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Before there were films

Magic Lantern Shows and optical illusions

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Magic lantern showsThe magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.

The most notorious magic lantern show was Fantasmagorie, 1794.

Robertson (a magician) showed bone-chilling images of death using

rear-projection.

Theaters started around Europe with many magicians pioneering

visual techniques leading to future film techniques.

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Magic lantern cont’dThe role of the magician in early cinema has been neglected by film scholars. But the first film viewers had no trouble thinking of films in the context of magic since they knew they were seeing things that could not be. We today, having accepted images and films as reality, have lost the magic of them. They knew they were seeing magic.

From The Magician and the Cinema by Erik

Barnouw

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Magic Lantern

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ZoetropeAn optical illusion where an image is painted around in a circle with each picture being gradually different. When spun, the image appears to be moving.

http://www.precinemahistory.net/1890.htm

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Series photographyThe first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826[1] by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

In 1877 and 1878, Eadweard Muybridge pioneered

series photography by filming a horse going around

the track by placing cameras around the track and

putting it together, which showed that the still image

appears to move. This was needed for people to

understand that you could film movement.

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The moving imageThe persistence of vision is the scientific term for your eyes tricking you into thinking there are no gaps in movement.