The Dead Media Notebook (34 page)

“In Germinal Year VI (March 1798) a Belgian inventor, physicist, and student of optics named Etienne-Gaspard Robertson presented what he called the first ‘fantasmagorie’ at the Pavillon de l’Echiquier in Paris. [Footnote: “Robertson (originally Robert) was born in Liege. On his colorful career, see his Memoires recreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques d’un physicien- aeronaute (Paris 1830-34). I have used the modern reprint, introduced by Philippe Blon, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985) Stendhal describes one of Robertson’s provincial shows in his Memoires d’un touriste (1838), in the section entitled, ‘Nivernais, le 18 avril.’”]

“Robertson, whose long and unusual career reflects the excitement and instability of his epoch, was both a brilliant eccentric and a tireless self-promoter. He first came to public notice in 1796 when he proposed to the Directoire a scheme for burning up the British fleet with a gigantic ‘miroir d’Archimede’, an assemblage of mirrors designed to concentrate solar rays on a distant object until the object caught fire. This particular plan was never put into action, but ‘Citoyen’ Robertson carried out a number of other public-spirited ventures in the years that followed. He experimented with galvanism and gave popular demonstrations in physics and optics in the 1790s and early 1800s. He was best known, however, as a balloon aeronaut, setting an altitude record in a montgolfiere in Hamburg in 1803. He later accompanied the Russian ambassador to China, where he demonstrated ballooning technique in the 1820s.

“Robertson’s phantasmagoria grew out of an interest in magic, conjuring, and optical effects. As he recalled in his Memoires recreatifs, scientifiques and anedotiques of 1830-34, he had been fascinated in youth with the conjuring device known as the magic lantern, invented by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century. Kircher’s device, from which all our modern instruments for slide and cinematic projection derive, consisted of a lantern containing a candle and a concave mirror. A tube with a convex lens at each end was fitted into an opening in the side of the lantern, while a groove in the middle of the tube held a small image painted on glass. When candlelight was reflected by the concave mirror onto the first lens, the lens concentrated the light on the image on the glass slide. The second lens in turn magnified the illuminated image and projected it onto a wall or gauze screen. In darkness, with the screen itself invisible, images could be made to appear like fantastic luminous shapes, floating inexplicably in the air.”

Source The Female Thermometer: 18
^th
-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny by Terry Castle Oxford University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-19-508097-1

From Bruce Sterling

“In the 1770s a showman named Francois Seraphin produced what he called Shadow Plays, or ‘Ombres Chinoises,’ using a magic lantern at Versailles; another inventor, Guyot, demonstrated how apparitions might be projected onto smoke.”

“Robertson began experimenting in the 1780s with similar techniques for producing ‘fantomes artificiels.’ He soon devised several improvements for the magic lantern, including a method for increasing and decreasing the size of the projected image by setting the whole apparatus on rollers. Thus the ‘ghost’ could be made to grow or shrink on front of the viewer’s eyes.

“Robertson recognized the uncanny illusionist potential of the new technology and exploited the magic lantern’s pseudonecromantic power with characteristic flamboyance. He staged his first ‘fantasmagorie’ as a Gothic extravaganza, complete with fashionably Radcliffean decor. An observer described the scene at the Pavillon de l’Echiquier:

“’The members of the public having been ushered into the most lugubrious of rooms, at the moment the spectacle is to be begin, the lights are suddenly extinguished and one is plunged for an hour and a half into frightful and profound darkness; it’s the nature of the thing; one should not be able to make anything out in the imaginary region of the dead. In an instant, two turnings of a key lock the door: nothing could be more natural than than one should be deprived of one’s liberty while seated in the tomb, or in the hereafter of Acheron, among shadows.’

“Robertson then emerged, spectrelike, from the gloom, and addressing the audience, offered to conjure up the spirits of their dead loved ones. A long newspaper account (cited in his memoirs) recorded the somewhat comical scenes that followed on one of these early occasions:

“’A moment of silence ensued; then an Arlesian- looking man in great disorder, with bristling hair and sad wild eyes, said: ‘Since I wasn’t able. to reestablish the cult of Marat, I would at least like to see his face.’

“’Then Robertson poured on a lighted brazier two glasses of blood, a bottle of vitriol, twelve drops of aqua fortis, and two numbers of the journal Hommes- Libres. Immediately, little by little, a small livid, hideous phantom in a red bonnet raised itself up, armed with a dagger. The man with the bristling hair recognized it as Marat; he wanted to embrace it, but the phantom made a frightful grimace and disappeared.

“’A young fop asked to see the apparition of a woman he had tenderly loved, and showed her portrait in miniature to the phantasmagorian, who threw on the brazier some sparrow feathers, a few grains of phosphorus and a dozen butterflies. Soon a woman became visible, with breast uncovered and floating hair, gazing upon her young friend with a sad and melancholy smile.

“’A grave man, seated next to me, cried out, raising his hand to his brow: ‘Heavens! I think that’s my wife!’ and ran off, not believing it a phantom anymore.’.

“Robertson, it should be allowed, disclaimed the accuracy of this account and accused its author, Armand Poultier, of trying to get him in trouble with the authorities. This particular exhbition, Poultier had written, concluded with an old royalist in the audience importuning Robertson to raise the shade of Louis XVI: ‘To this indiscreet question, Robertson responded very wisely: I had a recipe for that, before the eighteenth of Fructidor, I have lost it since that time: it is probable I shall never find it again, and it will be impossible from now on to make kings return in France.’

“This inflammatory story was false, Robertson complained in his memoirs, but nonetheless the police temporarily closed down the phantasmagoria and forced him to decamp for Bordeaux, where he remained for over a year.”

Source The Female Thermometer: 18
^th
-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny by Terry Castle Oxford University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-19-508097-1

From Bruce Sterling

[More excellent material from Professor Terry Castle’s fine work. My hat is off to her for her meticulously detailed research on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, a little- known titan of dead media.]

“When he [Robertson] returned to Paris he began producing even more elaborate and bizarre spectacles in the crypt of an abandoned Capuchin convent near the Place Vendome. Here, amid ancient tombs and effigies, Robertson found the perfect setting for his optical spectre-show, a kind of sepulchral theatre, suffused with gloom, cut off from the surrounding city streets, and pervaded by (as he put it) the silent aura of ‘des mysteres d’Isis.’ His memoirs, along with a surviving ‘Programme Instructif’ from the early 1800s, provide a picture of a typical night in the charnel house. At seven o’clock in the evening spectators entered through the main rooms of the convent, where they were entertained with a preliminary show of optical illusions, trompe l’oeil effects, panorama scenes, and scientific oddities.

“After passing through the ‘Galerie de la Femme Invisible’ (a ventriloquism and speaking-tube display orchestrated by Robertson’s assistant ‘Citoyen Fitz- James’), one descended at last to the ‘Salle de la Fantasmagorie.’ Here, the single, guttering candle was quickly extinguished, and muffled sounds of wind and thunder (produced by ‘les sons lugubres de Tamtam’) filled the crypt. Unearthly music emanated from an invisible glass harmonica.

“Robertson then began a somber, incoherent speech on death, immortality, and the unsettling power of superstition and fear to create terrifying illusions. He asked the audience to imagine the feelings of an ancient Egyptian maiden attempting to raise, through necromancy, the ghost of her dead lover at a ghastly catacomb: ‘There, surrounded by images of death, alone with the night and her imagination, she awaits the apparition of the object she cherishes. What must be the illusion for an imagination thus prepared!’ [footnote: “A surviving program from early 1800 entitled ‘Fantasmagorie de Robertson,’ containing a list of experiments and illusions performed at the Cour des Capucines, is located in the University of Illinois library.’]

“At last, when the mood of terror and apprehension had been raised to a pitch, the spectre-show itself began. One by one, out of the darkness, mysterious luminous shapes, some seemingly close enough to touch, began to surge and flit over the heads of the spectators.

“In a ‘Petit Repertoire Fantasmagorique’ Robertson listed some of the complex apparitions he produced on these occasions. Several, we notice, specifically involved a metamorphosis, or one shape rapidly changing into another, an effect easily achieved by doubling two glass slides in the tube of the magic lantern over one another in a quick, deft manner. Thus the image of ‘The Three Graces, turning into skeletons.’

“But in a sense the entire phantasmagoria was founded on discontinuity and transformation. Ghostly vignettes followed upon one another in a crazy, rapid succession. The only links were thematic: each image bore some supernatural, exotic, or morbid association. In selecting his spectral program pieces Robertson drew frequently upon the ‘graveyard’ and Gothic iconography popular in the 1790s. Thus the apparition of ‘The Nightmare,’ adapted from Henry Fuseli, depicted a young woman dreaming amid fantastic tableaux; a demon pressing on her chest held a dagger suspended over her heart. In ‘The Death of Lord Lyttleton,’ the hapless peer was shown confronting his famous phantom and expiring.

“Other scenes included ‘Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo,’ ‘The Bleeding Nun,’ ‘A Witches’ Sabbath,’ ‘Young Interring his Daughter,’ ‘Proserpine and Pluto on their Throne,’ ‘The Witch of Endor,’ ‘The Head of Medusa,’ ‘A Gravedigger,’ ‘The Agony of Ugolino,’ ‘The Opening of Pandora’s Box.’ Interspersed among these were single apparitions familiar from the earlier phantasmagoria shows, often the bloody ‘revolutionary’ spectres of Rousseau, Voltaire, Robespierre, and Marat.

“Robertson concluded his shows with a rousing speech and a macabre coup de theatre. ‘I have shown you the most occult things natural philosophy has to offer, effects that seemed supernatural to the ages of credulity,’ he told the audience; ‘but now see the only real horror. see what is in store for all of you, what each of you will become one day: remember the phantasmagoria.’ And with that, he relit the torch in the crypt, suddenly illuminating the skeleton of a young woman on a pedestal.”

Source The Female Thermometer: 18
^th
-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny by Terry Castle Oxford University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-19-508097-1

From Bruce Sterling

“Phantasmagoria shows rapidly became a staple of London popular entertainment. Mark Lonsdale presented a ‘Spectrographia’ at the Lyceum in 1802; Meeson offered a phantasmagoria modeled on Philipstal’s at Bartholomew Fair in 1803. A series of ‘Optical eidothaumata’ featuring ‘some surprising Capnophoric Phantoms’ materialized at the Lyceum in 1804. In the same year the German conjurer Moritz opened a phantasmagoria and magic show at the King’s Arms in Change Alley, Cornhill, and in the following year, again at the Lyceum, the famous comedian and harlequin Jack Bologna exhibited his ‘Phantoscopia.’ Two ‘Professors of Physic,’ Schirmer and Scholl, quickly followed suit with an ‘Ergascopia.’

“In 1807, Moritz opened another phantasmagoria show at the Temple of Apollo in the Strand, this one featuring a representation of the raising of Samuel by the Witch of Endor, the ghost scene from Hamlet, and the transformation of Louis XVI into a skeleton. In 1812 Henry Crabb Robinson saw a ‘gratifying’ show of spectres, their ‘eyes etc’ all moving, at the Royal Mechanical and Optical Exhibition in Catherine Street. In De Berar’s ‘Optikali Illusio,’ displayed at Bartholomew Fair in 1833, Death appeared on a pale horse accompanied by a luminous skeleton.

“How realistic were the ‘ghosts’? Strange as it now seems, most contemporary observers stressed the convincing nature of phantasmagoric apparitions and their power to surprise the unwary. Robertson described a man striking at one of his phantoms with a stick; a contributor to the Ami des Lois worried that pregnant women might be so frightened by the phantasmagoria that they would miscarry. One should not underestimate, by any means, the powerful effect of magic-lantern illusionism on eyes untrained by photography and cinematography.”

“Better images and a more complex technology were required. Brewster’s own solution was the ‘catadioptrical phantasmagoria’, an apparatus of mirrors and lenses capable of projecting the illuminated image of a living human being. ‘In place of chalky ill-drawn figures, mimicking humanity by the most absurd gesticulations,’ he wrote, ‘we shall have phantasms of the most perfect delineation, clothed in real drapery, and displaying all the movements of life.’

“In the renowned show of ‘Pepper’s Ghost,’ exhibited at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London in the 1860s, just such an apparatus was used to great effect. Wraithlike actors and actresses, reflected from below the stage, mingled with onstage counterparts in a phantasmagorical version of Dickens’ ‘The Haunted Man’ on Christmas Eve, 1862. ‘The apparitions,’ wrote Thomas Frost, ‘not only moved about the stage, looking as tangible as the actors who passed through them, and from whose proffered embrace or threatened attack they vanished in an instant, but spoke or sang with voices of unmistakable reality.’”

[We have quoted rather extensively from Chapter 9 of Professor Castle’s work, but no mere ascii can do justice to its many remarkable period illustrations, including a priceless depiction of Robertson’s audience beset by phantom devils and in a stampeding panic]