Pre-Cinema


"Come by agreement Mr. Reeves, bringing me a lanthorn, with pictures on glass, to make strange things appear on the wall, very pretty."

from Samuel Pepys Diary

August 19, 1666


The precursor of motion pictures, the magic lantern was invented in the 1650s with numerous people developing working models.

 Thomas Walgensten is reputed to be the first to use the term Laterna Magica. He traveled around Europe demonstrating and selling projectors to royalty.


It soon became a traveling showman's instrument and for the next 200 years lanternists were putting on programs at inns, castles, fairs and eventually theatres.

One of the first to exploit the screen's possibilities was the Belgian Etienne Gaspard Robert who called himself "Robertson". He noted the French public's taste for the macabre during the waning years of the Revolution and by 1799 was staging elaborate ghost shows at the Pavilon d'Echiquier in Paris .

 Three years later, Robertson moved his "Fantasmagorie" to a former Capuchin convent. Spectators were led down dark passageways to the old chapel where they sat facing a screen behind which were concealed several magic lanterns and six assistants.  

As thunder roared and lightening flashed ghosts, goblins, and demons came hurling at the audience. 


Skeleton from the Magic Lantern Society.

Sweep from the Magic Lantern Society

With the advancement of science and technology came improvements in lanterns and their accessories: better lamps were made, reflectors and condenser lenses added, projection became brighter and sharper, and photographic slides replaced the old hand-painted pictures.


Capable of limited animation and certain special effects, slides changed every 30 seconds  or so as a live showman  presented illustrated songs and stories to musical accompaniment. The audience cheering, clapping, and booing much as they did while viewing a popular melodrama of the day.
These shows would fade in popularity with the rise of the motion picture and were soon relegated to illustrating songs between reels at nickelodeons.
 
Another form of entertainment to emerge in the 1850s were the panoramas in which vast paintings were wound across the stage of the theatre, accompanied by lighting and sound effects. 
 
Thidon's Theatre of Art depicted noted battles with sheet brass soldiers, horses and ships moving along a revolving belt in front of the scenery. The guns and cannons were so fixed that the operators behind the scenes could puff smoke through them with the boom coming from a bass drum.

By now most well-to-do Americans and Europeans were familiar with moving pictures, thanks to parlor toys such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, stroboscope and smaller versions of  magic lanterns. 

Perhaps the most popular was the Zoetrope, a slotted revolving drum. Peering through the slits, hand-drawn clowns, acrobats, and animals seemed  to leap through their paces on the strips of paper fitted inside the drum.


Thumatrope

Thaumatrope from Optical Toys 

 Muybridge set in motion by the California Museum of Photography.

The series photos of Eadweard Muybridge would provide the essential link between still photography and motion pictures. This British eccentric begun a series of studies of animal locomotion in 1872 under the sponsorship if Governor Leland Standford of California.

His experiments with a galloping horse and a battery of 12 cameras were disrupted by a murder trail (he killed his wife's lover) and self-imposed exile to Centrail America during most of 1875. 


 He resumed work with Leland Stanford in 1877  and moved forward on several fronts. Using 24 cameras and an improved shutter-release method, Muybridge made numerous studies of animals and humans in motion.  
 
 Muybridge traveled and lectured extensively, projecting his serial pictures by a device he called the Zoopraxiscope. Actually it showed colored elongated drawings that recreated the motion his battery of cameras had analyzed.
 
 These experiments and lectures would strongly influence such innovators as Professor Etienne-Jules Marey and Thomas Edison and stimulated their subsequent discoveries.
 
 In this brief essay, we have only touched lightly upon various aspects of precinema history. For those wishing more information, please visit