Popular Optical Entertainment

Introduction

New visual and optical media, together with the improvement and consequent invigorated usage of existing devices and technologies, were a defining feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Photography captured and fixed moments in time: the diorama and kaleidoscope entranced with their metamorphosis and transformation; circular and moving panoramas awed with enormous canvases whose size seemingly attempted to encompass all the spaces of the globe. The stereoscope beguiled with a 3D world that hovered between the sensuous and virtual, while the many varieties of peepshow promised an immersive, closed-off experience of patriotic battles, gruesome murders and far-off places. If that was not enough, the ever-versatile magic lantern projected hundreds of thousands of slides of every imaginable scientific, amusing and educational subject, from travelogues and temperance tales to illustrated hymns and adaptations of popular fiction. Then, after 1895, audiences experienced the cinematograph, its moving images simultaneously animated, projected and photographic. Many other visual technologies and devices could be added to this list: X-rays, spectroscopes, microscopes, transparencies, zoetropes, kinetoscopes, and mutoscopes to name but a few. Most of these forms existed in manifold versions that had evolved to meet the range of audiences and purposes for which they were used; more generally, there was a creative melting pot of on-going convergence and competition between them through borrowing of subject matter, aesthetic effects and technologies.

The Adam Matthew digital archive, Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema, based on the collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, offers a fascinating glimpse into the rich and wondrous world of Victorian and Edwardian visual entertainment. This introduction is organised into seven sections that outline the principal visual technologies, forms, exhibitions and mode of audience engagement: the sections proceed chronologically from Renaissance natural magic through to the advent of the cinematograph and the development of a global film industry.