Moving Images, Understanding Media

Chapter 2 Inventions and Origins 45

Projecting Light

In the last unit, we discussed the earliest recorded impressions that humans

made of their world, painted on cave walls. Humanity has constantly sought

diverse ways to tell stories and record and enact impressions of their world,

and among these methods has been the use and manipulation of light.

From ancient examples of using one’s hands or body to create shadows

that outline fi gures in a story to the expressive cutouts of shadow theater

in Asia, people have used light projected on a surface to communicate

with an audience.

A major step towards what we think of as the cinema was initiated with

an apparatus that was used for centuries in Europe and Asia: the magic lantern.

Over fi ve centuries ago, artisans had used very primitive lanterns that created

candlelit projections of shadows to entertain spectators. By the seventeenth

century, devices with a light source, lenses, and mirrors were used to project

images and writing on walls and screens. Th ese magic lanterns, which are

essentially precursors to the modern slide projector, allowed people to see

shows that thrilled and amused with images of ghosts, demons, or painted

scenes. By the 1830s, traveling storytellers used glass plates with painted

scenes that sometimes incorporated movement, and audiences could even

see slides dissolve into each other, an eff ect that later became a key cinematic

technique.

Th e next major component of motion pictures, a succession of images

that blends into a sense of movement, is seen in the many devices developed

during the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, such as the phenakistoscope

or the zoetrope. When we see a rapid succession of images, our eyes and

brain process the stream of images as a perception of movement. Although

previously attributed to the concept of “persistence of vision,” contemporary

Figure 2-4 The magic

lantern being used as a

teaching tool.

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