The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 (review)

It is apt that Lynda Nead begins her fascinating and informative volume with an exploration of the term "medium." As she clarifies, the word links the emergence of new mass communications such as film at the turn of the nineteenth century to the terrain of spiritualism. In both cases, medium marks a process of transition between the inert and the animated. In the course of the book's three thematic parts, "Ghosts and Machines," "Cameras and Cars," and "Earthly and Astral Bodies," Nead explores frictions and inversions between the moving and the still, the living and the dead. The metaphor of haunting thus comes to haunt the text itself, and it allows Nead to make productive connections between histories, objects, and cultural forms that otherwise appear disjointed or opposed.

The case studies explored are diverse, encompassing histories of aesthetics and the psychology of vision; associated visual technologies, including the magic lantern, the camera, the cinematograph, and other moving image devices; traditions of representation and exhibition associated with Victorian arts; and performance traditions in entertainments from magic theatre to music hall to fairground. As Nead explains, the "polemical aim" of this methodology is "to move beyond the established frameworks of interdisciplinarity" and develop a model of intermedial study "that produces an integrated approach to visual media and that secures these forms within historical networks that include technology, magic, entertainment and desire" (2). The opening two chapters are exemplary in this respect, providing a wealth of context concerning issues of movement and of haunting that will be essential reading for the broadening range of disciplines sharing an interest in late-century visual culture. These issues have been considered by early film historians, frequently in response to those early film reviews that evoked the new medium's kinetic or uncanny qualities. But there are many more relatively unknown histories of such uncanny, affective responses to images, and Nead dexterously moves to explore and connect some of these. For example, in her fascinating and important account of the tradition of staged tableaux vivants, Nead links Pygmalionist fantasises of animated statuary to haunting scenes in spectacular and magic theatre and to the widespread cultural theme—upon which early film would regularly capitalise—of the picture that comes to life. At the same time, the book excavates a set of performance conventions and visual regimes that were a pervasive fixture of the late-Victorian popular entertainment landscape but have attracted remarkably little academic attention.

Throughout The Haunted Gallery, Nead seeks out and occupies the spaces between competing disciplinary teleologies. Emphasising that such constructions are condemned to produce "limited historical meaning," Nead prefers a generative model of visual media, in which they are collectively taken "to represent the exchange of social meanings through the circulation of images and ideas" (135). She is assisted in this project, in part, by the book's wealth of beautiful illustrations, which suggest a re-enactment of the dialogue between alternative visual media. Most strikingly, in the course of the final chapter's expansive discussion of astronomy, time, projection, and female iconography, G. F. Watts's remarkable 1902 canvas, The Sower of the Systems, is visually associated both with popular astronomical imagery reproduced in turn-of-the-century popular journals and guides, and with the swirling, colourful "skirt dances" crafted at this time by the popular performer Loïe Fuller, to which she sometimes gave astronomical names. Other images emphasise connections between popular representations of the lunar landscape imagined within astronomical books of the period and celebrated early films such as George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902). As in other chapters, Nead develops such suggestive graphic linkages, in part, by associating them with the careers of those who created or worked with them. Thus, figures such as Méliès—whose career as a filmmaker famously developed from traditions of magic theatre—and Camille Flammarion—a French astronomer, photographer, and psychic researcher, who proposed a...