Magic Lantern - Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

The later part of the 18th century was the age of Romanticism and the Gothic novel. There was an obsession with the bizarre and the supernatural. Johann Georg Schröpfer began using the magic lantern in séances, before Paul Philidor refined the techniques. In these shows, the illusionists used the magic lantern to trick people into thinking that they had summoned up spirits of revolutionary figures with the lantern mounted on a trolley. They also summoned ghosts by requests. However, Philidor's show was eventually closed by the authorities due to their paranoia. The audiences of these magic lantern shows reacted to the projections with bewilderment. They thought the projections were real dreams, visions, apparitions and ghosts, and the devil. This was just fueled by the fact that this is exactly what the early conjurers and magicians used them for: scaring people using these ghostly images. The next famous conjurer to utilize the magic lantern was Etienne-Gaspard Robert.

He was a Belgian inventor with an interest in magic. He held his first "fantasmagorie" at Pavillon de l'Echiquier in Paris. He began experimenting in the 1780s with techniques used to make phantasmagorias, which is basically the use of the magic lantern to conjure up supernatural images such as the devil, phantoms, or ghosts. If the images were projected onto a gauze screen, they would even seem to be floating in air, making the stunt even more believable-looking. At Pavillon de l'Echiquier, Robertson set up a public phantasmagoria and told the audience he would conjure up their dead relatives. He made a big show out of it and conjured up an image of a phantom with a dagger, and then pictures of the dead relatives. After this show, he continued to make other, bigger, more outrageous spectacles. He put the magic lantern onto wheels and patented this under the name of 'fantascope'. He eventually moved his work to a theater, where he built up a show to a big finale in which big shapes moved around the otherwise dark theater. Robertson also used mechanical slides to make his images move. There is a small collection of transparencies at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris which shows a two-piece slide he used with one glass showing the face of a phantom and the other which had the image of the eyes, which when used meant the eyes could roll back and forth. Also, Robertson used multiple lanterns to project both a moving figure as well as a background for that figure. For example, a stationary projector in the front would have projected an image of a church courtyard while a moving projector from behind would project the image of the phantom The Bleeding Nun, an image which came from the novel The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. His shows were extremely successful. The popularity increased and eventually this phenomenon moved to England. Many observers have been quoted saying these "ghosts" were very realistic, which is partly due to people's eyes not being trained to the phenomenon of photography and cinematography like ours today are.