis of the special effects employed in three American films - Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), Sam Wood’s Our Town (1940) and Garson Kanin’s Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) - sketched a history of the use of superimposition in cinema from Méliès’ trick films to the filmic production of Bazin’s time. In this chapter, a similar task will be undertaken.
Differently from Bazin, however, this history of superimposition will start before Méliès, and even before the invention of cinema. The underlying argument is that the visual device that involved the superimposing of ghostly apparitions on a given background cannot be
understood by looking at the history of photography or at cinema alone. In order to be told, this history demands what Lynda Nead has called “an integrated approach to visual media” (2007, 2), that moves beyond the use of an interdisciplinary framework to focus on the connections and spaces across media.
In the 1860s, more than a decade after the emergence of the spiritualist movement, a new genre of spirit manifestations was established: spirit photography. This phenomenon was not based on the capacity of the photographic medium to document what is visible to the human eye. On the contrary, spirit photographs were presented as the result of photography’s purported unsettling and uncanny faculty to detect the image of spirits that were among us, but went undetected by the human senses. Just like trance mediums, the visual medium of
photography was able to access the spirit world, offering to spiritualist believers the possibility to receive a post-mortem portrait of their beloved.
As it was soon pointed out by expert photographers and other sceptics, however, this apparently extraordinary phenomenon could be explained as the product of a simple
photographic trick or accident. Most notably, critics pointed to multiple exposure and other superimposition techniques that were of common use in photographic practice. Fake “spirit” photographs were produced to demonstrate the trickery that had been employed in
spiritualism. During the second half of the nineteenth century, photographic images that featured a superimposed element were at times believed to be real manifestations of the existence of spirits and ghosts, at times debunked as a photographic trick, at times used for their entertaining and spectacular effect. Following the emergence of film, multiple-exposure imagery became a common way to render on the screen the apparition of ghosts and the occurrence of dreams and visions. This article explores the circulation of a photographic technique -multiple exposure- and a visual effect -superimposition- in spiritualism, stage magic, magic-lantern projection, photography and cinema.
The trajectory from spirit photography to the motion picture found a symbolic
expression at the very beginning of the film era. As Matthew Solomon has noted (2010), one of the first books ever published on the moving photographic image, W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson’s History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-phonograph, published in 1895, included a curious illustration, labelled “Photography Extraordinary.” It was, in the tradition of mocked-up spirit photographs, a photographic portrait of Dickson with a spectral double behind him (fig. 1). Dickson, a photography specialist in Edison’s laboratory, had contributed to the invention of the first commercial moving-picture technology, the kinetograph (and its viewing device, the kinetoscope). It was probably to acknowledge cinema’s debts to photography, which had played the role, as he put it, of “the birthplace and
nursery of the kinetoscope” (2000, 19), that he and his wife inserted this image in the book. It is intriguing, however, to read it as a dedication to the visual technique of superimposition. Dickson’s spirit was just a sample of the ghosts that multiple exposure would eventually conjure through its new dimension, the moving photographic image.
[INSERT FIG. 1 HERE]
Fig. 1. A page from William Kennedy Laurie and Antonia Dickson’s History of the kinetograph, kinetoscope, and kinetophonograph (1895), illustrated with a fake spirit photograph.
Several scholars, including François Jost (1998), Matthew Solomon (2003, 2010), Karen Beckman (2003), Lynda Nead (2007), and Tom Gunning (2007), have recognized the debts of early cinema, and of the trick movie genre in particular, to the iconography of spirit photography. Effort has not been made, however, to understand how images that were considered truthful manifestation of spirits by believers could be linked to cinema, a technology that, notwithstanding the apocryphal anecdotes regarding early cinematic
audiences panicking before the image of an oncoming train (Bottomore 1999), did not attract the same kind of faith. In this regard, this article gives three insights supporting the
connection between spirit photography and early film tricks. First, the fact that spirit photographs were a widely commercialized commodity within the spiritualist movement suggests that its use was not exclusively concerned with matters of belief. Thus, spirit photography can also be considered a visual attraction, capable of attracting the curiosity of spiritualists and non-spiritualists alike. Second, multiple-exposure techniques used to produce these kinds of images were popularized by stage magicians in the second half of the
nineteenth century, with the aim of debunking spirit photography as a mere photographic trick. The insertion of superimposition techniques in the history of stage magic, a tradition that was central to the formation of many early filmmakers (Barnouw 1981), might help
explain why such practices were so productively replicated in the trick film genre. Finally, a documented case in which spirit photographs were presented to a paying public as a kind of magic-lantern show demonstrates that spirit photography, before the introduction of cinema, interacted with the nineteenth-century tradition of the projected image.
The circulation of superimposition in multiple technological and cultural contexts contributed to shape it as a body of technologies and knowledge that wavered between realism and fantasy, stasis and movement, fiction and belief. Since the 1850s, when David Brewster described a trick to produce the photograph of a spectre and the London
Stereoscopic Company started to produce a series called “The Ghost in the Stereoscope”, superimposition was displaced through a number of technologies and cultural environments, including spiritualism, trick photography, magic lantern, and stage magic. Comparable images, produced through similar means, were presented in these various contexts as an audacious trick, the demonstration of the existence of spirits, or a way to visualize dreaming. It was this displacement into different technological and cultural worlds that ultimately fixed the meaning of superimposition at the intersection of spiritualism and magic, photography and cinema, realism and fantasy. Following the visual technique of superimposition in the worlds of photographic and projected images, from Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s
phantasmagoria to William Mumler’s spirit photographs, from photographic amusements to stage magic and the trick film, I will look at superimposition as a kind of visual medium in its own right. Despite its being continuously reinvented and reconstructed, its history reveals the trajectory of a visual culture that was haunted by ghosts, dreams, visions, and the
contradictory status of the photographic image.
A visual commodity
spirit manifestation had been “discovered” by an engraver from Boston, William Mumler. Mumler, as the readers of the spiritualist journal The Banner of Light came to discover, had been able for the first time in history to produce the photograph of a spirit (Child 1862). In the following months, he opened a photographic studio in Boston, where paying sitters were offered the opportunity to be photographed in company of the spirit of deceased relatives and friend. Seven years later, in 1869, as Mumler was brought to trial for fraud in New York and the news spread in the American press, spirit photography became widely known also beyond the boundaries of the spiritualist movement. While Mumler was declared innocent, the prosecutors having failed to explain with certainty which procedure Mumler used to perform the trick, the trial succeeded in making spirit photography an issue for public debate. Spirit photography became a hot item in the New York daily press and in widely circulating national magazines including Harper’s Weekly (Kaplan 2008). Probably stimulated by the impressive popularity of Mumler’s case, others followed his example, producing photographs of spirits in the United States, Britain, and France in the subsequent decades (Coates 1911, 57). Although repeatedly exposed as a mere photographic trick, spirit photography remained a very relevant practice within the spiritualist field for decades, starting to decline in
popularity only in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Literature dealing with spiritualism’s connections to visual media tends to see photog-raphy as an evidentiary medium, through which spiritualists searched for a tangible confirma-tion of the trustworthiness of their faith (Harvey 2007; Jolly 2006; Chéroux et al. 2005).1
Film, by contrast, is usually regarded as working on the level of fantasy and narration, conjur-ing images of ghosts only to embed them in a fictional world that, implicitly or explicitly, de-nies their reality. As Matthew Solomon has noted, “cinematography was very rarely made into a tool for psychical research” (2010, 24). However, as contemporary scholarship has highlighted, photography’s evidentiary status in the nineteenth century was not as
unchal-lenged as we tended to think. Authors such as Jennifer Tucker (2005), Jennifer L. Mnookin (1998), and Michael Leja (2004) have demonstrated that the images produced by Mumler and other spirit photographers stimulated a lively debate on the manipulability of the photo-graphic image in the nineteenth century. Tucker, in particular, argues that this controversy “made the issues of trust in photographic production visible to a wider Victorian public and focused attention as never before on the necessary qualifications to make authentic photo-graphs” (124). Furthermore, spiritualist sources reveal that the attitude of believers in spirit communication toward photographic technologies was ambivalent, too. Photography was considered, also and perhaps especially within the spiritualist movement, as a problematic ev-idence form and as a highly manipulable technology. Spiritualist publications frequently rec-ognized the possibility of producing images of “ghosts” by purely technical, non-spiritual means (Fritz 1873, 81). Many spiritualist leaders and mediums openly criticized the practice of spirit photography: this is the case, for instance, of the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who overtly explained how to produce spirit photographs through optical tricks (1877, 360-366).
Therefore, if photography was often employed by spiritualists to provide evidence supporting their claims, its use within the spiritualist movement is much more complex than usually acknowledged. As I have shown elsewhere, nineteenth-century spiritualism was a matter not only of religious and superstitious beliefs, but also of entertainment and spectacle: mediums often performed on the theatrical stage, before a paying public, and even private séances had a high degree of dramatization (Natale 2011). This was also the case with spirit photography. Spirit photographs were also visual attractions, and could be regarded as a cu-riosity by spiritualists and non-spiritualists alike. We should remember that photography –es-pecially after the positive-negative process became dominant- is a commodity that can be easily reproduced and commercialized. It is perhaps for this reason that, as historian of
spiri-tualism Robert S. Cox has noted, while spiritualist séances were sometimes performed pri-vately without charging a fee, non-commercial instances of spirit photography are virtually non-existent (2003, 134). As a commercial commodity, spirit photography circulated within the channels of spiritualist circles and communities and was frequently advertised in spiritual-ist journals. For instance, in 1882 copies of “Recognized Spirit-Photographs” could be ac-quired at the price of 1s. each by the readers of the London spiritualist magazine Medium and Daybreak (Anon. 1882). The commercialization of spirit pictures also concerned, to a certain extent, those who were not involved in spiritualism: the American showman P.T. Barnum, for one, had acquired some prints of Mumler’s photographs for his American Museum, where all genres of visual curiosities were exhibited, a few years before the photographer’s famous New York trial (Barnum 1866, 117).
In this sense, the representation of ghosts in visual media can be followed through the still and the moving image as a trajectory in which fictional and purportedly “real” appari-tions of ghosts mutually reinforced their appeal with a public of sitters, viewers and, ulti-mately, spectators. Although spirit photographs were believed by many to be truly manifesta-tions of spirit agency, they were seen by others as a curiosity, rather than as an object of faith. As I will show, late-nineteenth-century numerous attempts to debunk this spiritualist tech-nique further testify to this merging of spectacle with religious and superstitious belief.
Debunking spirit photography
The advent of spiritualism in the nineteenth century resulted not only in a craze for spirit séances, but also in an unprecedented effort on the part of sceptics to expose beliefs in ghosts as superstition and fraud. This enlightening attempt gave rise to an impressive body of publications (see Natale 2010). In this context, spirit photography was demystified as a
photographic trick, and fake spirit photographs were described as the result of multiple exposure and other techniques for the purpose of exposing the dishonesty of mediums.
Applications of trick photography to produce illusions of magical appearance were known as “photographic amusements” during the second half of the nineteenth century. An article published in the British Journal of Photography included in the category of
photographic amusements “an extended class of effects, produced by the aid of the camera, which, in their complete state, serve to excite the curiosity or the amusement of the public, and in some measure to justify the occasionally-lengthy correspondence which we have seen in our scientific journals to explain and account for them” (Statham 1880, 79). In this context, prior to Mumler’s introduction of this phenomenon into the spiritualist world, the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, one of the main characters involved in the mid-nineteenth century popularization of stereoscopic photography, suggested a technique to produce, “for the purpose of amusement” (1856, 205), an effect similar to spirit photography. Following Brewster’s suggestion, ante-litteram spirit photographs were successively produced: the “Ghost in the stereoscope” series, for instance, were a series of stereoscopic prints of this kind that was commercialized in the 1850s.2 But the introduction of spirit photography in the
1860s altered the context for use and production of these images. Photographs in the style of the “ghost in the stereoscope” series were now explicitly linked to spiritualism, and the purpose of amusement came together with the moral duty of exposing superstition and gullibility.
[INSERT FIG 2 HERE]
Fig. 2. A “spirit” photograph. From: Hopkins, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. New York: Munn & Co., 1897.
During the late nineteenth century, photographic tricks were often described in popular scientific publications such as Scientific American or the French journal La Nature,
that published a series of articles later collected in Hopkins’ Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (1897). Containing the explanation of a number of illusory techniques taken from stage magic and prestidigitation, this book went through several editions at the turn of the century. It included chapters on chronophotography and the projection of moving pictures and an entire section dedicated to popular
“photographic diversions.” Also, a well-detailed explanation of how to perform the photographs of so-called spirits was given, in the hope that “they will be made merely for amusement, and, if possible, to expose persons who practice on the gullibility of experienced persons” (435). Engravings illustrated how multiple exposure could be used to produce so-called spirit photographs (fig. 2), as well as other photographic illusions (fig. 3-5).
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Fig. 3. “Composite Photograph in Two Poses, at Different Distances, on the Same Plate.” From: Hopkins, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. New York: Munn & Co., 1897.
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Fig. 4. “Facsimile of a Composite Photograph.” From: Hopkins, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. New York: Munn & Co., 1897.
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Fig. 5. “Group in Open Air, in Two Different Poses on One Plate.” From: Hopkins, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. New York: Munn & Co., 1897.
The main context for imitations of spirit photography was stage magic. After the rise of the spiritualist movement in the middle nineteenth century, magicians engaged in the polemical attempt to demonstrate that behind the craze for spirit séances was concealed the
trickery of fraudulent mediums. Pointing out that their knowledge in illusionism and optics allowed them to recognize and explain spirit séances, stage conjurors exploited the
fascination for the supernatural, often performing on the stage a kind of anti-spiritualist show that aimed to reproduce technically the “phenomena” of spiritualism. Although spirit
photography could not be conveniently exhibited on the magic stage, exposés of this
spiritualist practice can be found in several printed sources that were published in connection to magicians’ debunking of spiritualism. In contrast to their stage shows, these images broke with the magicians’ tradition of live performance. Instead of being produced in real time through mirror or hidden projections, the ghostly illusion was now conjured with the photographic medium. The effect, however, was not less spectacular. A particularly interesting example of this anti-spiritualist spirit photography is the engraving used as frontispiece for The supernatural?, an 1891 book that featured a chapter on modern spiritualism written by the prominent English magician John Nevil Maskelyne. In this
ironical and symbolic picture, the “spirit” of John Nevil Maskelyne appears beside the author of the book, Lionel A. Weatherly, as if intending to clasp his hand (fig. 6). In the text, it was Maskelyne himself who explained how these images could be produced, pointing to two possible tricks: “double-printing”, which involved the superimposition of two negatives on the same print, and “double-exposure”, a technique that followed the method illustrated by Brewster. In both cases, the second exposure or print was too brief for the image to be fully fixed. The result, Maskelyne explained, was that “whilst all else is sharp and well-defined, the ‘spirit’ is represented by a hazy outline, through which all that is behind it shows. There is nothing very ‘spiritual’ about this, is there?” (1891, 203-204).
[INSERT FIG 6 HERE]
Fig. 6. “A Spirit Photograph: The Wraith of Mr. Maskelyne Appearing to Dr. Weatherly,” frontispiece. F: Weatherly, Lionel A. The Supernatural? Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1891.
Among other fake spirit photographs made by magicians are the two images
published in Carl Willman’s 1886 Moderne Wunder [Modern Wonders]. Willman, a German watchmaker and amateur magician, wrote several books on stage magic and was engaged in exposing spiritualist trickery, and in Moderne Wunder he made clear that such “spirit” photographs were produced through fully explainable, artificial means (1886, 211). The first engraving, titled “Jacoby in the realm of his ghosts (so-called spirit photography)”, was a relatively conventional image in which the magician Jacoby seemed frightened before a spectral apparition (fig. 7). The other, “The liberation of the prestidigitator Jacoby”, involved a more complicated multiple exposure, incorporating apparitions of a ghost, a skull, and a levitating hand (fig. 8). This illustration seems to play ironically with the tradition of escape art, which had been practiced in spiritualism by the Davenport Brothers, and in magic by a number of showmen, including the American Harry Houdini, who would eventually make it his most successful feat at the beginning of the twentieth century.
[INSERT FIG 7 HERE]
Fig. 7. “Jacoby im Reiche seiner Geister: Sogenannte Geister-Photographier” (“Jacoby in the Realm of his Spirits: So-Called Spirit Photography”). From: Willmann, Carl. Moderne Wunder: Natürliche Erklärung der älteren wie neueren Geheimnisse der Spiritisten und Antispiritisten, Geisterritieren, Hellseher, Gedankenleser, Heilmedien, Mnemotechniker und Rechenkünstler. Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1886; 212.
Magicians and other opponents of spiritualism kept alive the debunking of spirit photography as multiple exposure well beyond the end of the nineteenth century. This tradition also contributed to the questioning of photography’s claims of objectivity, and continued to foreground the ability of this medium to create fictional worlds and also, in cases when there was the intent to deceive, to lie. As a debunker of spiritualism pointed out some years later, “so unreliable I consider any photograph to which is attached the slightest
taint of spiritualism, that when in this connection I have been asked, ‘Can a photograph lie?,’ I have frequently replied, ‘A spirit photograph is absolutely unable to speak the truth’” (Fawkes 1920, 99).
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Fig. 8. “Die Entfesselung der Prestidigitateurs Jacoby” (“The Liberation of the Prestidigitator Jacoby”). From: Willmann, Carl. Moderne Wunder: Natürliche Erklärung der älteren wie neueren Geheimnisse der Spiritisten und Antispiritisten, Geisterritieren, Hellseher, Gedankenleser, Heilmedien, Mnemotechniker und Rechenkünstler. Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1886; 66.
Projecting ghosts
The history of superimposition is connected not only with the photographic medium, but also with the projected image. During the nineteenth century, the technology of magic-lantern projection developed as a spectacular, recreational, and didactical means. In this process, a number of techniques were introduced to create visual effects that could stimulate the wonder and the attention of its spectator. One of these, involving the employment of two magic lanterns to superpose a figure on a background, has been compared to the use of
superimposition in early cinema (Mannoni 2002, 50). This, however, was not the only means by which superimposition intertwined with the projection of images. Magic lanterns were used for the projection of photographic images that featured the trick of multiple exposure, and in at least one case, as I will show, they were used for the projection of spirit
photographs, too.
The technique of superposing one image over the other had been common in magic lantern shows at least since the spectacles of phantasmagoria popularized by Etiénne Gaspard Robertson in the 1790s. Playing on the uncanny relationship between the projected images
and the apparitions of ghosts, Robertson staged his performances in the lugubrious rooms of an abandoned chapel in the Couvent des Capucines in Paris. Although he presented his shows as a spectacle, and introduced them with a warning against superstition and impostors, Robertson’s phantasmagoria played with the fascination for the worlds of the supernatural and the occult. The concealment of the projector, which remained invisible to the spectators, contributed to creating the mysterious atmosphere of these spectacles. He used multiple visual effects, such as dissolves and the illusion of movement, which he obtained through the means of mechanical slides and by moving the lantern forward and back, making an image seemingly approaching the spectator.3 The figures were sometimes projected onto smoke,
creating the effect that the apparitions were floating over the audience.
Superimposition in Robertson’s phantasmagoria was performed through the use of two projectors. The first lantern usually provided the background, while the other was mobile, and could produce the illusion that the apparition, often a ghost or a skeleton, was moving toward the public. This trick was often used by lanternists in the nineteenth century, building a long tradition of superimposition with the magic lantern (Barber 1989), and a similar technique was involved in the illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost, that was first presented at London’s Royal Polytechnic in 1863 and combined real actors and projected images (Brooker 2007).
The employment of a dark background in the superimposition trick is common to magic lantern projections and spirit photography. In early cinema, filmmakers such as Georges Méliès would eventually adopt the same procedure: in Le Mélomane [The Melomaniac] (1903), for instance, the dark background allows Méliès to make his heads appear on the musical staff in the top part of the screen. The common use of superimposition in magic lantern shows may have played a role in the establishment of superimposition in early film. Indeed, as Deac Rossell (1998, 153), among others, has documented, many
pioneers and early practitioners of the moving image had a background in the art of lantern projection.
The magic lantern was also used to project photographic superimpositions. In April 1882, the spiritualist journal Medium and Daybreak published the report of an evening ceremony organized in London to celebrate the thirty-fourth anniversary of modern
spiritualism. It was, according to this report, “a general meeting of British spiritualists” that gathered together representatives of many spiritualist communities outside the capital. The Neumeyer Hall, which had been chosen to host the celebration, was soon crammed to capacity; chairs had to be placed in every available space to accommodate the number of visitors. For those who had not reserved a place, ordinary tickets were sold at the entrance, where the pressure of the crowd became quite intense. But neither the delay nor the
discomfort of the line could ruin the atmosphere of the gathering; as the reporter put it, “on the contrary the principle of love seemed to dominate so completely that it was a pleasure to press the one against the other” (Anon. 1882a, 257).
A solo pianist inaugurated the evening’s entertainment. After this musical
introduction, the programme went on with the introductory addresses of the celebration’s committee, the performance of a vocalist, “through whose voice the spirit world seems to breathe its harmonies” (258), and two trance lectures performed by spiritualist mediums. Then, it was time for the principal attraction, spirit photography. A lantern-slide operator, Mr. Middleton,4 set up the projection, while a piano player furnished musical accompaniment.
Lights were turned off in order to ensure a suitable condition for the projection. When the images started to be projected, James Burns, the editor of the Medium and Daybreak, acted as presenter, introducing every slide with his “descriptive remarks.” The projection included some illustrations and photographs that represented the salient moments in the history of spiritualism during the past decades, as well as a few samples of manifestations, such as slate
writing and direct drawing. But the attention soon turned toward spirit photographs. The first series of images of this kind was titled “The Substance of which Spirit-Photographs are made” (260) and included some photographs of mediums with a halo of light over their hands or body, a phenomenon that, according to Burns, modern science had been unable to explain. The next sequence, which, with thirty-seven images, accounted for the majority of the slides, exhibited the spirit photographs of Frederick Hudson, whose reproduction had been
repeatedly offered on sale to the readers of the Medium and Daybreak. A few examples of spirit images made by other photographers, among them some by William Mumler, completed the forty-minute-long projection, which was followed by a speech from the medium Georgiana Houghton and by a few words of thanks from Hudson.
While in the case of the phantasmagoria and other spectacular uses of magic lantern tricks the illusion – or, in the believer’s perspective, the spirit manifestation – took place right before the spectator, the projection of spirit photography is in a certain regard a different case, since the manipulation preceded the show, having been produced by the camera while taking the photograph and not directly before the audience of the Neumeyer Hall. The magic lantern was employed to project on the stage images that had been previously made: it was not used to conjure the superimposition effect, nor was involved in the reputedly supernatural phenomenon. The audience, however, did not seem to be completely aware of this
distinction. Reportedly, the magic lantern spiritualist show was seen by many as a mystic event. As the reporter stated, “the darkness which prevailed during the exhibition was very favourable for the exercise of the clairvoyance” (263), and several among the public claimed to have seen visions of spirits, or to have felt the presence of them. The account in the Medium and Daybreak mentioned a spectator affirming to have seen the apparition of a horseman, over whose head six different spirits of different nationalities were hovering. Apparently, then, a trace of the supernatural presence which, according to the spiritualists’
claims, had produced the images was believed to be carried also in the slides projected before the audience. This might suggest that not only the photograph as a concrete object, but also the visual representation as such, regardless of the medium employed to show it, was believed to be of spiritualist meaning.
The account of this event, apart from providing proof of the richness of the spiritualist visual culture, demonstrates that at least on one occasion – although the use of a consistent number of magic-lantern glass slides featuring spirit photographs in the London celebrative evening show indicate there could have been more events of this kind – spirit photography intertwined with the technology of the projected image. Although the author of the report insisted that “the sole purpose” of the evening was “the work of the angel-world amongst humanity” (257), the gathering of the London spiritualist community was presented as a highly spectacular event, with the public taking part in a performance that resembled not only magic-lantern shows of the time, but also the spectacular situation of early film shows. In fact, some of the conditions of display that were highlighted by the author of this report, such as the darkness of the room, the musical accompaniment, the paying public, and the presence of a presenter who gave commentaries and explanations, came to be customary some decades later for the projection of films.
Towards the trick movie
In early cinema, the technique of multiple exposure was successfully introduced in a genre, the trick film, that rose to great popularity during the first years of the moving image. It was particularly the involvement of filmmakers who were implicated in the tradition of stage magic that contributed to popularizing this technique in film production. Through their creative solutions, photographic tricks were applied to the new moving images, and new tricks, such as substitution splicing, were successfully established. Multiple exposure was
used to produce several different effects, including dissolves, replications of characters or objects, superimpositions and transparencies.
Bazin’s essay on superimposition opened with a consideration of the coexistence of realism and fantasy on the cinematic screen. “The fantastic in the cinema,” he argued, “is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic image. It is the image that can bring us face to face with the unreal, that can introduce the unreal into the world of the visible.” As an example, Bazin mentioned James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), arguing that as an animated film it would have immediately lost all interest, since what appealed to the audience was “the contradiction between the irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image and the unbelievable nature of the events that it depicts” (2002). The observation that realism is needed to bring the viewer into the world of fantasy could be applied to the history of superimposition before cinema. The most astounding paradox of this technique is that it was regarded at the same time as a spirit manifestation by spiritualists and as a mere trick by magicians, expert photographers, and sceptics in general. In this sense, superimposition brought to cinema what Dan North called “the synthesis between
photographic similitude and its fantastic, transformative effect” (2008, 49). The fact that multiple exposure was used in two contexts, spiritualism and magic, exploiting respectively its realist and its fantastic power, may explain the fascination of early filmmakers with this technique and its extensive employment in the trick film.
The relationship between stage magic and early cinema has been increasingly acknowledged in film history. As Erik Barnouw, the author of a pioneering work on this topic, put it, given the extent to which professional magicians relied on technical means and magic lantern projection to perform their tricks, it is not surprising that the debut of
Lumières’ cinématographe “set off a gold rush” in the magic arena (38). Practicing theatrical conjurers such as Gaston Velle, Walter Booth, J. Stuart Blackton, Albert E. Smith, Georges
Méliès, and many others, were among the first motion picture exhibitionists and filmmakers; magic theatres, such as the Egyptian Hall in London, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin and the Théâtre Isola in Paris, were among the places where the earliest projection with
cinematographic devices took place, and Tom Gunning (1989, 10), Lucy Fischer (1979), Simon During (2002, 135-177), and Karen Beckman (2003), among others, have all posited that many spectators of the time experienced cinema as a kind of magic show.
Notwithstanding Matthew Solomon’s convincing demonstration that magic dialogued with cinema well beyond the novelty period (2010, 1-10), the most relevant contribution of stage magic to film practice is certainly the trick film. Trick films were composed of a series of apparitions, transformations, and magical attractions that aimed at astonishing the
spectator with the visual wonder of complex visual tricks. Especially in the earliest years, they did not rely on a convincing narrative plot, but on a series of magical attractions that were performed through photographic tricks such as substitution splicing and multiple exposure. Filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, a professional stage magician who owned the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, and George Albert Smith, who produced a number of films of this genre in Britain, were the protagonists of this genre. Devils, fairies, skeletons and ghosts were, alongside the stage magician who was often the protagonist of these short movies, the figures that populated this imaginary world.
Images such as those technically created by Maskelyne and Willman demonstrate that photographic tricks were in use in the world of magic and illusionism well before the
invention of cinema. The exposure of spirit photography can thus be seen as evidence of the pre-cinematic involvement of stage magicians in the art of chemicals, dark rooms, and photographic manipulation, an art that was at the root of the success in early cinema of magicians such as Méliès and Smith. It is probably not a coincidence that multiple exposure and other dark-room tricks were first popularized in the motion picture by those filmmakers
who came to film production from the stage magic profession, and who were particularly aware of the artifices used by spiritualist mediums.
In 1898, the British pioneer of trick film George Albert Smith produced a film called Photographing a Ghost. Although no copies of the original film have been preserved,
Smith’s catalogue description offers insight into its simple plot that involved the comical and unfortunate attempt of a photographer to take the picture of a spirit (Chanan 1996, 117-118). The text mentioned that the ghost was perfectly transparent, so that the background was visible behind him, and that the ghost also kept disappearing and reappearing. Smith, who, before becoming involved in film production, had been a magic lanternist, a portrait photographer, and a stage hypnotist, and took part in the Society for Psychical Research’s experiments on hypnotism and thought-reading (Gray 1998), certainly had a career trajectory that was reminiscent of the spiritualist practitioners of spirit photography. The catalogue description suggests that he used multiple exposure to insert the transparent image of the spectre into the scene, performing through the moving photograph something similar to what Mumler and other spirit photographers had been doing with the still image. In other films of the same period, Smith skilfully exploited superimposition tricks, and he even obtained a patent for double exposure (Brosnan 1974, 11), which he used for representing a ghost and a vision in his film The Corsican Brothers. According to Frank Gray, he was the first British filmmaker to render ghost illusions and vision scenes through multiple exposure (Gray 2000, 177).
Georges Méliès was also involved in the tradition of spiritualism’s debunking. One of his most successful magic plays, called Le decapité recalcitrant (“The Recalcitrant
Decapitated Man”), popular enough to be performed 1,200 times at the theatre Robert-Houdin, featured the decapitation of a spiritualist medium who annoyed the public by assuring them of the trustworthiness of spirit séances. Méliès also shot L’armoire des frères
Davenport [The Cabinet Trick of the Davenport Brothers] (1902) mocking the performances of the two famous American stage mediums. Like Smith, Méliès also shot a film on spirit photography, called Le portrait spirite [A Spiritualist Photographer] (1903).
Méliès’ familiarity with spirit photography might date back to 1884, when he sojourned in London to learn about modern stage magic techniques. During this period he became a devotee of the most famous London magic theatre, the Egyptian Hall, and a friend of John Nevil Maskelyne. In the years 1883-4, Maskelyne gave two hundred anti-spiritualist performances at the Egyptian Hall, during which, as he put it, “I explained every trick, together with several improvements of my own” (Maskelyne 1891, 190). At the beginning of the 1880s, several spirit photographers were active in London (Coates 1911, 57-60), and it is possible that Maskelyne was already involved in the production of fake spirit photographs like the one he later published in Weatherly’s book (1891). In 1884, Méliès was also in contact with David Devant, another Egyptian Hall magician who after 1896 introduced film projections in his shows.5 Devant was known at the time for making a life-sized portrait of a
woman came to life, an illusion that some decades later would eventually inspire Méliès’ Le portrait spirite.
Multiple exposure and superimposition effects were widely used in film production in the following decades, even after the trick film had virtually disappeared as a genre. In 1922, for instance, the American magician Harry Houdini produced and acted in The Man from Beyond, a film featuring ghostly apparitions using the technique of multiple exposure. Although Houdini had already been the protagonist of several non-fiction and fiction films (Solomon 2010, 80-101), this was the first of his films to rely on the supernatural and, in particular, on themes taken from beliefs in spiritualism and reincarnation. Using
superimposition to visually express spirit apparitions, Houdini consciously mocked spirit photography. During his entire career, he had been involved in the exposure of spiritualist
trickery, claiming to consider it a moral duty (1924, 12) and comparing mediums to gamblers who “resort to deception and take advantage of the sitters at all angles” (245). The collection he donated after his death to the Library of Congress, which he described as “one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc., some of the material going back as far as 1489” (Salamanca 1942, 325), reveals how anti-spiritualist activities not only played a part in his shows, but were a sort of obsession to him. The image of the spectres appearing in The Man from Beyond can be considered a kind of homage to the iconography of spirit photography, a phenomenon he exposed as multiple exposure in his A Magician among the Spirits (1924).
Conclusion
In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Gregory Bateson argues that a crucial stage in the evolution of communication occurs when “the organism gradually ceases to respond quite ‘automatically’ to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal, that is, to recognize that the other individual’s and its own signals are only signals, that can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth” (1955, 40). As a consequence, the definition of an event as serious or unserious will vary, depending on the meaning that an individual gives of this event. In some cases, however, we may be uncertain if the right interpretation of a situation is reality or play. Bateson’s suggestion, recalled by Erving Goffman in his discussion of frame analysis (1974, 2-5), can be helpful in understanding how the ghostly image of superimposition wavered between fictional and religious contexts, lacking a precise definition of its meaning, or perhaps allowing for its annexation to the worlds of belief and entertainment at the same time. Flowing through technological and cultural contexts as distinct as spiritualism, the magic lantern lecturing circuit, stage magic, photographic amusements and early cinema, superimposition effects
produced ambivalent images that could carry the viewer into fictional realms or passionate beliefs, into the marvels of illusion or the spirit world. Depending on the perspective from which they were regarded, they opened the door to realms that were only apparently
contradictory. This is probably the reason why superimposition, as a visual practice, was so widely employed in the early years of the motion picture. As Michael Chanan has argued, cinema was from its very start “an art of both realism and illusion, veracity and deception, transparency and trickery—in short, a highly paradoxical medium” (1996, 117). Being the subject of different and sometimes divergent interpretations – the revelation of spirit agency, a mere trick, a photographic accident –, superimposition seems to have shared with film this paradoxical character.
Endnotes
With some relevant exceptions: see, in particular, Tucker (2005), Mnookin (1998), and Leja (2004).
2 Tom Gunning pointed out that “perhaps the most extraordinary historical fact about Spirit
Photographs lies in the fact that such images existed for years before any Spiritualist seemed to have claimed them” (2007, 112).
3 The literature on Robertson’s phantasmagoria is extensive. See, among others, Mannoni (1995), Milner (1982)
and Gunning (2003).
4 This Mr. Middleton could be Thomas John Middleton, who was active in London in those
years as a magic lantern manufacturer, or a member of his family. See http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-of-suppliers/m.php
5 Also some of the producers of fake-spirit photographs, such as John Nevil Maskelyne, were
directly engaged in producing films during its novelty period. Maskelyne appeared in a 1896 film by Robert Paul and produced trick films together with his son Nevil in the following
years. The Egyptian Hall hosted film shows from March 1896.
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