bot intones about motion pictures,“The illusion is wholly due to one glaring
deficiency of the human eye, of which the utmost advantage has been taken”)
in order to make us believe we see something that does not, in fact, exist.
I have always found such description of this ability to blend two images into
a single one as a imperfection of the eye curious and extremely Cartesian, in the
sense of driving a wedge between what we know and what we see–and decid-
edly valuing what weknowover what wesee. Following Paris’s cue, we might
view the Thaumatrope as a machine for producing young Cartesians, as much
as illusions. But to understand this new form of image, I think we must let the
movement speak rather than concentrate exclusively on the explanation. When
I twirl a Thaumatrope, although I do see a composite image, I do not mistake it
for the equivalent of the images imprinted on either side of the disk. The image
has an unfamiliar quality. It is less material than the printed images, and, as
Paris stresses, less opaque; I can in effect see through it. I am inclined to think
of it as visual rather than tactile, something I can see but not touch. And yet I
am very aware of its production (and my manual role in producing it). Mary
Ann Doane, one of the few film scholars who attempts to describe the image
produced by optical devices, captures its odd nature which she indicates
aligned it with the possibility of deception and trickery:“The image of move-
ment itself was nowhere but in the perception of the viewer–immaterial, ab-
stract, and thus open to practice of manipulation and deception. The toys could
not work without this fundamental dependence upon an evanescent, intangible
image.”Most likely this is best described as a“virtual image”an image whose
existence consists in its appearance and effects rather than its materiality, and
which, in relation to optics, the OED defines as an“image resulting from the
effect of reflection or refraction upon rays of light”(thus David Brewster used
the term into describe the effect of an image appearing behind the mirror
caused by a convex mirror). As a trick, this virtual image surprises me, not only
because I know it isn’t“really there,”but because I participate in its appearance.
As simple as the device is, the Thaumatrope cannot function without someone
serving as simultaneous viewer and manipulator. The image appears as the re-
sult of this interaction. As Doane states about early optical devices,“The tangi-
bility of the apparatus and the materiality of the images operated as a form of
resistance to this abstraction, assuring the viewer that the image of movement
could be produced at will, through the labor of the body, and could, indeed, be
owned as a commodity.”The viewer of the Thaumatrope was both the aston-
ished spectator and the producer of the image. Mannoni reproduces a Thauma-
trope with a painter before a blank canvas on the one side and a small portrait
of a lady on the other. Twirling the disc, the resulting composite image places
the lady on the canvas, as if stressing the device’s role in creating, not just a
composite, but a compositeimage.
The Play between Still and Moving Images 33