Queen Victoria at the Pictures

Queen Victoria was enthusiastically taken up by the shows, exhibitions and lectures that blossomed in the nineteenth century. This collaborative essay demonstrates the way Victoria's life and reign was embraced by the moving-image and projected-image formats that proliferated during the period, particularly touring panoramas, magic lantern shows and early film. Victoria and Albert were themselves intermittent visitors to these new pictorial shows in London, while, across both nation and empire, local communities were able to participate in key royal events thanks to their replaying and broadcasting by media such as the magic lantern and early film.

Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination

Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination explores the role of biblical imagery in modernity through the lens of Gustave Doré (1832–83), whose work is among the most reproduced and adapted scriptural imagery in the history of Judeo-Christianity. First published in France in late 1865, Doré’s Bible illustrations received widespread critical acclaim among both religious and lay audiences, and the next several decades saw unprecedented dissemination of the images on an international scale. In 1868, the Doré Gallery opened in London, featuring monumental religious paintings that drew 2.5 million visitors over the course of a quarter century; when the gallery’s holdings traveled to the United States in 1892, exhibitions at venues such as the Art Institute of Chicago drew record crowds. The United States saw the most creative appropriations of Doré’s images among a plethora of media, from prayer cards and magic lantern slides to massive stained-glass windows and the spectacular epic films of Cecil B. DeMille. This book repositions biblical imagery at the center of modernity, an era that has often been defined through a process of secularization. The veracity and authority of the Bible came under unprecedented scrutiny and were at the center of a range of historical, theological, and cultural debates. Gustave Doré is at the nexus of these narratives, as his work established the most pervasive visual language for biblical imagery in the past two and a half centuries and constitutes the means by which the Bible has persistently been translated visually for modern audiences.

Peddling for Profit

Chapter 5 moves to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, where the entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for spectacle led to some of the most significant and idiosyncratic recuperations of Doré’s work and the most compelling evidence for the critical place biblical imagery has maintained in modern life. A combination of practical factors (the lack of international copyright laws, for instance, and the highly successful tour of works from the Doré Gallery) led to widespread appropriation of Doré’s imagery in a plethora of contexts, including traditional media such as stained glass and book illustration, as well as more recent developments such as the magic lantern. In the United States, the proliferation of Christian denominations and capitalist culture alike are uniquely bound up with the circulation of Doré’s images.

Adorno’s Magic Lantern: On Film, Semblance, and Aesthetic Heteronomy

Rejecting a reading of Theodor W. Adorno as a critic of the culture industry who could not conceive of film’s critical potential, many commentators have argued that for Adorno, film can become autonomous and thus a medium for social critique. This article argues that such a reading is only partly correct. Indeed, Adorno thought that film could be a medium for critique, yet he never stopped asserting film’s heteronomy. Building on the work of Miriam Hansen, the article argues that for Adorno, critical film could overcome the limitation of technique by film’s representational base and its inability to achieve a neutral standpoint through the use of montage, which arranges the material without dominating it.

Walter Scott, Five Short Stories: The Dundee Edition

Five Short Stories brings together a diverse selection of Walter Scott’s shorter fictions produced over a five-year span late in his long career. First published within the three-volume novel Redgauntlet (1824), “Wandering Willie’s Tale” remains a staple of Gothic anthologies. Two Scottish tales, “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers”, come from Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott’s only official short story collection. Two other works intended for a second series of Chronicles, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” and “The Tapestried Chamber”, eventually appeared in a fashionable gift-book, The Keepsake for 1829. A grisly murder and a journey into a hellish underworld; a drug-induced desertion followed by a military execution; a simmering rivalry leading to a homicide; bigamy exposed by a magic lantern show; and an ornate room furnished with the ghost of an evil aristocrat: these short stories amply showcase Scott’s darker imagination.

The Projector's Noises: A Media Archaeology Of Cinema Through The Projector

This dissertation provides a media archaeology of the film projector, concentrating on the conceptualization and use of projector noise through the lens of the modernist and contemporary avant-garde, that offers new ways of understanding cinema, interpreting embodied cinematic space, and extending the discourse on audiovision in general. Looking toward the projector allows us to see how it is a productive labourer in the construction of cinematic experience. Listening to its noises— which have been framed as insignificant and/or unwanted—allows us to understand the way cinema is in fact a performative art with a certain kind of liveness. Part One of this dissertation traces an alternative history of cinema focused on the projector beginning with the pre-cinema technologies of the camera obscura, the telescope and the magic lantern. Part Two analyzes how the avant-garde has engaged with the projector-as-instrument during three major technological transitional moments in cinema: first, early cinema and the rise of the Cinématographe by looking at the Italian futurists, specifically Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra’s interest in the projector-as-instrument and the relationship between the Cinématographe and Luigi Russolo’s