Lecture recordings

The stupendous impact of the magic lantern on the imaginative labours of the romantic generation, especially when these return us to the domain of the ocular – of seeing and gazing – has long been recognized in scholarship. Less understood is the mobilization of the apparatus for reimagining voice, singing, and song during the nineteenth century. This presentation takes its point of departure from an eccentric assemblage of scenes from silent film, narrative, song, and opera, which I read in a kaleidoscopic manner for traces of sound and for the sense of how the lantern may be said to constitute the scene of romantic listening.

Gabriela Cruz teaches music history and the history of opera at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her interests lie at the intersection of the histories of visual and sonic technologies, opera, theatre, and performance studies; and her recent book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera (OUP, 2020) addresses the constitutive roles that technologies of illumination and illusion played in transforming the medium of opera during the nineteenth century. She is currently working on a new book on music and comedy.

This paper discusses the career of the American magic lanternist and moving picture showman John P. Dibble (1853-1943), as described in his 1268 pages long unpublished manuscript memoirs in the presenter’s collection. ‘Pop Dibble, who called himself the ‘Daddy of Them All’, came from Branford, Connecticut. Beginning in 1872, his exhibitions continued for half a century. The memoirs, which Dibble wrote in 1929-31, may be the most extensive document ever written by a major lanternist. It offers unique insights into the world of itinerant exhibitions between magic lantern and moving panorama spectacles, and silent cinema. Dibble’s activities, which were noted in the trade press, encouraged him to characterize himself as ‘The Oldest Exhibitor in the United States and Canada’.

Erkki Huhtamo is Professor of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California Los Angeles. He is internationally known as a founding figure of media archaeology. He is also a major collector of items related to the early history of visual media. Professor Huhtamo has lectured worldwide, curated exhibitions, directed television programmes, and published widely in over ten languages. His most important book to date is Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (The MIT Press, 2013). ‘The Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study’ is forthcoming.