Laurent Mannoni,
The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Translated and edited by Richard Crangle.
Exeter Studies in Film History: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0 85989 665 X (pb)
512pp
£25.00
(Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press)
Uploaded 1 December 2001
Mannoni’s big, handsome, well-illustrated book offers a long history of the visual representation of movement, or “the great art of light and shadow,” as he calls it, borrowing his title from a famous seventeenth century treatise by Athanasius Kircher. In roughly chronological order, layer by layer, as befitting an “archaeology of the cinema” (his book’s subtitle), we encounter the camera obscura of the middle ages, first used to view solar eclipses and then in the 1500s to project moving images into darkened interiors; the magic lantern, which achieved global ascendancy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in complex phantasmagoria shows emerging around The French Revolution; a bevy of “scopes” (phenakistiscope, choreutoscope, bioscope, and so on) introduced during the 1800s both as toys and scientific instruments designed to analyze human perception; the photographic animal motion studies of Muybridge and Marey later in the century; and finally in the 1890s a host of inventors and entrepreneurs (French, German, British, American) who laid the foundations for the twentieth century film industry.

Although the general outlines of Mannoni’s story are familiar to most cinema scholars, The Great Art of Light and Shadow stands out as the richest and most compelling account to date for three related reasons. First, this is no simple “greatest hits” list of machines and men (and they were all men, it seems); instead Mannoni presents a wealth of archival detail – personal letters, patent applications, newspaper reports – to suggest the wider visual culture, layer by layer, from which these various optical devices and shows emerged. He appends, for example, in its entirety, a fascinating 1800 report by a pair of French scientists who helped settle legal charges and countercharges of counterfeiting by examining and exposing the (secret) internal workings of two famous rival phantasmagoria apparatus.

Second, unlike some of his predecessors, Mannoni refuses to get bogged down by fruitless (and often nationalistically motivated) searches for “firsts,” suggesting instead how so many of these attempts to produce the illusion of movement occurred simultaneously, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in competition, sometimes in complete ignorance of one another. For instance in the single afternoon of 9 June 1896, Mannoni tells us, in the space of two hours in fact, no less than four different patents were filed with the Paris Patents Office for cinematographic cameras or projectors. Although it’s still customary to label Edison or Lumiere as the “founding father” and lump everyone else prior into the vague category of cinema “pre-history,” Mannoni shows that the intersection of movement, projection, and photographic realism was a far more complex historical process that required a whole series of incremental and interlocking innovations. Thanks to Mannoni’s research, lesser known figures like the seventeenth century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, the nineteenth century designer of the phenakistiscope Joseph Plateau, and the late nineteenth century master projectionist/artist Emile Reynaud take their rightful place as important precursors of cinema.

Third and perhaps most important, Mannoni understands that the technology of projected moving images is a social practice, not simply a matter of hardware. Given his former position as curator of the equipment collections at the Cinematheque Francaise and the Centre National de la Cinematographie, it is only reasonable to expect that Mannoni would spend a lot of time describing how these optical devices were constructed, and in fact his book does offer remarkably clear and precise descriptions, sometimes loving, of dozens and dozens of ingenious mechanisms – boxes, tubes, rotating wheels, lens, mirrors and so on. But Mannoni also spends an equal amount of attention, century by century, on the specific circumstances of exhibition and the economics of invention: who attended these shows, how they were staged, what sorts of responses these visual novelties provoked, how inventors sought to patent and market their creations. One drawback of the book, if you can even call it such, is that Mannoni spends relatively little time analyzing the formal dimension of visual spectacle, perhaps because little is empirically known about such aspects. He offers thirty pages explaining the painting and fabrication of magic lantern glass slides, for example, but only a single page discussing the narrative effects of magic lantern representation, how slides were composed and arranged in succession to tell coherent stories.

Surveying the extended history of light and shadow laid out by Mannoni, certain continuities are thrown in relief, particularly in regard to reception and exhibition. In 1621, some 275 years before Lumiere’s Le dejeuner de bebe, a French Jesuit viewing a camera obscura show was struck by “the shaking of the plants in the wind” (12), essentially the same effect that astonished viewers of the Lumiere film in 1896. From the camera obscura to 1890s cinema, spectators also over and over again identified projected moving images as “little ghosts”(13); it is remarkable how ghosts, skeletons, and death so haunt the account of Mannoni, who himself notes early on (40) that the “first illuminated artificial recreation of life [by Huygens] was a representation of death.” (In this regard Mannoni’s study would seem to offer some historical support for Garrett Stewart’s provocative recent theoretical speculations in Between Film and Screen.) More generally, viewers’ responses through the centuries seem to oscillate between the mimetic (images as true to nature) and the hypnotic (images invoking magic and fear), although it is perhaps more accurate to say that the two go together – the moving image as uncanny because of its verisimilitude.

A similar sort of pattern or dialectical interplay can be discerned in Mannoni’s description of the two sorts of men responsible for making these images: rational scientists interested in using the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the “Faraday Wheel” to explore the physics of light, optics and perception, and those showmen who saw these devices as sources of entertainment and spectacle. Huygens, Mannoni tells us, was essentially embarrassed by his invention of the magic lantern, which he regarded as a trifle that might damage his reputation as a scientist. He balked at making a copy for his father, who wanted to exploit its potential for spectacle. Similarly Etienne-Jules Marey refused to commercialize his chronophotography, which he valued strictly as a means to freeze and measure locomotion analytically, rather than create effects of movement. Athanasius Kircher, on the other hand, in passing off his Ars magna luci et umbrae (1644) as a grand learned compendium of optics, regarded his devices and techniques as a kind of “natural magic” hovering somewhere between science and sorcery. Dismissed by Rene Descartes as “more of a charlatan than a scholar,” Kircher the showman offered spellbinding visual displays that cast the very sort of magic his demonstrations were rationally purporting to debunk. Taking his cue (and his book’s title) from Kircher, Mannoni too appreciates the charm and the rapture, as well as the technology, that constitute the history of the great art of light and shadow.

Jonathan Auerbach