The apparatus...essentially consists of a cardboard disc pierced along its circumfer-
ence with a certain number of small openings and carrying painted figures on one of
its sides. When the disc is rotated about its center facing a mirror, and looking with
one eye opposite the opening...the figures are animated and execute movements.The viewer holds the device by a handle in one hand while peering through the
slots and sets the wheel turning, usually spinning it with a single finger of her
other hand. The slots punctuate the vision of images on the moving disc as
Stampfer described, converting the passing figures into a flickering series of in-
dividual images (or rather producing a single moving image) rather than a con-
tinuous blur.
Apparently the idea of a moving figure came to Plateau only after his experi-
ments with the“illusion”of a still image produced by the Anorthoscope. He
had also demonstrated the apparent stillness of a rapidly revolving device with
a repeated identically drawn figure. As the wheel revolved with some sixteen
figures of a standing man drawn on its periphery, the figure appears within the
viewing slots as a single static image. Mannoni theorizes that the example of the
Thaumatrope may then have inspired Plateau to the next crucial move. Now
the figures drawn on the periphery portrayed a single figure engaged in the
successive stages of a simple repetitive motion: a dance, sawing wood, opening
one’s mouth in a grimace, juggling balls, or, perhaps most mesmerizingly, a se-
ries of abstract geometrical gyrations and transformations. As William B. Car-
penter, vice president of the Royal Society, pointed out in, the Phenakisti-
scope substituted “for the repetition of similar impressions...a series of
gradationally varied impressions, produced by drawings of the same figure in
different positions.”Although the succession of poses yields a single progres-
sive action, the revolving wheel makes it a potentially endless cycle, with no
clear conclusion, other than that caused by the operator/viewer’s boredom or
manual fatigue. The movement portrayed here is posed between brevity and
endlessness, an instant of action or an eternity of Sisyphean repetition, the first
appearance of the cinematic loop that evades the linearity of action through its
circular technology. The most famous of Plateau’s phenakistiscope disc shows a
male dancer performing a pirouette.The dancer performs a-degree turn.
Like most of his contemporaries, Plateau believed the device demonstrated
the natural outcome of optical afterimages, as for the first time explicitly sub-
sumed under persistence of vision:
If several objects that differ sequentially in terms of form are represented one after
another to the eye in very brief intervals and sufficiently close together, the impres-
sion they produce on the retina will blend together without confusion and one will
believe that a single object is gradually changing form and position.36 Tom Gunning