The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema

MURRAY LEEDER The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema Murray Leeder The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema Murray Leeder Calgary, Alberta, Canada ISBN 978-1-137-58370-3 ISBN 978-1-137-58371-0 DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58371-0 (eBook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959382 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identiied as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image © Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom Dedicated to Alana and Julian ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book builds on my dissertation, “Early Cinema and the Supernatural,” defended at Carleton University in 2011. Many thanks irst of all to my supervisor, Charles O’Brien, and my other committee members: Marc Furstenau, Franny Nudelman, Aboubakar Sanogo and Rob King. I would like to give special thanks to various professors from Carleton University’s Film Studies programme and from the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Arts and Culture, including André Loiselle, Mitchell Frank, Barbara Leckie, Barbara Gabriel, Mitsuyo WadaMarciano, Paul Théberge, George McKnight, Mark Langer, Zuzana Pick and Chris Faulkner for their help and support over the years, as well my fellow students, including Owen Lyons, David Richler, Margaret Rose, Steve Rifkin, Jessica Aldred, Marc Raymond, Ben Wright, Dan Sheridan, Sylvie and Paul Jasen, Heather Igloliorte, Matt Croombs, Jeremy Maron, Stacey Loyer, Anne de Stecher, Danielle Wiley, Tom Everett and Kyle Devine. I would also like to thank my colleagues from the University of Manitoba (including George Toles, Brenda Austin-Smith and David Annandale) and the University of Calgary (including Lee Carruthers, Charles Tepperman and Ryan Pierson). Many other scholars have kindly helped this project along the way with useful advice. I would like especially to thank Simone Natale, James Cahill, Matthew Solomon, Frank Gray, Esther Peeren, Pamela Thurschwell, Jeffrey Sconce, Adam Hart, Colin Williamson, Brian Jacobson, John Warne Monroe and Tom Gunning. vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My work has beneited from the recent explosion in archival material from early cinema on DVD. Special credit must go to the Flicker Alley’s wonderful boxed set Georges Méliès: First Wizard of the Cinema (1896–1913) (2008) and its follow-up Georges Méliès: Encore (2010) with newer discoveries—may there be many more “encores” to follow. Other ilms, especially those of George Albert Smith, I viewed at the British Film Institute in London, largely on 35 mm with a few on VHS. My research into print documents and rare books and periodicals took me to the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, housed in the Cambridge University library, the Harry Price Collection at the University of London, the reading room of the Magic Circle in London and the American Society for Psychical Research in Manhattan. Many thanks to the archivists and librarians at these venues for their support and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank Donna Yates for generously hosting me during the Cambridge leg of my research. Portions of Chaps. 5 and 6 expand upon writing previously published as “Eroticism and Death: The Skeleton in the Trick Film” in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema (2012) and Chap. 7 is an edited version of “‘Visualizing the Phantoms of the Imagination’: Projecting the Haunted Minds of Modernity,” published in Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (2015). My thanks to John Libbey and to Bloomsbury Academic USA for permission to reprint. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 2 The Haunting of Film Theory 21 3 Light and Lies: Screen Practice and (Super-) Natural Magic 45 4 The Strange Case of George Albert Smith: Mesmerism, Psychical Research and Cinema 67 Aesthetics of Co-registration: Spirit Photography, X-rays and Cinema 97 5 6 1 Méliès’s Skeleton: Gender, Cinema’s Danse Macabre and the Erotics of Bone 135 7 “Living Pictures at Will”: Projecting Haunted Minds 173 8 Conclusion: Lost Worlds, Ghost Worlds 191 Index 201 ix LIST OF FIGURES Image 3.1 A depiction of Robertson’s Phantasmagoria that appeared in L’Optique by “Fulgence Marion”—actually Camille Flammarion (1869) Image 3.2 A depiction of Pepper’s Ghost that appeared in L’Optique by “Fulgence Marion”—actually Camille Flammarion (1869) Image 5.1 The alleged New Zealand ghost horses, reprinted in Borderland in 1896 Image 5.2 Illustrations of the magic trick called “The Neoöccultism,” 1897 Image 5.3 Illustrations of the magic trick called “The Neoöccultism,” 1897 Image 5.4 An advertisement for “Les Rayons Röntgen” stage act, 1897 Image 5.5 Promotional postcard from the Paris Cabaret du Néant, c. 1895 Image 5.6 Promotional postcard from the Paris Cabaret du Néant, c. 1895 Image 5.7 Depiction of the Paris Cabaret du Néant from W.C. Morrow’s Bohemian Paris of To-day (1896) Image 5.8 Depiction of transformation trick from New York Cabaret du Néant from Scientiic American, 1896 Image 5.9 Depiction of transformation trick from New York Cabaret du Néant from Scientiic American, 1896 Image 5.10 George Albert Smith’s The X-ray Fiend (1896) Image 5.11 An apparent reference to the Cabaret du Néant in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 51 54 101 110 111 112 113 113 114 115 116 118 121 xi xii LIST OF FIGURES Image 6.1 Image 6.2 Image 6.3 Image 6.4 Image 6.5 Image 6.6 Image 6.7 Image 7.1 Image 8.1 Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1896) Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1896) Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1896) Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1896) William Crookes with “Katie King” in 1874 Promotional postcard from the Paris Cabaret du Néant, c. 1895 “Miss November” from the EIZO’s pin-up skeletons calendar (2010) David Starr Jordan’s “Sympsychograph” (1896) The face of loss: from The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (BBC, Episode 1, 2005) 136 137 138 139 151 154 163 178 194 CHAPTER 1 Introduction In the October 1896 issue of his quarterly journal Borderland, W.T. Stead, the well-known British spiritualist and “new journalist,” offered a dozen pages worth of “Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students: Useful Analogies from Recent Discoveries and Inventions.” The “Borderland” to which the periodical’s name referred straddles the realms of science and the supernatural, and “Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students” was meant to arm the faithful with analogies to convince people of the validity of spiritualist concepts about life and death, time and space. Stead’s analogies come from electricity, the phonograph, the telephone, the photograph and the camera obscura, but also from the X-ray and the kinetoscope, the early motion picture exhibition device that the Edison Manufacturing Company had debuted in 1894. The article begins: The discovery of the Röntgen rays has compelled many a hardened sceptic to admit, when discussing Borderland, that “there may be something in it after all.” In like manner many of the latest inventions and scientiic discoveries make psychic phenomena thinkable, even by those who have no personal experience of their own to compel conviction. I string together a few of these helpful analogies, claiming only that they at least supply stepping stones that may lead to a rational understanding of much that is now incomprehensible. (1896, 400) This is an excellent example of how clearly and consciously the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century recognized its own peculiar © The Author(s) 2017 M. Leeder, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58371-0_1 1 2 M. LEEDER relationship with new technologies and drew consciously on scientiic rhetoric.1 Spiritualists like Stead argued that psychic powers and contact with the dead did not seem so far removed from the modern wonders of science and technology, cinema included.2 We will return to Stead’s “Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students” in Chap. 7, but for the moment will observe that it illustrates how new technologies, including those of recording and projection, helped make the spiritualists’ ghost worlds that much more tangible and plausible. In Stead’s article we see one case where cinema’s irst observers were inclined characterize it as a supernatural medium. The most famous instance of this, which I will discuss at length in Chap. 2, is Maxim Gorky’s declaration that the Lumière brothers’ ilms represented “the kingdom of shadows,” a sort of storehouse for the unhappy dead: “Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground” (1960, 407). Gorky’s gloomy reaction stands in contrast with that of the French reporter who asserted in 1895 that “when these cameras are made available to the public, when everyone can photograph their dear ones, no longer in a motionless form but in their movements, their activity, their familiar gestures, with words on their lips, death will have ceased to be absolute” (quoted in Burch 1990, 21),3 but in a way they stand as complementary opposites, one promising immortality and the other a gloomy netherworld between life and death. This book, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema, locates late Victorian interest in supernatural phenomena as an important context for early cinema,4 but one that is often misunderstood. The overarching question explored here is a broadly cultural one: why did such a compulsive desire to link the cinema with the supernatural exist in the late 1800s? This was not only the case for outsiders like Gorky, struck by the irst encounter with the apparatus. Such metaphors also served people within the nascent ilm industry. In fact, the kinetoscope’s inventor, W.K.L. Dickson, used séance metaphors to describe cinema in his book The History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (1895),5 and one early projector, premiered by Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, in October 1895, bore a name that would seem to promise ghost-viewing, or perhaps seeing through ghostly means: “Phantoscope” (Rossell 1998, 120–6). These were natural analogies to use in the supernatural-obsessed late nineteenth century. INTRODUCTION 3 Supernatural scenarios allowed pioneering trick ilmmakers like Georges Méliès in France and George Albert Smith in England, and the whole marvellous body of trick ilms that followed (including the stock “haunted hotel” scenario of a traveller entering a haunted space and being beset by creepy phenomena), to show off the capacity of the medium for wonderful appearances and disappearances, animations and transformations. It can fairly be said, to quote Pamela Thurschwell, that “early cinematic ghosts were created in part because the technology available motivated their production” (2003, 26), but also that audience demand motivated supernatural-themed material. Nuanced attention to the Victorian understanding of the supernatural allows us to better understand the reception of cinema’s apparent capacity to both arrest and reanimate life, its ghostly status as a half-present medium of projected light or its capacity to dematerialize and transform the human body through trick effects. In addition to excavating early cinema’s links with the late Victorian supernatural, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema both contributes to and examines what has come to be called the “spectral turn”: the concerted interest in questions of the supernatural, ghostliness and haunting within cultural and critical theory during the last two decades, the most inluential work of which is Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (2006; irst published in French 1992, English translation 1993). I am indebted to this body of scholarship and the freedom it has promoted to engage with issues of ghosts and magic, but at the same time I express scepticism and caution about its claims, and especially the way it has tended to look to early cinema to prove claims about cinema as a “ghostly” or “supernatural” medium. The association of early cinema with the supernatural is an important subject, but the trope of cinema in general and early cinema in particular as a haunted, spectral or magical space has been deployed in scholarship with too little attention to historical speciics—often relying on generalized and ahistorical invocations of the supernatural. While the vogue for looking back to early cinema to understand media culture today often produces valuable insights, it can also produce misconceptions about early cinema, particularly where early cinema’s links to the supernatural are concerned. In particular, there is a tendency to overstate cinema’s novelty and efface its continuities with prior media, and I argue that, where its links with the supernatural are concerned, early cinema’s place on a lineage of haunted and haunting media is at least as important as its newness. 4 M. LEEDER The Modern SupernaTural What can we mean by a “modern supernatural”? Both of these terms require some clariication. Throughout this book, I use the term “supernatural” broadly enough to encompass practices and discourses as far ranging as spiritualism, occultism,6 psychical research and stage magic.7 However, I am using it advisedly, aware of its controversial potential. In 2003, Anthropological Forum devoted a special issue to the question of whether “supernatural” is a viable term, in the process debating its relationship to such categories as “sacred,” “holy,” “divine,” “spiritual,” “mystical,” “mysterious,” “paranormal,” “extrasensory,” “miraculous,” “transcendent,” “religious,” “magical” and “superstition,” to borrow the lexicon assembled by Susan Sered in her afterword (2003, 216–17)—we can add terms like “sorcery” and “occult.” I ind this journal’s discussion of terminology and its implications quite useful; anthropologists seem to be among the only scholars concerned with deining the “supernatural” at all. Various scholars in this special issue come out for or against the continued value of “supernatural” as a term, and I am tentatively borrowing my working deinition from one of the “pro” camp: “The term ‘supernatural’ deines an order of existence beyond what is pragmatically visible and observable, an order of existence that is paranormal in the sense that it supposedly deies the laws of nature” (Anderson 2003, 125). I would place particular emphasis on the word “supposedly,” and note that the deinition uses “paranormal”—a word of twentieth-century coinage—to deine the older term “supernatural.” One of the reasons for the contentiousness of the term “supernatural” within anthropology is its implicit validation of western superiority. Morton Klass writes of the: remorseless unavoidable ethnocentric judgment of supernatural: that there is on the one hand a natural—real—universe and on the other hand there are notions about aspects of the universe that are situated outside the natural and the real and are therefore labeled supernatural by the person who knows what belongs in which category. (1995, 25, original emphasis) The idea and the terminology of the supernatural can indeed be imperialistic and reductive, with belief in the supernatural often consigned to those on the margins: women, children, “savages,” the superstitious lower classes, the rural and so on. Further complicating the terminology, advocates of supernatural concepts such as telepathy or the existence of ghosts INTRODUCTION 5 or the human soul believe that these things are in fact not supernatural at all, but natural; for this reason, spiritualists frequently denounced the very word “supernatural” (Connor 1999, 204). The word itself is thus problematic, but I believe still the best available. Signiicantly, the word itself undergoes a transformation closely linked with the modern era. The word derives from the Latin supernaturalis, meaning “above or beyond nature,” and was usually associated with religion before the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a more secular usage, associated with ghosts and the like, began to predominate. This shift in the meaning roughly corresponds to Terry Castle’s (1995) constellation of the late eighteenth century as the period of the “invention of the uncanny.” Castle locates the invention of the uncanny with the internalization of the supernatural into the mind, where once external forces were turned into phantasmic “inner pictures” (1995, 132). The modern experience of the supernatural, then, often involves layers of intellectual hesitation, so often framed in optical terms—is what I am seeing “real” or is it all in my head?—which are in turn linked to a set of issues about illusionism in cinema and the centuries of screen practice before it. So what is the “modern supernatural”? The hundred years prior to cinema’s debut saw a major reconiguration of the supernatural. It was modernized and scientiicized,8 and by 1895, the year of cinema’s public debut, that process was complete. Magicians reframed their tricks as “experiments,” spiritualism (often pointedly calling itself “Modern Spiritualism,” simultaneously suggesting an ancient lineage and promoting its own currency) promoted itself as a scientiic religion for a new rational era, and psychical researchers saw their grandest project as inding scientiic evidence for the human soul and thus protecting religion from the agnostic likes of John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley (Blum 2006, 263–4).9 Amid these blurring boundaries of faith and science, the new wave of Gothic literature, including famous novels and short iction by H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Bram Stoker, was itself heavily indebted to the new science of psychical research; in these works we often ind that “science is Gothicized, and gothicity is rendered scientiically plausible” (Hurley 1996, 20).10 This intimate relationship between science and the supernatural is clearly attested to by some of the earliest writings on cinema. One excellent example is V.E. Johnson’s December 1896 article “The Kinematograph from a Scientiic Point of View.” Johnston writes: 6 M. LEEDER The Kinematograph having literally at its birth been dragged into the service of the omnipotent music hall … its scientiic value is likely to be obscured, if not temporarily lost—a misfortune which every earnest worker in science should, I think, do his utmost to avert … In meteorology, isolated photographs of a storm or storm clouds, or the results of a whirlwind, are held in high esteem, but how much more valuable would be a series showing such a storm of whirlwind in action? … Photographs of machinery at rest in all its diversiied branches are of the greatest value both in business and in the education of students—how much more valuable will be photographs—faithfully representing its wonderful and oftentimes complicated movements? (1996, 25) Johnson endorses cinema’s value as a mechanical tool for science’s beneit in place of its status as a means of public entertainment, but nevertheless closes his article with a magical analogy: When King Roderick irst visited the necromantic tower of Toledo—or at least so runs legendary history—he beheld on the linen cloth taken by him from the coffer the painted igures of men on horseback of ierce demeanor; anon the picture became animated, and there at length appeared a depiction upon its magic surface a great ield of battle with Christians and Moslems engaged in deadly conlict, accompanied with the clash of arms, the braying of trumpets, the neighing of horses. Can the imagination conceive that which the mind of science cannot execute? (1996, 25) The identiication of cinema as a valuable new technology and the understanding of it as the heir apparent to supernatural traditions coexist easily for commentators like Johnson. We might do well to recall Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: “any suficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (1962, 36), or the corollary often attributed to Larry Niven: “any suficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”11 For the Victorians, cinema was one of the best feats of magic (or supernatural conjurations) to have ever come along. Scholars of recent decades have explored the signiicance of magical and spiritualist practices to media history more broadly. Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000) examines how supernatural, metaphysical and otherwise outré metaphors have served to help make new media technologies legible to their irst users. More than this, Sconce argues that our very ideas about what constitutes the supernatural at a given historical moment have everything to INTRODUCTION 7 do with the media of the time; he persuasively interprets, for instance, the spiritualist movement as originating in the 1840s as an unexpected outgrowth of the invention of the telegraph. Sconce focuses on such media of transmission as the telegraph, the radio, television and the internet, but cinema too is a “haunted” medium, a fact recognized both by some of its irst commentators and by a body of literature in ilm studies. Cinema is surely not the only supernatural technology, nor even the most supernatural, but if, as John Durham Peters provocatively puts it, “[e]very new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts” (1999, 139), it must have supernatural particularities of its own. Of course, early cinema overlapped in fundamental ways with other media, and this book attends to some of these connections as well, most notably in relation to cinema’s near-twin, the X-ray. Simon During’s Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2002) rests on the simple but profound premise that “magic has helped shape modern culture” (2002, 1).12 During proposes that, “once we fully recognize magic’s role as a cultural agent, our sensitivity to the play of puzzlement, ictiveness and contingency in modernity will be heightened” (2002, 2). Just as our understanding of modernity is transformed by attention to the supernatural, so too will our understanding of cinema—so often understood as one of the emblematic technologies of modernity.13 What role does the supernatural play in modernity? Alan Swingewood writes that modernity “is imbricated in Enlightenment reason, the belief in progress, empirical science and positivism. Modernity signiies a culture of innovation, a rational ethos challenging traditions and rituals in the name of critical thought, empirical knowledge and humanism” (1998, 138). But the face of modernity Swingewood (1998) describes is merely one aspect of the complex, contradictory character of modernity that other scholars have emphasized (Calinescu 1987; Pels 2003). Writing about the “second phase” of modernity that encompasses the nineteenth century, Marshall Berman emphasizes both ordering and chaotic facets: This is a new landscape of steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast new industrial zones; of teeming cities that have grown overnight, often with dreadful human consequences; of daily newspapers, telegraphs, telephones and other mass media; of increasingly strong national states and multinational aggregations of capital; of mass social movements ighting these modernizations from above with their own modes of modernization from below; of an ever-expanding world market embracing all, capable of 8 M. LEEDER the most spectacular growth, capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability. (1983, 19) We should not be surprised that such a tumultuous and contradictory time proved a fertile environment for speculations about the supernatural to lourish. As Marina Warner has written: modernity did not by any means put an end to the quest for spirit and the desire to explain its mystery: curiosity about spirits of every sort … and the ideas and imagery that communicate their nature have lourished more vigorously than ever, when the modern fusion of scientiic inquiry, psychology, and metaphysics began. (2006, 10) Mladen Dolar similarly asserts that, “Ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead, etc., lourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place. They are something brought about by modernity itself” (1991, 7). If “modernity and enchantment have been perceived to be dichotomous in much of Western theory” (McEwan 2008, 31), the counter-tradition described by During, Warner and others argues for more of a dialectical relationship, in which modernity is not so much the “disenchantment of the world” described by Max Weber but, on the contrary, part of the world’s re-enchantment (see Chap. 3). The view of modernity as multifaceted and dialectical has recently been taken up by thinkers on early cinema, an area where the debates on the value of modernity have raged perhaps to the point of an impasse.14 In “Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows” (2006), Tom Gunning offers a signiicant revision of the formulation he irst popularized in his “Cinema of Attractions” essay (1990). Gunning writes that his previous work tended to “[emphasize] what Marshall Berman might have called the ‘dissolving’ aspects of modernity: its discontinuity, its sense of confrontation and shock, its explosive nature, its speed and disorientation” (2006, 309). But such an emphasis, Gunning argues, marginalizes another dimension of modernity that emphasizes standardization, organization and rationalization. With both aspects under consideration, modernity emerges as Janus-faced, looking at once towards chaos and order—the titular shock and low. Drawing on Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986), Gunning uses the railway as an emblematic example. Railroad travel was rapid and comfortable. It was a much smoother means of transportation than the stagecoach, with its bumpy roads and unpredictable INTRODUCTION 9 schedules. A train could handle many more passengers at once than its competitors, and allowed passengers to ride in comfort and class. A traveller could read and socialize. In many ways, rail was the representative modern form of transportation—rational, systematic, fast and eficient. But passengers knew the ever-present danger of railroad crashes that could inlict trauma on an enormous scale. The train ride embodies the dialectic between the forces of rationalization and organization and those of dissolution and chaos. Both are modern (Gunning 2006, 310).15 So how can it be that magicians, spiritualists, psychical researchers and so many others made such blatant appeals to science and postEnlightenment rationality to explain, contextualize or justify ghosts, magic, telepathy and other such phenomena? If we understand modernity in the dialectical terms Gunning proposes, this dynamic seems not only unsurprising, but also inevitable. Cinema, according to Gunning’s revised formulation, is best understood as partaking of both the shock and the low of modernity. If early cinema was dominated by displays and shocks of many kinds (Gunning’s “Cinema of Attractions”), post-1910 cinema would turn towards the rationalizing face of modernity, with narrative as a stabilizing force that ushers in the factory-style industrial mode of production and thus regularizes cinema’s main product. But that chaotic other face remains. Gunning (2006) ultimately argues that a nuanced conception of modernity needs to acknowledge both its dissolving and stabilizing faces. Ben Singer offers a similar revision of his understanding of modernity in the 2009 essay “The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema”: “Modernity is better understood as a heterogeneous arena of modern and counter-modern impulses, yielding cultural expressions that relected both ends of the spectrum, along with, and perhaps more frequently, ambivalent or ambiguous positions in between” (2009, 38). These multifaceted, multidirectional conceptions of modernity suggest ways of addressing the question of why the most modern and rational societies always seem to have such a fascination with the magical, the supernatural and the occult. And what of modernism? Berman deines “modernism” as “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it” (1983, 5). By this deinition, most of the personages dealt with herein qualify as modernists, be they magicians modernizing their acts by appealing to science, spiritualists delighted by the potential of new technologies to access invisible worlds, psychical researchers applying an experimental model to supernatural phenomena or early ilmmakers 10 M. LEEDER drawing on the stock of supernatural concepts available to them to provide material for their new medium. They are all probably most readily allied with “popular modernism” (Daly 1999) or “vernacular modernism” (Hansen 1999), though many of the canonical igures of high modernism, from such writers as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Mina Loy, to artists like Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp and intellectuals like Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, had their own dabblings (and sometimes more) with spiritualism and occultism. The cultural reach of the supernatural went well beyond those who believed in it, per se; as Helen Sword writes, “even conirmed sceptics such as [James] Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, while shunning spiritualist practice, routinely illed their iction, poetry and essays with mediums, ghosts, séances, disembodied voices, and other invocations of the living dead” (n, x).16 Taking up The ghoST The entanglements of early cinema with the modern supernatural can be explored from any number of angles, and this book, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema, does not claim to be exhaustive. It does, however, attempt to provide an important backstory to current debates about cinema’s “supernatural,” “magical” or “ghostly” properties, testing the claims of these theoretical debates against historical evidence. The central question of The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema may be phrased as something like “What conditions made early cinema’s supernatural associations possible?” Why did early cinema inspire supernatural associations by commentators like Stead, Gorky and Johnson, and by those ilmmakers who gravitated towards supernatural scenarios? One way to explain any supernatural qualities that cinema was recognized as possessing in its irst years is through recourse to its newness, its status as a novel and wondrous new medium. I do not discount this explanation for cinema’s supernatural afinities entirely, but it does not fully satisfy me. Rather, I suggest throughout this book that we can understand cinema’s supernatural qualities not only through its newness but also through its continuities with some of the innumerable technologies and practices that anticipated it. Chapter 2, “The Haunting of Film Theory,” deals with the understanding of cinema as a haunted medium by such early ilm theorists as Ricciotto Canudo, Antonin Artaud, Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs, and the revival of this understanding in the aforementioned “spectral turn.” INTRODUCTION 11 This chapter argues that the spectral turn, which draws from the supernatural a set of powerful discursive metaphors, has tended to mistake historically contingent aspects of cinema for essential attributes. Having established the theoretical contexts for the book’s discussion of early cinema and the supernatural, subsequent chapters try to reclaim its original context in a variety of ways. Chapter 3, “Light and Lies: Screen Practice and (Super-) Natural Magic,” examines the entanglement of the supernatural and “screen practice” in a longer history leading up to the cinema. From the magic lantern, and the Phantasmagoria’s complex dynamics of demystiication and mystiication, through the theatrical illusions of Pepper’s Ghost and the ghost show in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fascination with the supernatural implications of the projected image has a long history before cinema’s debut, which helps illuminate cinema’s own supernatural afinities. Chapter 4, “The Strange Case of George Albert Smith: Mesmerism, Psychical Research and Cinema,” offers a biographical examination of the relationship of cinema and the supernatural by following the unique career trajectory of a pioneering British ilmmaker. Smith started as a Brighton stage performer whose thought-transference act brought him the attention of the ledgling Society for Psychical Research (SPR). After spending more than a decade working for the SPR in a variety of capacities, he returned to Brighton and made some of the most innovative ilms of the time, including a variety of trick ilms that clearly drew on his prior professions. Chapter 5, “Aesthetics of Co-registration: Spirit Photography, X-rays and Cinema,” broadens its focus outward from cinema to examine the supernatural implications of two photographic practices adjacent to cinema: spirit photography and X-ray photography. The chapter argues that both share an aesthetic principle whereby various layers of information are collapsed onto a single plane, which they share with cinematic doubleexposure techniques. This aesthetic would be central to the doubleexposure techniques frequently used to represent ghosts in the silent era (and to a lesser extent, beyond it). Chapter 6, “Méliès’s Skeleton: Gender, Cinema’s Danse Macabre and the Erotics of Bone,” focuses on the prominence of the igure of the skeleton in entertainment in the 1890s. Skeletons are a particularly common sight in early cinema, especially in the trick ilms of Georges Méliès beginning with The Vanishing Lady (1896). This visibility can be explained on the one hand as a vestige of danse macabre traditions stretching back to 12 M. LEEDER the Middle Ages, and on the other as an offshoot of the X-ray’s contemporaneous popularity. The chapter explains how both of these causes factored into the eroticization of the female skeleton in early cinema and the late Victorian cult of dead and dying women. Chapter 7, “Living Pictures at Will: Projecting Haunted Minds,” explores a triangular relationship between internal mental spaces, the supernatural and the trope of projection. It examines several nineteenthcentury texts in which this connection is made manifest: Edward BulwerLytton’s 1859 novella “The Haunted and the Haunters,” spiritualist/ journalist W.T. Stead’s 1896 writings about “The Kinetiscope of the Mind” and David Starr Jordan’s 1896 sympsychography hoax. The conclusion, “Lost Worlds, Ghost Worlds,” offers some inal thoughts on the current fascination with the supernatural qualities of early cinema, linking it to the narrative of the “lostness” of that era of cinema. noTeS 1. The “technological” character of modern spiritualism has been explored by numerous scholars, including Swatos (1990), Peters (1999, esp. 94–101, 137–44), Sconce (2000, esp. 21–58) and Noakes (2004). Martyn Jolly writes that, “The spiritualists were modernists. They understood the phenomena they witnessed, and believed in, to be part of the same unfolding story of progress as science and technology” (2006, 143). 2. For more on Stead’s occult explorations in particular, see Luckhurst (2004) and Sausman (2012). 3. Compare the account of another 1896 French journalist, Jean Badreux: “the Lumière brothers … have found a way to revive the dead … Science has triumphed over death” (quoted in Solomon 2010, 12). 4. In the past few decades this term has largely displaced “primitive cinema” to describe cinema before roughly the mid 1910s and the standardization of the feature-length narrative ilms as the industry’s key product. 5. The book was co-authored with his sister Antonia. Matthew Solomon (2010) explores the rhetoric of the supernatural in the Dicksons’ book, arguing that it borrows from exposures of spiritualism done by stage magicians (2010, 16–20). W.K.L. Dickson’s employer, Thomas Edison, was himself a point of obsession for INTRODUCTION 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 13 some spiritualists. An 1884 article in Light argued that Edison’s feat of sending electricity through a vacuum was great evidence of “how science is tending towards the spiritualism … Spiritualists should be in the front ranks of learning in every department of knowledge in the great school of nature” (Allen 1884, 512) and a 1896 letter in Banner of Light insisted that Edison was a medium whose (perhaps unconscious) grand project was contacting the spirit world (Eggleston 1896, 1). The Victorian occult revival, conventionally dated to the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888, plays only a background role in this text. For excellent overviews, I would refer any reader to such sources as Washington (1995), Owen (2004), Gunn (2011), Drury (2011), Butler (2011) and Wilson (2013). I have ruled out “paranormal” as a viable substitute because it is of twentieth-century coinage. I confess that it does some injustice to complex terms like “magic” to subsume them under “supernatural.” Among important scholarship on the relationship of science and the supernatural in modern culture which is not otherwise mentioned here, is Briggs (1977), Finucane (1982), Gunning (1995a), Grove (1997), Davis (1998), Marvin (1988), Vanderbeke (2006), Morrisson (2007), Brower (2010) and Lachapelle (2011, 2015). This process is related to the professionalization of science that, according to John Limon, was complete by 1860. Prior to that time, one could “drop everything and become a scientist” (1990, 5), but in time science became an occulted process inaccessible to the average man. See also Knight (1986). See also Luckhurst (2005, xix). For “cinematic” imagery in Gothic literature, see Williams (2007) and Foster (2015). Clarke’s famous words are quoted or paraphrased in a great many places, including within ictional narratives. Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) quotes them in Superman Returns (2006) (see Evans 2010, 590), as does Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Thor (2011). A 2011 Star Trek tie-in novel by David A. McIntee bears the title Indistinguishable from Magic, and James Cameron once described the impact his special effects in The Abyss (1989) had on an audience by evoking Clarke’s Third Law, stating that it represents “how 14 M. LEEDER 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. it’s supposed to be—for the audience … The suficiently advanced technology had become magic to them” (1992, 262). More recent and more ilm-oriented takes on magic include Solomon (2010) and Williamson (2015). Others would include the locomotive, phonograph, telegraph, typewriter, phonograph, telephone and automobile. Important sources on modernity not otherwise cited in this introduction include Kern (1983), Clark (1984), Crary (1992) and Latour (1993). For useful overviews on thinking about cinema and modernity, see Furstenau and Hasslöcher (1994) and Murphet (2008). See Gunning (1995a, 2006), Bordwell (1997), Singer (2001) and Keil (2004) for a back-and-forth between rival perspectives, a once-productive conversation giving way to a quarrel. For more accounts of modernity and cinema, see Gunning (1998), Hansen (1991, 1999), Friedberg (1993), Doane (1990, 2002), Christie (1994, 2009), Charney and Schwartz (1995), Kirby (1997), Schwartz (1998) and Singer (2009). For critical views, see Carroll (2001) and Turvey (2008). The considerable signiicance of the train and early cinema has been explored by such scholars as Kirby (1997), Bottomore (1999), Loiperdinger (2004), Blümlinger (2006) and Elsaesser (2009). See Bell (2012) and Wilson (2013) for other articulations of the role of magic and the supernatural in modern societies. WorkS CiTed Allen, Milton. “Electrical Exhibition at Philadelphia.” Light 4.205 (1884): 512. Anderson, Robert. “Deining the Supernatural in Iceland.” Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 125–30. Bell, Karl. The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1983. Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientiic Proof of Life After Death. New York: Penguin, 2006. Blümlinger, Christa. “Lumière, the Train and the Avant-garde.” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Stauven. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006. 245–64. INTRODUCTION 15 Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Bottomore, Stephen. “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect’.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19.2 (1999): 177–216. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977. Brower, M. Brady. Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Burch, Noël. Life to Those Shadows. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Butler, Alison. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Magic. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Cameron, James. “Effects Scene: Technology and Magic.” Cinefex 51 (1992): 5–7. Carroll, Noël. “Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59.1 (2001): 11–7. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: 18th Century and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Christie, Ian. The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World. London: British Film Institute/BBC Educational Developments, 1994. Christie, Ian. “Moving-Picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously.” Comparative Critic Studies 6.3 (2009): 299–318. Clark, T.J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Clarke, Arthur C. Proiles of Magic: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. London: Orion, 1962. Connor, Steven. “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology and the ‘Direct Voice.’” Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Eds. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 203–25. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992. Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony, 1998. Dickson, W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson. History of the Kinematograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph. New York: Arno, 1895. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 16 M. LEEDER Doane, Mary Ann. “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe.” Logic of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 222–39. Dolar, Mladen. “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny.” October 58 (1991): 5–23. Drury, Nevill. Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Eggleston, Thomas. “Is He Not a Medium?” Banner of Light (May 2, 1896): 1. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship.” Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. Eds. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey Publishing, 2009. 9–22. Evans, Nicola Jean. “Undoing the Magic? DVD Extras and the Pleasure Behind the Scenes.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.4 (August 2010): 587–600. Finucane, R.C. Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts. London: Junction Books, 1982. Foster, Paul. “Kingdom of Shadows: Fin-de-siècle Gothic and Early Cinema.” Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Eds. Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. 29–41. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Furstenau, Marc and Kerstin Hasslöcher. “Cinema/Modernism/Modernity: Towards an Archaeology of the Cinema.” European Journal for Semiotic Studies 6.1–2 (1994): 253–305. Gorky, Maxim. “A review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair,” as printed in the Nizhegorodski listok, newspaper, July 4, 1896, and signed “I.M. Pacatus.” Appendix 3 to Jay Leyda, A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Unwin House, 1960. 407–9. Grove, Allen W. “Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-rays and the Victorian Imagination.” Literature and Medicine 16.2 (Fall 1997): 141–73. Gunn, Joshua. Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995b. 114–33. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56–62. INTRODUCTION 17 Gunning, Tom. “Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows.” Cinema and Modernity. Ed. Murray Pomerance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 297–315. Gunning, Tom. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995a. 42–71. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hansen, Miriam. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siecle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Johnson, V.E. “The Kinematograph from a Scientiic Point of View.” In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. Eds. Colin Harding and Simon Popple. London: Cygnus Press, 1996. 25. Jolly, Martyn. Faces of the Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. London: British Library, 2006. Keil, Charlie. “‘To Here from Modernity’: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema.” American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 51–75. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Klass, Morton. Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. Knight, David. The Age of Science: The Scientiic World-view in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Lachapelle, Soie. Conjuring Science: A History of Scientiic Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Lachapelle, Soie. Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metaphysics in France, 1853–1931. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Loiperdinger, Martin. “Lumière’s Arrival of a Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth.” The Moving Image 4.1 (Spring 2004): 89–118. 18 M. LEEDER Luckhurst, Roger. “Introduction.” Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Ed. Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ix–xxxi. Luckhurst, Roger. “W.T. Stead’s Occult Economies.” Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-century Media. Eds. Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Goean Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan R. Topham. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004. 125–35. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: University of Oxford Press, 1988. McEwan, Cheryl. “A Very Modern Ghost: Postcolonialism and the Politics of Enchantment.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 29–46. Morrisson, Mark S. Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Murphet, Julian. “Film and (as) Modernity.” The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies. Eds. James Donald and Michael Renov. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. 343–60. Noakes, Richard. “Spiritualism, Science and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain.” The Victorian Supernatural. Eds. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 23–43. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pels, Peter. “Introduction: Magic and Modernity.” Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Eds. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 1–38. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Rossell, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. Sausman, Justin. “The Democratisation of the Spook: W.T. Stead and the Invention of Public Occultism.” W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary. Eds. Laurel Brake, Ed King, Roger Luckhurst and James Mussell. London: The British Library, 2012. 149–165. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Schwartz, Vanessa. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Sered, Susan. “Afterword: Lexicons of the Supernatural.” Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 213–8. Singer, Ben. “The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse.” Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. Eds. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey, 2009. 37–52. INTRODUCTION 19 Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Solomon, Matthew. Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Stead, W.T. “Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students: Useful Analogies from Recent Discoveries and Inventions.” Borderland 3.4 (October 1896): 400–11. Swatos, William H. “Spiritualism as a Religion of Science.” Social Compass 37.4 (1990): 471–82. Swingewood, Alan. Cultural Theory and the Problem of Modernity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Thurschwell, Pamela. “Refusing to Give Up the Ghost: Some Thoughts on the Afterlife from Spirit Photography to Phantom Films.” The Disembodied Spirit. Brunswick, Maine: The Bowdon College Museum of Art, 2003. 20–31. Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Vanderbeke, Dirk. “‘Science Is Magic That Works’: The Return of Magic in Literature on Science.” Magic, Science, Technology and Literature. Eds. Jarmila Mildorf, Hans Ulrich Seeber and Martin Windisch. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006. 209–24. Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-irst Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums and Misits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Williams, Keith. H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Williamson, Colin. Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Wilson, Leigh. Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.