The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing, and Connecting ed. by Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy (review)

The magic lantern is a fascinating, albeit neglected, record of the past. These "palm-sized modular units of glass" survive in surprising numbers in public and private archives around the world, yet only recently have scholars begun to investigate their myriad social, cultural, and material histories (p. 8). This neglect is all the more regrettable since as an early type of image projector, the magic lantern was a major technology of mass visual communication and persuasion in pre-cinematic days. Understanding its history and significance as part of a wider media environment is a necessary step towards historicizing our contemporary engagement with information technologies—including ubiquitous software programs such as PowerPoint—and an essential aspect of media literacy education more generally.

This richly illustrated volume, the outcome of a 2018 conference at the Australian National University, is a welcome attempt by editors Jolly and DeCourcy to draw attention to this overlooked body of past mediatic practices and define a future research agenda. As the title suggests, the essays are bound together by the contributors' aim to recover the magic lantern's multifaceted "work" as an instrument of "experiencing," "persuading," "witnessing," and "connecting." The book's core argument is that the magic lantern was "a key driver of historical agency and social affect" (p. 5). The case studies focus on the Anglophone world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, Britain, and the United States, complemented by two examples from continental Europe, but also firmly locate the magic lantern within a transnational circuit of media production and consumption.

Although not framed as such in the introductory essay, the notion of "experience" appears to represent an overarching theme, if we agree that persuading, witnessing, and connecting can be forms of experience mediated by the magic lantern. Such an approach would have enhanced the conceptual cohesion of the book, more so since many of the contributions acknowledge the multiple overlaps between these aspects of the lantern's work. The first chapter, by Deirdre Feeney, stands out as being the only contribution that considers how contemporary researchers experience magic lanterns as historical technologies that shape both their research and artistic practices. But the following chapters also engage with experiences mediated by the lantern, albeit from diverse perspectives: those of the people who produced and supplied lantern slides for the British Association for the Advancement of Science lectures or who staged lantern shows, among them American and Australian suffragists, missionaries for the British and Foreign Bible Society of Australia, and art historians like Professor Sidney Dickson. Equally significant, if more difficult to capture, are the experiences of those who attended these performances. A vivid example is the response to Armin T. Wegner's photographs of the Armenian genocide: the projection of Wegner's slides at the Urania Theatre in Berlin aroused an emotionally charged atmosphere among the Turkish and Armenian members of the audience.

This concern with the elusive responses of past audiences—or, indeed, the lack thereof, as was the case with Lawrence Hargrave's slides aimed at reinterpreting Australia's past, which were apparently never projected—is one of the main strengths of the volume. True to their stated aim of capturing the particularities of audiences in an era of expanding mass communication, the essays also show how the lantern failed to connect and persuade (p. 6). Furthermore, they demonstrate that for such connecting work to be successful, the mere availability of technology was far from sufficient; access to technology had to be reinforced by access to human networks, and content had to be localized in order to address the specific needs of socially distinct audiences. In light of these rich historical examples that engage not only with the technology of the magic lantern, but also with the multitude of practices surrounding its use and the content of its messages, it is perhaps unfortunate that the notion of "social affect" remains untheorized in...