Category Archives: Pre-cinema optical devices

Pathé Baby Collection

In the summer of 2008, Professor Rubén Gallo discovered a treasure trove of 800 French silent movies along with the Pathé Baby home movie projector to play them. This morning, nearly seven years later, we finalized the digitization, cataloguing and mounting of these films on the internet for the world to see.

All the title frames have been transcribed and translated, so that the films are key word searchable in English and French. Give it a try:
http://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2244

Many people worked on this project. We must begin by thanking Lynn Shostack and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project for their encouragement and generous support. Thanks to grants in both 2009 and 2010, we were able to partner with the Colorlab Preservation Laboratory of Rockville, Maryland, which is one of the few companies in the United States capable of undertaking the arduous process of hand-cleaning, replasticizing, and transferring the 9.5 mm film stock to a digital medium.

Each one minute film was treated individually, and a pause was inserted at a total of 11,067 title frames to give enough time for them to be read. Then, the combined digital files had to be broken up again into each physical reel, to preserve the films in their original length. Finally, the files were converted to a universally readable format that could be played by all browsers.

Over the last few years, Vicki Principi and Ben Johnston have been the primary forces bringing this project to completion, overseeing the transcription, translating, and cataloguing of each reel. A website was designed so that all this data can be searchable by viewers around the world. In addition, a number of Princeton University students worked on this project, including Ghita Guessous, Oren Lurie, Christopher McElwain, Iriane Narcisse, Christian Perry, and Mengyi Xu.

Please join me in congratulating them on their great work. Now, enjoy the movies.
http://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2244

Daguerre’s Diorama

Seventeen years before Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1759-1851) perfected the capture of images on a silver-coated copper plate (daguerreotypes), he created the Diorama with the help of the architectural painter Charles Marie Bouton (1781-1853). The barn-size building was elaborately constructed to present a life-size painting moving past spectators with constantly changing light effects that gave the illusion of changing times of days, or weather or seasons or other magically moving pictures.

Daguerre’s Diorama opened in Paris during the summer of 1822 and was an immediate success. Within a year, a second auditorium opened in London. Each 30 minute show presented two paintings, usually one outdoor scene and one religion interior.

Vue du Château d’Eau prise du Boulevard St. Martin. Metz: Nicolas Gengel et Adrien Dembour, 1840. Hand colored wood engraving. Graphic Arts Collection GA2015- in process

This vue d’optique or optical view of the Diorama comes from the Metz studio of Adrien Dembour (1799-1887) and his successor Nicolas Gengel, where over 100 workers were employed.

Like the studios nearby in Nancy and Epinal, the Metz shop produced colorful, popular prints of historic sites and urban landmarks. This print is meant to be view with a zograscope.

We are calling this a wood engraving, but Dembour devised a relief etching process around 1834, which he called ecktypography. The relief copper plate was inked and printed the same as a woodblock. It is possible this is a metal relief print.

http://www.midley.co.uk/HomePage.htm
More articles and images about Daguerre have been collected by R. Derek Wood.

Slip-slides

The Graphic Arts Collection has a large collection of magic lantern slides but only a few mechanical or movable slides. We have some chromotrope slides with cranks or pulleys that produce abstract geometrical patterns and colors. Others have two or three sheets of glass that slide back and forth to conceal and reveal parts of a scene. These are known as slip-slides. Some are meant to be snapped, creating a sudden appearance, while others move slowly, dissolving from one view to another.

Here are a few animated GIFs of our slipping slides.

Pathé Baby Gifts

Our sincere thanks today go to W. Allen Scheuch II, Class of 1976, who has tripled our Pathé Baby projector collection. These, along with a German Pathé manual, extra bulbs, repair kit and tools, special film oil, and various other equipment, are given in honor of Rubén Gallo, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain; Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures; and Director, Program in Latin American Studies. It was Professor Gallo who first introduced our department to the Pathé company and its film history.

Thanks to Mr. Scheuch’s gift, we now understand that Pathé’s special 9.5 mm film came in several length reels, the first running approximately one minute and the other two or three minutes. We have yet to play the films that came today but one has a note that it shows a procession in 1932 (written in German).

Coming in 2015, we will be adding several hundred additional films to the Princeton University website, which have been digitized and catalogued. Until then, take a look at these: http://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2244

Shadow and Substance

The British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1828–1867) drew a series of caricatures for the Illustrated Times known informally as Shadows, beginning as early as 1856. In each scene, a shadow is cast by an individual to form a surprising, usually humorous shape, which reveals something about their inner personality. It is a play on the popular magic lantern entertainments of the period.

Between 1858 and 1859, Bennett’s images were wood-engraved by Joseph Swain, matched with prose and poetry by Robert Brough, and issued in 10 parts by William Kent. In 1860, the parts were collected and published with hand colored plates under the title Shadow and Substance.

The preface notes that it is a book of images, illustrated with text, stating “It is only necessary to state formally what will be found implied symbolically in the introductory chapter, namely, that the work originated with the artist—the writer’s share of it being, consequently, accessorial and supplementary.”

The popularity of these images led to a series of magic lantern slides, issued by Fred V.A. Lloyd, Liverpool, with reduced black and white wood engravings of Bennett’s caricatures. The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired five of these slides, including one labeled “Elephant” never reproduced in the Bennett’s book.

Charles H. Bennett, Shadow and Substance. Text by Robert B. Brough (London: W. Kent & Co., 1860). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

A gift with perspective

The Graphic Arts Collection is delighted to have received the donation of a vintage zograscope and 56 eighteenth-century hand-colored perspective prints (vue d’optique) from Evelyn and Peter Kraus in honour of Charles Ryskamp.

The device, also called a diagonal mirror, is simply a double convex lens and a mirror on a stand tall enough to use either sitting or standing. A well-known eighteenth-century print [below] by J.F. Cazenzave after Louis Léopold Boilly, shows a woman and her son (identified as Louise Sébastienne Danton and Antoine Danton) looking at prints through a zograscope,

Erin Blake traced the earliest mention of perspective prints to the April 2-4, 1747 St. James’s Evening Post, and after this, in a number of newspaper advertisements. By 1753, Robert Sayer published a catalogue of over 200 views and in later years, Georg Balthasar Probst established an busy studio producing prints labeled in four languages for sale throughout Europe. The majority of prints in our new collection date from the earliest years, some even proofs before the caption was added.

L’Optique, ca. 1794. British Museum.

It is the condition of the prints donated by Mr. and Mrs. Kraus that is particularly impressive. Because perspective prints were made to be handled and enjoyed by the whole family, most of the ones that survive are worn and/or faded. The color of these prints is strong and bright, with lovely watercolored skies and oceans.

Views of all the major cities of Europe are represented, as well as Mexico, Egypt, and the Far East. I have included a few examples below. For the complete list, here is a pdf
French School. Vue de Baionne. Paris, Basset, ca. 1750-1800. Original engraving hand-colored at publication.

European School. Vues des Chantiers et du Port de Carthagene en Espagne. ca. 1750-1800. Original engraving hand-colored at publication.

Georg Balthasar Probst. Le Rouine del grande Tempio du Palmira, della parte d’Occidente. Augsburg, ca. 1750-1800. Original engraving hand-colored at publication.

Georg Balthasar Probst. Les Pyramides de l’Egypte. Augsburg, ca. 1750-1800. Original engraving hand-colored at publication.

Georg Balthasar Probst. Veduta della Chiesa di S. Martino, a Londra. Augsburg, ca. 1750-1800. Original engraving hand-colored at publication.

above: lit from the front
below: lit from the back
C.J. Kaldenbach, “Perspective Views,” Print Quarterly 2, no.2 (June 1985): 87-104.

Erin Blake, “Zograscopes, Virtual Reality and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth Century England,” in New Media 1740-1915 (Cambridge Mass., 2003)

Erin Blake, “Topographical Prints Through the Zograscope,” Imago Mundi 54 (2002): 120-4.

Prospect der Königlichen Börse an dem Haupt Canal zu Cadix

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Balthazar Frederic Leizelt (ca. 1727-1796), Prospect der Königlichen Börse an dem Haupt Canal zu Cadix, wo man zugleich mit spanischen Gondlen spazieren fahret. / Vuë de Bourse Royale au Canal de Cadix ou les Chevalliers et Dames se prome=nent dans les Barques, after 1770. Engraved optical print. Graphic Arts Collection GC138

This 18th century prospect of the Royal Exchange in Cadiz is one of our Vues d’Optique or Perspective Views. The back is prepared with colored paper so that when it is held to light, or seen in a peep box, the lights in the windows turn on creating a bright night scene.

Based in Augsburg, Balthazar Frederic Leizelt published dozens of these city views with captions in multiple languages for maximum sales potential. Not all scenes are realistic views. Leizelt and his staff also made-up city views, especially from the United States, which were too difficult to draw in person.

Lantern slides of Hamlet

Joseph George Holman ?1764-1817. 1st Hamlet America: Sept. 28, 1812. Artist unknown, Garrick Club, London. Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Within the Graphic Arts Collection there are 100s of lantern slides. Several dozen document various productions of Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Here are a few examples.

At the bottom is a wonderful video on the documentation and performance of Charles Dickens’s novels using lantern slides.

Basil Sydney. Claudius: Charles Waldron, Booth Theatre 1925. Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Maurice Evans, Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Mrs. Shaw (Mrs. Thomas S. Hamblin). 1st performance Hamlet February 21 1940, Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Raymond Massey 1931. Horatio: Leon Quartermaine. Design: Norman Bel Geddes. Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson 1853-1903. Graphic Arts Collection GC136

John E. Kellerd 1863-1929. Start of forced run of 102 performances November 18, 1912, Graphic Arts Collection GC136

Thanks go to the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture and Prof. Mervyn Heard for this video:

Magic Lantern Society of U.S. & Canada

It has been a full first day at the 16th convention of the Magic Lantern Society of U.S. & Canada, hosted by Dick Balzer in his astonishing Carriage House. Members from Australia, Japan, Italy, and elsewhere marveled at Mr. Balzer’s collection, beautifully exhibited in cabinets and cases on all sides. Our welcome bags even included a full color catalogue describing 100 items carefully chosen from this extraordinary cabinet of wonders.

So far, there have been ten diverse presentations beginning with Dick Moore’s ‘Peek under the Circus Tent.’ Not only did he show us historical images but he did it using a magic lantern projector rather than a simple PowerPoint presentation. See a single image below of children peeking under as we did the same.
I am resting up for the second day, which will include an evening of magic lantern entertainments at the Brattle Theater by Dick Balzer, Dick Moore, Terry Borton, Larry Rakow, and Mervyn Heard (seen far below introducing the Great Snazelle). Here are a few more images from the day. For more, see Mr. Balzer’s own site: http://www.dickbalzer.com/

Magic Lantern Society of United States and Canada: http://www.magiclanternsociety.org/

Filmathèque Pathé-Baby

In conjunction with our collection of French silent movies, available to stream online at:
http://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2244 we are also acquiring the catalogues and indexes that went together with the films produced by the Société française du Pathé-Baby.

This directory lists over 4,000 films to purchase and watch on the Pathé home movie projector, primarily French and American but others as well. We will be posting a new series of films in the fall, many of which are listed in this volume.

Filmathèque Pathé-Baby France, [11e édition]. Paris: Société française du Pathé-Baby, 1931.

http://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/1711

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