Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media by Noam M. Elcott (review)

In the beginning there was nothing, and then there was artificial darkness. This, in several respects, is the thesis of Noam M. Elcott's book, which indeed begins by quoting Genesis. A series of arguments about the critical role that darkness played in early cinema and modernism follow, all intelligently formulated, elegantly constructed, and engagingly presented, though less groundbreaking than the author wants us to believe. An exquisitely illustrated book, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media traces the relationship between constructed darkness and artificial light, privileging the former by obscuring the latter. It focuses on an oft-studied set of objects: the magic lantern, phantasmagoria, spirit photography, and Pepper's ghost; Étienne-Jules Marey's motion studies; Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón's trick films; and Richard Wagner's Bayreuth theater, interwar movie houses, and Oskar Schlemmer's avant-garde ballets. Using these objects and practices, Elcott narrates something like cinema's emergence in the nineteenth century, although this story ends not with the medium's institutionalization or industrialization but instead with artificial darkness, a dispositif, not a medium, and with Schlemmer, an artist who used darkness but only rarely worked with film. Elcott's question is not where cinema came from so much as how and where darkness, one of cinema's defining features, developed with it.

For cinema scholars, much of this, save perhaps Wagner and Schlemmer, will sound familiar, and those steeped in early film historiography and media archaeology may strain to identify the "obscure" in a history we know in large part thanks to the New Film History.¹ By ignoring that history's valuable insights, however, Artificial Darkness manufactures its own darkness—the black historiographical screen for its illumination. This is a problem not only for intellectual reasons but also because this book, in positioning itself as an interdisciplinary work that can speak not just to art history but also to cinema and media studies, misrepresents the latter. In doing so, it negates the very promise of interdisciplinarity.

Turning away from both light and the significant interventions of more than two decades of film and media scholarship, Elcott argues in the book's introduction that "nearly all archaeologies of cinema betray themselves as paeans to lights and cameras when they climax at the legendary Lumière screening at the Grand Café on December 28, 1895."² The "nearly" here is this book's essential rhetorical buttress, through which Elcott obscures so much work that has not focused on film and its cameras and thereby insists upon the novelty of his alternative to film history's supposedly light- and text-obsessed histories. That novelty rests on a restrictive dichotomy between artificial light and manufactured darkness, the former having, Elcott argues, blinded historians from the more important story of the latter. The introduction includes a series of "exclusions" to this strict distinction—noting, for example, that artificial darkness could not be total, that it sometimes required daylight, and that it "was much more proximate to artificial light than to other forms of darkness."³ These equivocations aside, the book insists that although "the histories of artificial light and artificial darkness overlap at important junctures … ultimately they are distinct."⁴ Focusing on where the darkness appeared, such as in film studios and theaters, the book examines a series of dispositifs, most often involving some version of a black screen, used to create the conditions for conjuring images.

The book's first chapter focuses on Marey's Station Physiologique, site of the scientist's "proto-cinematic" studies of moving humans, animals, and objects. Between 1882 and 1886, Marey designed a series of structures to serve as backdrops for these photographic experiments. The essential innovation, inspired by chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, was a recessed tunnel lined in black curtains that limited light...