TEORIE DEL CINEMA

FILM E CULTURA VISUALE

DISPENSE 2019/2020

Prof. Giulia Fanara

O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts-
London 2003, pp. 52-72.

T. Gunning, Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era, in
«Spring», 2012, pp. 495-515.

L. Rabinovitz, More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale’s Tours,
Imax, and Motion Simulation Rides, in L. Rabinovitz, A. Geil (a cura di) Memory Bytes: History,
Technology, and Digital Culture, Duke University Press, Durham 2004, pp. 99-125.

J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, in «October», Vol. 45, Summer, 1988, pp. 3-35.

A. Griffiths, Sensual Vision: 3-D, Medieval Art, and the Cinematic Imaginary, in «Film Criticism»,
Vol. 37, No. 3, 2013, pp. 60-85.

T. Elsaesser, Il ritorno del 3D: logica e genealogie dell'immagine del XXI Secolo, logica e
genealogie dell'immagine del XXI Secolo, in «Imago: studi di cinema e media», Vol. 1, 2011, 49-
68.

E. Huhtamo, Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen, in «ICONICS:

International Studies of the Modern Image», Vol. 7, 2004, pp. 31-64.

T. Elsaesser, Media Archaeology as Symptom, in «New Review of Film and Television Studies»,
Vol. 14, No. 2, 2016, pp. 181-215.

W. Strauven, Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art and New Media (Can) Meet, in
J. Noordegraaf, V. Hediger, B. Le Maitre, C.G. Saba (a cura di) Preserving and Exhibiting Media
Art: Challenges and Perspectives, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013, pp. 59-79

C. Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press,
Durham-London 2018, pp. 11-34.

B. Herzogenrath, Decasia, The Matter|Image: Film is Also a Thing, in B. Herzogenrath (a cura di)
The Films of Bill Morrison, Aesthetics of the Archive, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam
2018, pp. 84-96.

L. Koepnick, Herzog's Cave: On Cinema's Unclaimed Pasts and Forgotten Futures, in «The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory», Vol. 88, No. 3, pp. 271-285.
FILMOGRAFIA

La maschera di cera (House of Wax, André De Toth, 1953)

Film Before Film (Werner Nekes, 1985)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTvEsvH59g
Dal polo all’equatore (Angela Ricci Lucchi, Yervant Gianikian, 1987)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7DoXDXUeig&t=483s
Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San, Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)
Avatar (Id., James Cameron, 2009)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Id., Werner Herzog, 2010)
Hugo Cabret (Hugo, Martin Scorsese, 2011)
Il grande e potente Oz (Oz the Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi, 2013)
The Canyons (Id., Paul Schrader, 2013)
Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison, 2016)
Le secret de la chambre noire (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016)
La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro, 2017)
La stanza delle meraviglie (Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes, 2017)
Ready Player One (Id., Steven Spielberg, 2018)
of the image space is a red cushion; the middle panel shows a bed with
a sleeping woman. Accessories, such as a string of pearls and a tortoise-
shell comb, in this well-to-do interior evidence the common contemporary
motif of virtue and sin, as found in the genre paintings by other artists of
the period, such as Jan Steen or Piecer de Hooch.
Later additions were often made to the boxes in the form of staffage-
like figures of people, animals, or objects (so-called repoussoirs), which do
not conform to the perspecrival representation and frequently look out of
place. These repoussoirs detract slightly from the illusionistic effect bur
they are invariably positioned at points in the image that represent prob-
lem zones of perspective drawing and, thus, serve to conceal mistakes or
weaknesses in the construction.
As in the later panorama, light enters the box's image space through
the open top, which is not visible to the observer looking through the
peephole. In the above example from London's National Gallery, light falls
in through transparent oiled paper, which makes it diffuse, bathes certain
parts in an indistinct sfumato, and thus perfects the illusionistic effect. The
construction principle of the peep shows is the Euclidean theorem that if
two straight lines meet at an angle, they appear to be continuous if viewed
on the same level. Recent investigations have shown that the vanishing
points in the boxes exhibit pinpricks. 105 From an imaginary viewpoint (the
point where the peephole will be), needles fastened by threads were passed
through the paper to the corners of the sketch and the marked paper was
fixed co the panel.
Peep shows stand at the beginning of a line of development that com-
plements the immersive spaces that envelop the full body, where the illu-
sionistic effect results from bringing the images up very close to the eyes of
the observer. Among its successors were the stereoscope, View Master, and
Head Mounted Display.

Viewing with Military Precision: The Birth of the Panorama

Since the seventeenth century, Italian artists had worked in England
to satisfy the demand for spaces of illusion, including Antonino Verro
(Chatsworth House, 1671), Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, and their pupil,
Giovanni Battista Pellegrini (Chelsea H ospital, 1721). English artists, such
as William Kent and James Thornhill, mastered the technique of q11ad-
rat1-tra. Cipriani's parlor at Standlynch (1766), now Trafalgar House, near

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Salisbury, is the first example of che modern era to dispense with the
architectonic element of the frame- sixty years before the issue of Barker's
panorama parent.
In the eighteenth century, Italian artists were first and foremost bril-
liant interior designers; masters of stucco work and fresco, who trans-
formed many a castle and monastery hall with scenes of festivity and
ceremony, they were famous throughout Europe. Bernardo Bellocro, a
contemporary of Giambatcista Tiepolo, the lase great figure of illusioniscic
painting in Italy, set out on his travels with a small camera obscura and a
larger portable one with a tent. His work with these drawing aids in the
service of mimesis, which in him bordered on an obsession, perfected a
new fusion of arc and technology for small-format pictures. 106 The brothers
Paul and Thomas Sandby also used the camera obscura, char apparent
mirror of the real. 107 Afrer the Jacobite Rebellion was crushed in 1746,
which ended popular support for the Stuarts, the Sandbys traveled the
Highlands for seve ral months as topog raphical draftsmen in the service of
the Military Survey of Scotland. To control the occupied territories effi-
ciendy and plan future military operations, the army was very interested in
accurate drawings of the terrain, detailed panoramic vistas, and views of
the landscape. 108 O nly derailed cartographic data could be used effectively
to play through questions of tactics, field of fire, positions for advance and
retreat, and che like, so when a new pictorial technique emerged that made
it possible "to be in the picture," it was soon pressed into the service of
the House of H anover's geopolitical aspirations. 109 For five years, 1746 to
1751, the young Paul Sandby worked fo r the Military Survey under Colo-
nel David Warson. It is safe to assume thac Sandby's ability to observe
narure with precision, for which he later becam e famous, owed much, if
not all, to the military training of his artist's eye. 11 0
As a tool of visual perception, the camera obscura was the result of a
long process of scientific discovery and development. Rudimentary ideas
are found in Euclid; the discoveries of Copernicus and Galilei led to a
realization of the physical problem that had already been described by
Leonardo. Building on the findings of Johannes Kepler and Achanasius
Kircher, it became possible to make the apparatus smaller, refine the co-
ordination of the lenses, improve the reflecting mirrors, and optimize rhe
relation of focal length and distance of the image. Finally, Johan Zahn, a
monk from Wi.irzburg, succeeded in producing a portable version.

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 Jonathan Crary has shown how, since the seventeenth century, the view
onto reality has been gradually liberated through developments in science.
The camera obscura represented a pioneering achievement in the history of
cinematographic modes of perception because it introduced a restructuring
of possibilities for vis11al experience through optical techniques. It was an
innovation comparable with the discove~y of perspective, and an important
precondition for its development was a further stage in the process of
individualizing the observer. Using it required isolation in a darkened
space. This isolated situation of the observer in the camera obscura, as
Crary expresses it, "provides a vantage point onto the world analogous to
the eye of God." 111
More than forty years later and five years after the first public exhibition
of a circular painting by Robert Barker in London, in 1793 Paul Sandby
created a "room of illusion" in just two months 11 2 for Sir Nigel Bowyer
Gresley at his seat of Drakelowe Hall near Burton-on-Trent in Derbyshire.
Sandby covered three walls with a wild and romantic landscape without
framing elements. Visitors found themselves under the canopy of a blue
sky, painted on the arched ceiling, and mighty trees, several meters high.
Between the t rees, prospects of undulating countryside, crossed by cut-
tings, with wide clearings and grassy banks, stretched into the distance
(fig. 2.15). 1 13 In front of the painting was a variety of fattx terrain, com-
prised of real objects: a chest-high fence was positioned a few centimeters
away from the painted wall; the fireplace was camouflaged as the entrance
to a grotto with pieces of minerals, ore, and a variety of seashells. H ere,
again, the function of the fa11x terrain was co blur the boundary between
the real space and the space of the illusion.
In the painting on the fourth wall, H ermann recognizes a real Welsh
landscape: "a valley; which is very Welsh in feeling and possibly repre-
sents Dolbadarn Castle in its fine setting on Llyn Feris, with Snowdon
beyond." 114 The distant view and the fact that it refers to a real place115
evoke strong associations with scenery as depicted in the panorama. One
may even surmise that this room, with its view of the disrance and directly
immersive properties of the gigantic trees, is a reaction of iliusionistic wall
painting to the "new" medium of the panorama.
As a member of the Royal Academy, Sandby must have been familiar
with Barker's invention. Although he had not painted room-filling frescoes
before Drakelowe Hali, Sandby was well known as a faithful observer of

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Figure 2.15 Landscape Room in Drakelowe Hall, by Paul Sandby, Derbyshire, Burton-on-Trent, 1793.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

nature and his name was firmly liked with landscape paincing. Particularly
his depictions of trees-nonschematic, multifaceted, delicately texrured-
and the face chat he distinguished between kinds of tree, generally held to
be an innovation of the early nineteenth century, made his landscapes
famous and Sandby a pioneer of modern landscape paincing. 116 In view of
Sandby's reputation, tO have a whole room painted by him must have
conferred considerable prestige on the commissioner of the work. In a
letter dated July 25, 1794 to the Reverend T. S. Whalley, Anna Seward
compares Sandby's wall paintings with the new invention of the panorama:
"The perspective [in Drakelowe H all] is so well preserved as to produce a
landscape deception little inferior to the watery delusion of the celebrated
panorama. " 117 Although "watery delusion" may be taken as rather scath-
ing, here a direct comparison is made between the new public panorama
and Sir Nigel's private room of illusion. The similarity of the two con-
ceptions is obvious, although at the time, the potential of the panorama to
produce illusions still left a lot to be desired. The new medium of the
panorama provoked the exponents of its forerunner medium into mobiliz-
ing the maximum potential of illusion that was possible.

Historic Spaces of Illusion

 The case is similar with the German inventor of the panorama, J ohann
Adam Breysig. Helmut Borsch-Supan finds a general connection between
spaces of illusion and the new medium: "Breysig ... developed his idea
from the tradition of interiors with illusionistic landscapes." 118 Inspired, or
goaded, by the new medium, with artistic experience rooted in military
precision of view, Sandby staged an evocative romantic landscape, a favor-
ite of tourists and amateur artists. Sir Nigel and his guests had the plea-
sure of a journey of the eye to a virtual Wales.

Barker's Invention: Developing the Space of Illusionistic

Landscapes
On J une 17, 1787, Robert Barker patented a process under the name of
"la nature a coup d'oeil," by which means a panoramic view could be
depicted on a completely circular canvas in correct perspective. Using em-
pirical methods, he developed a system of curves on the concave surface of
a picture so that the landscape, when viewed from a central platform at
a certain elevation, appeared to be true and undisrorted. The application
of this invention became known a few years later under the neologism
"panorama." 119
Barker was an Irishman who taught the accurate application of per-
spective in Edinburgh, the headquarters of British troops in occupied
Scotland. A few years before his patent was granted, Barker had invented
an appararus for drawing accurate circular perspective. It was mounted on
a frame with a fixecl point and could swivel to take a succession of partial
views, which together formed a panorama. The path leading to circular
paintings had commenced about a year before with six aquatints that
Barker's son, twelve-year-old Henry Asron, had made with the apparatus
at the top of Carlron Hill. If Barker's intention was to demonstrate how
easily, almost automatically, his system could be applied, he certainly
succeeded with the choice of his son as an example. H enry's views of the
landscape were first arranged on a semicircular canvas and then, using
Barker's method, joined together with curved lines to produce an un-
broken horizon.
However, without the material and financial support of a politician,
who was also a high-ranking military officer, this new pictorial tech-
nique might never have been realized. Barker's idea caught the interest of
William Wemyss of W emyss, Lord Elcho. 120 The Guards Room of his

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castle ac Holyrood served as the studio. It was here that Barker made the
first panorama, a 21-meter-long, 180° view of Edinburgh, which was pre-
sented to the public in the Archers' H all at H olyrood. As a military strat-
egist and committed parliamentarian, Wemyss was obviously interested in
a new technique of perspeccival representation that might be useful for
m ilitary surveys and planning. Thus, the inception of the panorama was
characterized by a combination of media and military history.
The panorama installs the observer in the picture. Although it found its
way into the world partly through m ilitary interest and patronage, the
notion of using the p anorama as a mobile instrument of military planning
was a nonstarter from the begi nning. On arriving in London, it soon
attracted the attention of broad sections of sensation-seeking civil society
and quickly became an agent of popular taste in a society of the spectacle.
On March 14, 1789, Barker exhibited the panorama of Edinburgh by dim
candlelight in the H aymarket. Public response was mediocre but the art
world began to sit up and take notice of the potential of this technique of
visualization. Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, had at
first told Barker that it was impracticable but soon changed his mind: "I
find I was in error in supposing your invention could never succeed, for the
present exhibition p roves it ro be capable of producing effects and repre-
senting nature in a manner far superior to the limited scale of pictures in
general." 12 1
This effect, representation of nature in the service of an illusion, was
from the beginning the core idea of the panorama. Thus, it is hig hly likely
that Paul Sandby, who was also a member of the Royal Academy, heard
about Barker's invention in connection with this event and gained valu-
able ideas for his landscape room at Drakelowe H all. At the very latest, he
would have heard of it in June 1791 when, still in its pre-immersive
phase, a semicircular view of London was exhibited with sensational suc-
cess. Not yet housed in a rotunda, Barker presented co the public a view
from the roof of the Albion Mills factory, near Blackfriars Bridge, in
premises in Castle Street. Drakelowe Hall has been made out as a fo re-
runner of the panoramas; 122 however, not only was ic pain ted in 1793,
bur Sandby combined illusionistic landscape with a typical panoramic
and distant view of a recognizable Welsh landscape as a reaction to the
panorama and as a demonstration of the superiority, as yet still intact, of
the older image technique.

Historic Spaces of I ll usion

 Figure 2.16 Robert Barker's Panorama Rotunda at Leiceste1· Square, London. Cross-section, by
Robert Mitchell, aquatint, 28.5 x 44.5 cm. Gebr. Mann Verlag Berlin.

Both the illusionistic landscape room and the panorama surround the
observer with pictorial images and both seek to create the effect of actually
being in a real landscape. Oettermann states chat " In the panorama, real
image spaces are created in which the observer moves around." 123 With
its suite of innovations in presenting images, the panorama was able co
heighten the illusion considerably and more lastingly, compared with the
illusionistic landscape room. Boch socially and with regard to location, the
provenance of the panorama is the private houses of the nobility, the same
terrain where illusionistic landscape spaces were located. This is supported
by the later takeover of the faux terrain by the panorama, which had an
important function at Drakelowe Hall, for example, as discussed above. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two media were at the stage
of reciprocal influence.

Construction and Function of the Panorama

The world's first purpose-built rotunda opened in Leicester Square on May
14, 1793. 124 A cross-section of Robert Barker's two-storied rotunda (fig.
2.16) illustrates design and function: via Staircase B, 125 the visicor entered
the viewing platform, which was surrounded by a balustrade. At this spot,
the visitor was completely surrounded by the illusionistic painting that

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hung on the circular walls of the building. The picture was smaller than
later panoramas, covering an area of "only" 930 m 2 . 1 26 The balustrade had
the double function of both preventing visitors from getting tao close t0
the picture and keeping them in a position where the upper and lower
limits of the picture could not be seen. No objects extraneous to the pic-
ture were in the space that might relativize or diminish the illusion.
Overhead lighting, also invisible to the visitor, illuminated the painting so
that it appeared to be the source of light itself, an effect that was later
perfected in cinema, television, and computer-generated images. For the
observer, standing in the dark, this made it even more difficult to distin-
guish between an imitatio nat1trae and real nature.
Illusionistic landscape spaces had used varieties of faux terrain127 since
the Renaissance, but Barker's first panoramas do not appear tO have made
use of this device. It was first integrated into the panorama in 1830, in
particular by Charles Langlois, the French specialist for battle scenes, and
refined continually thereafter. Constructed on a wooden framework be-
tween the painting and the viewing platform, it was almost imperceptibly
joined to the image for the visitor, who was up to fifteen meters away.
The two-dimensional painting then approached the observer with a three-
dimensional zone. The picture changed into an image space where the
observer was physically present and was able to set him- or herself in rela-
tion to it. Apart from the fa11x terrain, Barker's patent covered virtually all
the innovations that still determine panorama construction until the pres-
ent day. Building on the traditions and mechanisms of iliusionistic land-
scape spaces, the panorama developed into a presentation apparatus that
shut out the outside world completely and made the image absolute.
Judged by the postulates of iliusionism, these innovations in depiction
and representation revolutionized the image. The panorama was located in
the public sphere, and this fact, discussed in detail below, linked it to
themes selected according t0 economic criteria and a mode of production
that was industrial and international. Together, these endowed the p he-
nomenon of illusion spaces with a new quality. Notwithstanding, its art
historical origins still remain in 360° spaces of illusion.
The similarity of the concepts of the panorama and 360° spaces of illu-
sion is also attested to by experiences with the panorama being applied
to 360° spaces of illusion. In their book, The Union of Architecture, Smlp-
ture, and Painting of 1827, John Britton and Nathaniel Whitrock made

Historic Spaces of Illusion

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recommendations for heightening the effect of illusionistic landscape
spaces that had been developed in conjunction with the panorama: "A
painted landscape, or architectural scene, might also, with property, be
introduced .. . with a railing or balustrade to prevent so close an approach
as to destroy the illusion. I t is almost needless to remark, that such a pic-
ture should be on a semicircular wall, and painted on the principle of a
panorama, strongly lighted from above, while the spot whence it is to be
viewed should be in comparative obscurity." 128
Smaller panoramas for private rooms also made their appearance,
serving educational or scientific and aesthetic or atmospheric purposes.
Goethe, for example, who had visited several of the large-scale panoramas,
instaUed for a time a panorama, affixed to a circular arch, of the moun-
tain scenery near N euchatel in his chambers.129 A further example of
the panorama's influence on private spaces of illusion was the fashion for
panorama wallpaper in the nineteenth century. 131 Confined mainly to the
urban bourgeoisie, they were a relatively inexpensive industrial product.
At this point, the tradition of illusionistic landscape spaces ends in the
marriage of art and industry contracted by the panorama. The p anorama's
themes, a repertoire that targeted broad sections of society, were frequently
individualized in products for the private sphere. 131 Panorama-style wall-
paper was produced in the twentieth century and is still available today
(figs. 2.17 and 2. 18).
In his important study of the panorama, Stephan Oettermann writes:
"As any new invention has its precursors, forms of art bearing some ap-
parent relation to the panorama existed earlier, but in this case they played
no direct role in the panorama's development. " 132 T his statement can be
interpreted as the desire to postulate the position of chis medium as
unique. However, in view of the long and rich prehistory of the panorama
and, indeed, its posthistory in the form of contemporary developments in
computer-aided virtual spaces, Oerrermann's statement must be viewed as
relative and in need of amendment. That said, it must be admitted that
there is a paucity of research on this topic. Earlier studies, which mention
preforms of the panorama by Dolf Sternberger,133 Friedrich Rupp, 134 and
Alfred Auerbach 135 as well as more recent works hy Sune Lundwall, 136
Edward Croft-Murray,137 Gustav Solar, 138 John Sweetmann, 139 Silvia Bor-
dini, 140 and Marcel Roethlisberger141 contain only a few paragraphs on the
subject. The works cited fall into the category of short compilations and do

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figure 2.17 "Hindustan" Panorama WalIpaper, 1807- 1820. In Decors de l'imaginaire, Papiers peints
panoramiques, 1790-1865. Musee des Arts decoi-atifs, under the direction of Od ile Nouvel-l<ammerer,
Paris, 1990; p. 306.

figure 2.18 Panorama wallpaper. Industrial product, mountain scenery, 1970s. In Pro Magazin,
10/1976, p. 13, ill. 5. Author's archive.

Historic Spaces of Illusion

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not portray adequately rhe long tradition of enveloping spaces of images
and illusion; moreover, their research focus is different, often unsystematic
and focusing on single phenomena. However, even these findings suffice to
demolish the contention that the development of the panorama is without
a history. To support his argwnent of the singularity of the panorama,
Oettermann cites the changed visual habits of the observer, from a feudal
"construction in strict central perspective," 142 as used in the Baroque
court theaters, ro "a gradual "democratization" of the audience's point of
view," 143 culminating in the panorama. Further, the medium of the pan-
orama is, for Oettermann, firmly tied to the experience of the horizon, a
new aesthetic experience of the eighteenth century. 144 This is a little sur-
prising as there have been countless town- and cityscapes, coastal pan-
oramas, and overview maps since the fourteenth cenrury. 145 The innovation
represented by the panorama does not consist in eitl1t::r ils attempt to create
an illusionary spatial image, an immersive sphere, or in the secular p rove-
nance of its themes. In the sense of an optical illusion, or trompe l'oeH, the
panorama is, instead, the most sophisticated form of a 360° illusion space
created with the means of traditional painting. Of spaces with illusionistic
wall paintings, which surround the observer hermetically with 360° im-
ages and create the impression of being in another space than where one
actually is, that is, that form ulate an artificial world, many striking and
important examples exist from various epochs-long before the advent of
the panorama.

The Panorama: A Controversial Medium circa 1800

From the first, the panorama as an art form was controversial. Interest-
ingly, there was less dispute about the fact that the rotundas were fre-
quently sited near amusement districts of doubtful repure 146 or whether
artistic quality was possible in pictures of this size. The real bone of con-
tention was its outstanding aesthetic feature: the character of the illusion.
Opinion was divided into two diametrically opposed camps: a minority,
who criticized that there was coo much illusion and saw in this a danger,
and a majority, who valued the panorama precisely because of its illusion-
istic effect.
This "effect," which drove the representation of nature to a new level,
did not leave representatives of so-called high art unmoved. J acques Louis
David, who regarded the new pictorial form with favor and often visited

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the panoramas in Paris with his students, is reported co have dispensed rhe
following advice while in a panorama by Prevost: "Si vous voulez voir la
vraie nature, courez aux panoramas! "147 John Constable was also a fan of
the panorama. On May 23, 1803, he wrote to his friend John Dunthome:
"Panoramic painting seems to be all the rage. There are four or five
exhibiting and Mr. Reinagle is coming out with another, a view of Rome,
which l have seen. I should think he has taken his view favourably , and it
is executed with the g reatest care and fidelicy. " 148
William Wordsworth, however, commented with irony on the efforts
of the panorama ro create a second reality and described the effects of its
reception. The panorama of Edinburgh he characterized as "those mimic
sides that ape the absolute presence of reality, expressing as a mirror sea
and land and what earth is, and what she hath to shew ... ". 149
Heinrich von Kleist had high expectations of the illusionistic effect of
the new image medium but was disappointed. He recorded his impres-
sions after a visit co the first German panorama by Johann Adam Breysig,
the Panorama von Rom, exhibited at Gendarmenmarkt, a square in the
center of Berlin: "I say it is the first hint of a panorama, and even the idea
is capable of greater perfection. For as the whole point of the thing is ro
delude the observer into thinking he is in the midst of narure, and nothing
must remind him of the deception, then in the future, quite different
arrangements will have ro be made. " 150
Kleist goes on ro enumerate ways in which the illusionistic effect of the
new m edium can be perfected: "In fact, one should stand on the painting
and be unable co discover a point on any side that is not part of the
painting. "151 Kleisr's notion of the ideal observer's position is in the image
and, fascinated by an image medium that sought co realize a different,
second nature, he made a sketch of his plans, now unfortunately lost.152
A prominent critic of the panorama, J ohann August Eberhard, de-
scribed their effect in his Handbuch der Asthetik (1805) and, regarding the
question whether they were suitable as a medium of art, answered em-
phatically in the negative. He first targets the deceptive character of the
medium: "the similarity of a copy ro true nature cannot be any greater." 153
In particular, the inability of the panorama to transport transitory events
and sounds, that is, a perfect illusion, results for Eberhard in a confusing
conflict between "appearance" and "truth" that can even cause physical
indisposition: "I sway between reality and unreality, between nature and

Historic Spaces of I llusion

non-nature, between truth and appearance. My thoughts and my spirits
are set in motion, forced to swing from side to side, like going round in
circles or being rocked in a boat. I can only explain the dizziness and
sickness that befall the unprepared observer of the panorama in this
way." 1 54 H owever, the decisive factor for Eberhard's utter rejection was
the impossibility of escaping from the illusion: "I feel myself trapped in
the net of a contradicrory dream-world, ... not even comparison with rbe
bodies that surround me can awake me from this terrifying nightmare,
which I must go on dreaming against my will." 155
Here, we recognize a familiar polarized discourse, now in connection
with rhe panorama, between apocalyptisrs and uropists: between those
who see the new medium as a danger to perception and consciousness and
those who welcome it as a space for projecting their fantasies and visions
of fusion with all-pervasive image worlds. Shortly before, in 1800, a com-
mission set up by the Institut de France, the most important body re-
sponsible for questions of culmre in France, published its report on
Barker's invention. Chaired by Antoine Dufourny, the commission un-
animously applauded t he panorama and its effect of "illusion rorale." 156 In
rhe commission's opinion, art had come a good deal closer to its goal of a
perfect illusion through its alliance with science. 157 Unable to compare the
objects in the picture with objects outside it, surrounded completely by a
frameless, all-embracing image, the observer is completely subjected to the
deception. 158 Moreover, the commission believed that the length of time
spent in the panorama affected perception of the illusion as such: "as soon
as the eye is accustomed to the light inside [rhe panorama], forgers the
colors of nature, rhe painting produces imperceptibly its effect; rhe longer
one conremplares it, the less one is persuaded that thar which one sees is
merely a simple illusion. " 159 The commission wanted ro see this illusion-
isric effect used in all forms of art, including-and this was new-paint-
ings with a smaller format. T hey also suggested the development of an
appararus 160 to resolve rhe problems of transporting these huge pictures for
the distribu tion of illusions to a mass audience- an astoundingly modern
idea. In the context of this report, ideas were formulated for the first time
that would become pivotal to the conception of immersion as applied to
small images presented directly ro the eyes.
A further characteristic opinion on the panorama was advanced by John
Ruskin. H e was less interested in the argument over the artistic aspects

Chapter 2

-
and more in its use as a tool for education and instruction. During a visit
to Milan in 1833 he wrote: "I had been partly prepared for this view by
the admirable pre~entment of it in London, a year or two before, in an ex-
hibi cion, of which the vanishing has been in later life a g reatly felt loss to
me-Burford's pa norama in Leicester Square, which was an educational
institution of the highest and purest value, and ought co have been sup-
ported by the government as one of the most beneficial school instruments
in London." 161
The seep from using the panorama as an instrument of education to
sharpening its mass appeal and suggestive power in the direction of mass
propaganda is not a big one, even though it would probably never have
occurred co Ruskin. H owever, it did occur very soon co military leaders in
France and England. Admiral Lord Nelson, whose part in the naval battle
at Aboukir was a theme of one of Barker's panoramas in 1799, was per-
fectly aware of its impact; Barker wrote: "I was introduced ... to Lord
Nelson, who cook me by the hand, saying he was indebted to me for
keeping up the fame of his victory in the Battle of the Nile a year longer
than it would otherwise have lasted in the public estimation." 162 Napoleon
I, who was also a member of the Institut de France, fully appreciated the
potential for effective publicity and propaganda using the battle panorama
as a vehicle: On a visit to Thayer's panorama in 1810, he recognized that
the invention could be exploi red for propaganda if topical events were
presen ted to the public in a suggestive way. H e planned to build eight
rotundas showing representations of his battles in the park at Versailles.
If this plan had been realized, it would have been the first instance of
panoramas being used as permanent monuments co military battles. In
later years, there were many examples, for instance, Anton von W erner's
panorama, The Battle of Sedan. 163 Panoramas of battles fo r public con-
sumption are part of the medium's history from the very beginning. 164

The Role of Economics in the International Expansion of the

Panorama
In Europe and North America, the history of the panorama as a mass
phenomenon coincides almost exactly with the nineteenth century. Par-
ticularly in the metropolises of France and England, 165 Barker's invention
very q uickly became a favorite medium for art, education, political propa-
ganda, and entercainment. The rush and stress in which the panoramist

Historic Spaces of Illusion

 o/ J' '1 \'7,.
·: .· ' ---· ------ I

. ":-.. .( - ..
.
..._
..,
...
-
:.

*"_ . .,

Figure 2.19 "The Traveling Panoramist." Cartoons In Punch, July 14, 1849 marker/Jackson).

composed and produced is the theme of two cartoons in Punch that ap-
peared in 1849 (fig. 2 .19). Production was speeded up; whereas in the
early years, individual artists had taken years of painstaking work to pro-
duce a panorama, for example, in German-speaking countries, 166 shortly
after Barker's application for his patent, panoramas were being churned
out in Paris and London in just a few months. This was only possible
through technically rationalized processes and de-individualized methods
of painting the canvas- in short, the methods of industrial, profit-oriented
production. As early as 1798, panorama production in London was so well
organized that Robert Barker was able to exhibit several new paintings
each year .1 67

Chapter 2
 Figure 2.20 Poole's vehicle for transporting panoramas. Photo by G.A.S. Ramschen, 14 x 27 cm.

In Paris, the second most financially powerful city after London, James
W. Thayer acquired the rights to the patent for France in 1799 and his
rotunda was run along similar business lines to Barker's. In Germany, the
panorama was also a success at first; however, production fell off in the
years 1830 ro 1840. 168 Parallel ro the erection of p ermanent circular
buildings in the cities, simpler wooden rotundas were constructed, which
toured rhe smaller rnwns (see fig. 2.20).
Shrewd logistics and tight business organization, often with foreign
investment in the form of shares traded on the stock exchanges, charac-
terized the economic side of panorama production. Soon, capital invest-
m ent exceeded that of any other visual artistic medium, and, ro minimize
the risk of bad investments and check. up on their competitors, companies
even engaged in industrial espionage. These external economic factors de-
termined the role of the artist. Contracts not only stipulated punctual and
exact realization of the agreed concept, they also included a commitment
not ro create further copies tor a different client. For this reason, prepara-
tory sketches and studies usually remained the property of the company
once the work was completed. Artists had no rights either ro the concept
or to the end product.

Historic Spaces of Illusion

-
 In the interests of profit maximization, the operarors of the rotundas
extended opening times 169 and developed international marketing strat-
egies. When exhibition ar the original location ceased co be lucrative, the
canvas was rolled up and sent on tour to areas where people were affluent
_enough to be able to pay co see it. The paintings traveled thousands of
kilometers and were displayed in so many different places that they were
literally worn out. The Panorama of London, created in 1792, reached
Leipzig after eight years on tour. A newspaper remarked, "The painting is
so worn out and pale and all the sections so indistinct and confused that
the polite Saxons must muster all their tolerance and goodwill to recognize
this sorry sight as being that proclaimed by the pompous advertise-
ments."170 Standardization of canvas size around 1830 led to international
marketing on a large scale. 171 This blatant commercialism was responsible,
at least in part, for the rift that arose berween traditional artists and
panorama painters. The Hmnbm'ger Nachrichte-n newspaper reported from
England that "An academic expert report recently decided that panorama
and diorama painters should be barred from becoming members of the
Academy or professors of painring." 172
In the beginning, the rotundas were built in various forms bur increas-
ing institutionalization-later, buildings only housed panoramas with
standardized measurements-resulted in a typical form of building. A
new building technique utilizing a steel structure became the preferred
one. The buildings concealed an apparatus of remarkable technical sophis-
tication, although the observer inside could not see any of its features. In
the late phase of panorama construction, much attention was lavished on
external decoration. 173
As they targeted a broad international audience, panorama subjects
were selected for their popular appeal co the relevant sections of the public
and advertised extensively in the press and on posters. With these criteria
of selection, the subjects obviously did not include local interest, unknown
places, or individualized, allegorical, or mythological themes. For the most
part, the topic range was not driven by ideological considerations or any
variety of bourgeois democratic consciousness but was shaped by the nor-
mative forces of the market. H owever, to a limited extent panoramas did
reflect what interested the wealthier elements of society, for they were the
ones who were able ro afford the high entrance fees. In brief, panorama
themes can be classified in a few time phases and categories. 174 At first,

Chapter 2

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there were many examples of "duplicate" cityscapes-views of the city
where the panorama exhibited, such as the panorama of London from the
top of the Albion Mills that was shown in London-which served to con-
vince the observers of the illusionistic potential of the new medium. These
were followed by topographical representations of national or European
locadons. 175 Often, the reason for choosing these particular subjects was
thar a place was well known or had spectacular scenery: The more exotic,
distant, or remote a location, the hig her the profits of the operacors. 176
The era of tourism was just beginning, and it found in the panorama,
with its longing for faraway places, a versatile ally. 177 However, as pan-
oramas brought the world to the cities of Europe and North America, for
some the panoramas became an "economical surrogate for travel." 178 Many
and detailed accounts appeared comparing "travels with the eye" to real
travels, and quite a few preferred the former, as did this anonymous
author: "What cost a couple of hundred pounds and half a year half a
century ago, now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour. Throwing out
of the old account the innumerable miseries of travel, the insolence of
public functionaries, the roguery of innkeepers, the visitations of banditti
charged to the muzzle with sabre, pistol, and scapulary, and the rascality
of the custom-house officers, who plunder, passport in hand, the inde-
scribable desagrements of Italian cookery, and the insufferable annoyances of
that epicome of abomination, an Italian bed." 179 Even in the more sober
estimation of Alexander von Humbold t, the new 360° image medium 180
with its huge dimensions could "almost subsrimre for travelling through
different climes. The paintings on all sides evoke more than theatrical sce-
nery is capable of because the spectacor, captivated and transfixed as in a
magic circle and removed from distracting reality, believes himself to be
really surrounded by foreign nature." 181
The panorama was, to use Wolfgang Kemp's expression, "a space of
presence." 182 In addition to journeys through spaces, there were soon
examples of journeys through time. To this category belong rhe long series
depicting the Stations of the Cross (fig. 2.21) at the end of the nineteenth
century and the dozens of panoramas of historical battles. 183 Besides
chronicles of wars, images of the rise of imperialism began to appear.
Where colonial history offered spectacular events, landscapes, or battles,
these were presented to the imperial power's subjects in purportedly real-
istic panorama images. 184

Historic Spaces of Illusion

-
 Figure 2.21 Panorama of the Crucifixion. View from the visitors' platform. Altiitting 1903, by
Gebhard Fugel and coworkers. Photo: Erika Drave, SPA Stiftung Panorama Al totting. By kind
permission of Dr. Gebhard Streicher.

The essence of the panorama was the assumption of being entrapped in

the real. This game with deception was its chief fascination; whether the
observer was oblivious, as in the early years, or regarded it as a source
of aesthetic pleasure, as later. The other senses were addressed through the
haptic element of the faux terrain, sound effects (created mostly on an
orchestrion) and noise of battle, artificial wind, and smoke: All were used
to sustain the effect of the photorealistic presentation. The Panorama of the
German Colonies, which opened in 1885, "attempted t0 recreate the lig ht,
ambience, and heat-haze of the tropics in a true-to-life fashion, with mists
of steam. "185 Thus, in the course of its historical development, the medium
of the panorama sought to increase, or at least maintain, illusion by mov-
ing toward forms that addressed all the senses.
The panorama's claim of authenticity was based on painstaking re-
search, often with scientific pretensions, of the locations presented. Panic-

Chapter 2

-
 Figure 2.22 "The Panoramist M. Tynaire Directing the Work." From Encyclopedie du siecle.
L'exposition de Paris, de 1900, Paris, 1900, p. 313.

ularly in connection with the depiction of distant places, this had not been
possible on this scale before. Moreover, these themes had to appeal to an
anonymous audience of hundreds of thousands. 186 If it did not succeed in
appealing to the masses, the panorama had not achieved its goal. Egali-
tarian treatment of the paying public was not the rule; entrance charges
were often high when the panorama first opened, taking advantage of
affluent sections of the marker, and, toward the end of its run, the price
would be reduced to cater to less well-off people. This is still a common
marketing strategy today and was already in place during the enti re hey-
day of the panorama. Whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
panoramas targeted only the better off, between 1840 and 1870, they
addressed increasingly the middle classes. The era of truly egalitarian
panorama-going only began in the 1870s in France. 187 Nevert heless,
exclusivity of access for the well-to-do was still maintained through
pricing policies: Prices differed according to the day of the week and the
panorama. There were price supplements of up to 400 percent, which
segregated the audience effectively, protecting the upper classes from rub-
bing shoulders with the workers. 188

Historic Spaces of Illusion

-
Notes
1. "A wall is no longer a tangible boundary of space bm, instead, rhe medium
of an optical idea." Srrocka (1990), p. 213. See also Schefold (1952), p. 158:
"With painted architectural illusions, he [the painter] rakes all plastic character
from the wall and fuses the imaginary space with the real one. Using only pictorial
decoration, the plastic character of che wall is completely negated. The pedestal
finishes wich a protruding ledge, in order ro support the painted columns and
pilascer, and the wall appears to fall back behind chem." Also, Strocka (1990),
p. 214: "The rigid order of the First Sryle period was replaced by hitherro
unavailable possibilities of pictorial representacion that no longer delimited the
boundaries of space bur, inscead, extended space and realiry." See also Borbein
(1975), p. 61: "There is no doubt that the vistas chrough the space are not merely
perspectival figures; they are intended to be views into other spaces." Similarly
Wesenberg (1985), p. 473, and Andreae (1967), p. 202: The "framed view of the
landscape" was "inserted into the illusionistic views through the painted architec-
ture using all possible means of deception in order to create the impression of
looking through an apparent opening inro the outside world."-In Pliny's Natu-
ra/is Historia, there is a description of Apelles's painting of Alexander. Alexander
swings a thunder bolt, which, together with the hand holding it, projects from the
picture and appears to hang in the observer's space.

2. This vii/a s1tblt'rbana was discovered in 1909 and excavated under rhe direc-
tion of de Petra.

3. The illusionistic image is topped by a narrow frieze with a flowering vine

and nu.mern11s erotic figures. The original ceiling has not survived.

4. For details on the cult of Dionysius and its followers, see Merkelbach
(1988).

5. This interpretation was given by both Bieber and Toynbee in the late
1920s: See Bieber (1928); Toynbee (1929). See also che interpretacions of Simon
(1961), pp. 111-172 and Herbig (1958).

6. Hundsalz sees in this a reference to Dionysian mystics' beliefs in rran-

scendance, where pure water was attributed wirh the power of reviving the dead.
See Hundsalz (1991), p. 74; Simon (1961, p. 111) thinks it might have been a
purification ritual.

7. Simon (1961), p. 126.

Chapter 2
Access Provided by Oberlin College at 08/28/12 7:04AM GMT
Hand and Eye:
Excavating a New Technology of the Image
in the Victorian Era

Tom Gunning

T
he very concept of a Victorian cinema sounds a bit contradic-
tory to most ears, since we primarily think of cinema as “the
art of the 20th century.”1 However, cinema was invented during
the Victorian era and its basic technology—the motion picture camera,
the film projector, even celluloid films, not to mention the infrastruc-
ture of production companies and means of distribution—emerged
shortly before or during the 1890s, preceding the twentieth century by
at least a decade.2 This nineteenth-century cinema hardly evokes an
archaic world, but rather exemplifies the experience of modernity. Yet
confronting the nineteenth-century roots of cinema in some ways
resembles the archaeologist’s excavation of buried artifacts, uncov-
ering forgotten technologies in order to establish the foundations of a
later culture.
The relative oblivion within popular imagination of these initial
years of cinema is partly due to the lack of resemblance between early
cinema and the cinema we know best. There was no Hollywood in the
1890s. Not only was the center of film production not yet found on the
American west coast, but even American dominance of film production
occurred only about two decades into the twentieth century, after World
War I. For the first decade of film history, the cinema production of

A bstract: The possibility of a Victorian cinema extends beyond the first decade of cine-
ma’s innovation at the end of Victoria’s reign if we include the flourishing of optical
devices know as “philosophical toys” in the nineteenth century. This essay focuses on the
device known as the thaumatrope, invented by John Ayrton Paris in the 1820s. The
“wonder-turner” used rapid revolutions of a disk imprinted with matching partial
images (such as a bird on one side and a cage on the other) to create a perceptual image
that fused both sides into a single appearance. I call such optical toys “technological
images” because they manipulate human perception through a mechanical device.
Although the thaumatrope fuses an image rather than animating one, its novelty as an
optical device inaugurates an era of ever more complex technological images.

spring 2012
496 Tom Gunning

France and even Britain surpassed that of the United States: France in
quantity and Britain, I would claim, in quality (British cinema arguably
reached its high point in the era before 1907, especially in the innovative
films of the so-called “Brighton School” of James Williamson, Cecil
Hepworth, and G. A. Smith). Further, while cinema constituted an
important novelty before the end of Victoria’s regime, it did not yet func-
tion, as classical Hollywood did later, as a “dream factory,” the source of
popular narratives and mythical stars. This was an era of short rather
than feature-length films, rarely more than 8 or 9 minutes and in the
1890s generally even less, with nonfiction filmmaking dominating over
fictional narratives. Two culminating events of Victoria’s reign put
cinema firmly in the public eye in Britain: the films taken of her Diamond
Jubilee in 1897, especially the procession through London, which was
covered by dozens of cameramen, and then her 1901 state funeral.3 Films
of these events were shown throughout the empire, marking the moment
when public spectacle became a media event. (Films of the Boer War,
with some documentaries filmed on location and more re-staged in
Britain, also established film’s broad popularity.4) These films mark the
emergence of modern media, a new sense of contemporary history as a
mediated event and a culture conveyed by the technological image,
recordable and transportable.
Rather than a medium of stories and stars, cinema at the point
of its origin functioned primarily as a technical novelty. “Animated
pictures,” to use a phrase frequently applied to the nascent medium of
cinema, offered the latest in a long series of optical devices. I am most
concerned with cinema’s place within this series, rather than with the
brief, if essential, original period of projected films during the Victo-
rian era. Rather than describing and analyzing the short (but often
very rich) films produced during this time, I analyze cinematic and
optical devices—their discourses, practices, and affect. My investiga-
tion begins much earlier in the nineteenth century (even a decade or
so before Victoria’s reign) so as to trace a fundamental change in the
nature of the image: its essential, if somewhat primitive, integration
with technology through optical devices. These devices were commonly
referred to as “philosophical toys,” a complex, nearly oxymoronic term
that richly expresses their dual purposes of enlightenment and enter-
tainment—with the primary purpose of using the entertaining aspect
of toys to instruct children in scientific principles, thereby making
education enjoyable and entertaining. Operated by hand and intended

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 3

Hand and Ey e 497

to produce a visual effect, these toys were both manual and percep-
tual. They not only united amusement with education, but also
employed a mechanical device to manipulate human perception by
coordinating the hand and the eye. In what follows, the examination
of such objects and their uses resembles an archaeology, wherein I
characterize a broad transformation in the nature of imagery, of which
cinema was one development. This transformation is long, gradual,
and still continuing in today’s era of new media. Modes of representa-
tion and narration become radically revised through new interfaces
with the processes of perception and the precision of technology.
Archaeologists traditionally search for origins, attempting to
uncover the arche or foundation on which things are set.5 My focus is
on artifacts that preceded the more technological and industrial
systems of cinema that emerged in the 1890s. Although technological
and even commercial, and decidedly modern, these artifacts are less
tools than toys, yet defining their intended tasks and objects of scru-
tiny is important to understanding their role in the archaeology of the
cinema. Rather than comb the origins of cinema for the inventions
that “started it all”—as if to trace cinema’s genealogy back to a secure
paternity—I describe a period of novelty in which something changed
fundamentally. Rather than try to situate this change in a precise
moment, I want to get a handle on the way media, especially images,
changed in the modern era. During the Victorian era, a new way of
producing and viewing images emerged, a transformation so broad we
still have trouble seeing it. By returning to its early stages, I hope to
glimpse the appearance of a modern image culture, at once profoundly
technological and perceptual: one whose novelty may lie in how deeply
it coordinated the perceptual and the technological.
Academically speaking, the Victorian era is more often associ-
ated with literature and the domain of writing than with the realm of
images, despite the triumphs of painting, photography, and spectacle
that mark that era. But one could more accurately claim that the Victo-
rian era is marked by a peculiar intertwining of word and image that
characterized the great age of the illustrated novel, the art writing and
criticism of Ruskin and others, narrative painting, and the spectacle
stage.6 The technological image I am describing here seemed to justify
itself partly as a means of achieving this integration of word and image
and even a new process of reading and writing, one of whose future
forms would be cinematography, the writing of motion. Even the

spring 2012
498 Tom Gunning

earliest films partake of this interweaving, but perhaps it is best

captured by the moving image device called the thaumatrope. Even
before photography, the thaumatrope produced a new perceptual
experience, transforming both the act of reading and the contempla-
tion of images.

I. Philosophical Toys, Rational Amusements,

and the Technological Image

Philosophical toys provide a particularly rich entry point for

the analysis of technological images, as they did for many of the first
students of the cinema, from C. W. Ceram to contemporary scholars
such as Laurent Mannoni, David Robinson, Deac Rossell, and Erkki
Huhtamo. These optical devices display a double function. On the one
hand, they produce an image and a visual experience; on the other
hand, they seek to demonstrate the processes of visual perception
through their operation. Intensely self-reflective, they use a tech-
nology, a specific and often simple, hand-held device, in order to create
a visual effect and to draw attention to how that effect is generated. As
instruments of demonstration they both generate astonishment and
provide explanation. Some of these devices—such as the phenakisti-
scope, the zoetrope, or the flipbook—produce a moving image and
thus have a clear place in the development of motion pictures. By
contrast, the thaumatrope’s technology is much simpler, yet its
simplicity only makes the thaumatrope’s perceptual and phenomeno-
logical paradoxes—its “visual trick”—clearer.
At least legendarily, the thaumatrope originated as the solution
to a bet (as is ostensibly the case with a number of pre-cinema devices,
including Muybridge’s photographs of racehorses supposedly taken to
settle a wager by his patron, Leland Stanford, as to whether all four
hooves left the ground simultaneously). Charles Babbage, the inventor
of the difference machine, ancestor of the computer, claimed that the
thaumatrope arose from a playful conversation among savants. In his
Life of a Philosopher (1864), Babbage described how Sir John Herschel, the
distinguished astronomer and pioneer of photography, challenged
himself and Babbage to showing two sides of a coin at once. Solutions
involving reflections in a mirror were rejected in favor of something more
dynamic. Herschel solved the problem by spinning the coin so rapidly
that both sides seemed to appear simultaneously. Unlike the reflection of

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 3

Hand and Ey e 499

a mirror’s virtual image, which shows something where it is not, this

mobile demonstration depended on a quality of the eye as organ of sight,
the effect of an after-image in which rapidly successive images seemed to
fuse in time. Thus a rapid spin of a coin solved a paradox of space: two
different sides apparently seen at once, recto and verso combined.
More frequently referred to today as “flicker fusion,” this visual
phenomenon in the nineteenth century was called “persistence of
vision.” The principle was rendered even more easily demonstrable in
the form of a device constructed by Babbage and Herschel’s friend, a Dr.
Filton, who fashioned a “round disc of card suspended between the two
pieces of sewing silk” with each side of the disk showing a different
picture: in this case, a bird on one side, a cage on the other; “on turning
the thread rapidly the bird appeared to have got inside the cage.”
Babbage claimed to have discovered some months later that this amuse-
ment of learned men had become a commercialized object offered for
sale by a Dr. Paris for a few shillings, and described as a new toy known as
a thaumatrope (Babbage 189–90). This encounter—between the scien-
tific and the playful, the learned and popular, through a device producing
an image by turning faster than a certain threshold of perception—seems
to me of great significance. As Jonathan Crary, still our most profound
thinker on these devices, says of the thaumatrope:

Similar phenomena had been observed in earlier centuries merely by spinning a

coin and seeing both sides at the same time, but this was the first time the phenom-
enon was given a scientific explanation and a device was produced to be sold as a
popular entertainment. The simplicity of this “philosophical toy” made unequivo-
cally clear both the fabricated and the hallucinatory nature of its image and the
rupture between perception and its object. (106)

I want to draw out the implications about the technological

image that this insight of Crary’s contains, first by stressing his use of
italics: scientific explanation and device of popular entertainment.
The term “philosophical toy” expresses the same radical conjunction
in a nutshell. Barbara Stafford’s Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertain-
ment and the Eclipse of Visual Education places these devices within a
context of Enlightenment attitudes toward both education and vision.
I am interested in these devices primarily as visual media and their
role in the creation of this new phenomenon I call the technological
image. That phrase encompasses not only images produced by techno-
logical means (such as mechanically produced tapestries or prints, or

spring 2012
500 Tom Gunning

the chromolithographs that set off the age of mechanical reproduc-

tion), but images that owe their existence to a device and are optically
produced by it rather than simply reproduced. Photography may repre-
sent the most familiar of these processes, but the production of images
by philosophical toys presents a different and less explored set of para-
doxes. These devices manipulate (many sources would describe it as
fooling or tricking) human perception into seeing an image, thus
creating visual experiences dependent on operating the devices. The
superimposed image produced by the thaumatrope provides a perfect
example, illustrating what Crary succinctly describes as “the fabricated
and the hallucinatory nature of its image and the rupture between
perception and its object.” While I would dispute his characterization
of the image as a hallucination, I recognize the unique phenomeno-
logical quality he intends by this phrase, which I hope to describe more
precisely. Through the device the observer is “made to see” something
not otherwise visible. The composite image produced by the thau-
matrope is perceived only when the device is properly in motion. Once
the device ceases to operate, we experience the rupture between the
previous perception and the now-inert device; instead of a fused image,
the bird and cage now separate into independent images. This device
introduces to the Victorian era a new class of images simultaneously
technological, optical, and perceptual.

II. Image and Discourse: The Space of the Visual Trope

Babbage and Herschel produced a visual solution to a paradox,

a sort of riddle, triggering an oddity of perception that could be inten-
tionally provoked. As Crary indicates, producing a device that can
facilitate this experience indicates the desire to control such visual
phenomena through manual manipulation, rendering it easily repeat-
able and available as a commodity. This involved not only commercial-
izing the toy, but also embedding it in a discourse and practice, and
even envisioning it as a form of discourse itself.
The thaumatrope’s union of the entertaining and the instruc-
tional was developed and explicated by its primary commercial exploiter.
While Babbage displays some scorn for the thaumatrope’s purveyor,
John Ayrton Paris was no mere tradesman but a distinguished medical
doctor and scientific author who had used his philosophical toy to
demonstrate the principle of persistence of vision to the Royal Society in

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 3

Hand and Ey e 501

1824. The device was offered for sale in 1825 at Stationer’s Hall in
London (Barnes, Dr. Paris 8). A scientific discussion of it, published in
1826 in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, attributed its invention to Paris
and was most likely written by the distinguished scientist David Brewster
who served as the editor of that journal, and who later also discussed the
device in his Letters on Natural Magic (1832) (Dr. Paris 8).
Paris aggressively promoted the device’s role as an educational
toy, especially through a long, rather novelistic book he wrote and origi-
nally published anonymously in 1827. Explaining how toys and games
could teach young people about the nature of the universe and their
own perceptions, this popular book, which went through eight editions
and revisions, embeds these devices in a revealing discourse of popular
nineteenth-century science and instruction. The book’s title says it all:
Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest: An attempt to illustrate the first
principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports.7 The
chapter Paris devotes to the thaumatrope opens with a clear argument
for the educational use of illusions, an essential move in Enlightenment
philosophy: questioning the human senses and demonstrating their
unreliability. The trick of the thaumatrope, Paris explains, lies not just in
a sleight of hand, like a conjurer’s illusion, but lurks concealed in the eye
itself, whose complex nature the device demonstrates. Mr. Seymour, the
narrator who operates the toy, declares to his young charges, “I will now
show you that the eye also has its source of fallacy.” His adult interlocutor,
the local vicar, exclaims after a demonstration of the toy’s visual illusion,
“If you proceed in this manner, you will make us into Cartesians.” Paris
adds a useful footnote to explain the reference: “The Cartesians main-
tained that the senses were the great sources of deception; that every-
thing with which they present us ought to be suspected as false, or at
least dubious, until our reason has confirmed the report” (337).8 Paris’s
comment reveals how seriously he took the term “philosophical” in
philosophical toys. While the adjective simply denoted the device’s
demonstrative and pedagogical function, key philosophical attitudes
about the nature of perception and the role of the subject are embedded
in the toys and the discourse surrounding them. Paris’s book provides
the clearest extended example, but in almost all cases such toys were
accompanied by written instructions that described the best methods
of handling the top as well as the toy’s significance.
Yet the thaumatrope’s relation to a realm of discourse, its
involvement in a technology of reading, is not limited simply to the

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502 Tom Gunning

paratext of instructions and scientific explanations that surround it.

The toy’s relation to language, writing, and reading sink deeply into its
operation and its very identity, as it not only instructs but plays with the
processes of language, asserting an odd relation to Victorian litera-
ture. The thaumatrope enacts an intense intertwining of the verbal
and the visual, and the literary and the technological, beginning with
its formidable name. Mr. Seymour translates thaumatrope as “Wonder-
turner, or a toy which performs wonders by turning round” (Paris 339).
Paris’s description of its spinning operation as “turning” and his chris-
tening of it with a pair of Greek terms, thauma and trope, tell us how to
read this playful device.
Primarily, the thaumatrope produces a perceptual effect, one
that the instructor’s discourse will seek to explain (and possibly
contain). Seymour informs the children that the thaumatrope’s
wonder is “founded upon the well-known optical principle, that an
impression made on the retina of the eye lasts for a short interval after
the object that produced it has been withdrawn” (339)—still the classic
formulation of the persistence of vision. For instance, R. L. Gregory
defines afterimages in the classic account of visual perception Eye and
Brain as “the continuing firing of the optic nerve after the stimulation”
(49). The rapid twirling of the card in the thaumatrope causes the
images on each side to appear as if present at the same instant, which
Seymour describes as “a very striking and magical effect” (Paris 339).
Paris chose to baptize his toy with the Greek word for wonder, thauma,
associated with magic in the English word “thaumaturgy” or “wonder-
working,” used both of sorcerers and of stage illusionists. Approaching
the thaumatrope as a magic trick, even a sleight of hand (and eye),
might seem to contradict its educational purposes, but this device
works by reversals. Paris was undoubtedly aware of the claim, made by
both Aristotle and Plato, that “philosophy begins in wonder” (Plato,
Theaetetus, 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b). We can deepen our
understanding of this optical toy by following Paris’s classical allusion.
As Richard Neer informs us, “wonder, in Greek thinking, characteristi-
cally grounds itself in vision” (58). Neer brilliantly demonstrates that
wonder involves not simply vision but also the paradoxes of sight, espe-
cially in its play between the visible and the invisible. Reading a passage
from Euripides’s Alkestis, Neer comments, “The passage of the shining
sun into darkness and back into light, an oscillation of brilliance and
occlusion, presence and absence, is unsurpassably wonderful” (61).

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Hand and Ey e 503

Although Paris may not have possessed the philology of Neer, the
visual oscillation at the core of thauma exemplifies the visual play this
toy engenders. As Neer puts it, “wonder derives from the fact that a
single thing can somehow be two things at once” (63). Herein lies the
essence of the thaumatrope: the visual experience of the merging of
two things as one.
As with most philosophical toys, the lessons offered by the thau-
matrope depended on the manipulator not only being in control of the
device, but also being able to examine its elements both in motion and
stillness. Anyone could see that each side of the disk presented only one
element of the composite image produced by spinning. Thus, in contrast
to the traditional magic trick, whose illusion remains mysterious because
the secret is kept close by the prestidigitator, the philosophical toy is a
tool of demonstration and demystification. The illusion could be both
produced and deconstructed by the child who operated the device, once
instructed by a knowledgeable adult.
Exploiting (and explaining) the effect of persistence of vision,
the classic thaumatrope’s composite images (a bird and a cage; a vase
and flowers; a horse and a rider; a bald man [or woman] and a wig)
produced a superimposition, merging two separate pictures into a new
unity, perhaps as Hegelian as it was Cartesian. As visual as its effect
may be, Paris delighted in embedding it in a literary context. He indi-
cates that the composite image might also supply an effect of transfor-
mation. The thaumatrope disks would be perfect, he believed, for
illustrating the changes wrought in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Daphne’s
transformation into a laurel tree could appear to show leaves sprouting
from her fingers and her arms lengthening into branches (Paris
351–53). Such two-phase transformations recall many earlier devices,
such as blow books, transforming pictures, or magic lantern slipping
slides, which showed two contrasting stages of an action or transforma-
tion and used a rapid transition from one to the other to evoke the
actual movement needed to accomplish the change.
As an educational toy, the wonder-turner not only served to
demonstrate the fallible nature of human perception; it could also be
used to interest youths in Classical literature and mythology, as movie
adaptations of Victorian novels are used in high schools today. But
relating the metamorphoses of Ovid to the device did more than just
familiarize children with a standard text. As I indicated earlier, visual
devices in the Victorian era often broached the borders between the

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verbal and the pictorial. From the end of the eighteenth century to the
beginning of the twentieth, a variety of visual entertainments and
devices—beginning with Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, Philip James de
Loutherberg’s Eidophusikon, and the development of the magic lantern
into the form of dissolving views—provided poets and novelists (and
occasionally philosophers and political thinkers) with new metaphors
for both perceptual and psychological experiences. Such metaphorical
uses of visual technology also opened up less rational analogies of the
psyche and technology, as Terry Castle demonstrates in her work on
the eighteenth century and the emergence of the Gothic (140–67).
While Paris’s rationalist commentary stresses the thau-
matrope’s role in teaching children not to trust the evidence of their
senses, the device also delighted them with a new sort of paradox,
presenting a visual metamorphosis, albeit one produced mechanically
rather than mythologically: a return of thauma in a new mode. A
conception of the image as holding the possibility of transformation, a
labile identity, defines an essential aspect of the new technological/
perceptual image, one whose immateriality transformed the tradi-
tional static ideal of pictorial representation. The shuddering, super-
imposed thaumatrope image seems poised to morph into either
motion or transformation. It embodies the power and uncertainty of
thauma.
This conception of an image that transforms before our very
eyes asserts the power of vision while also maintaining a relation to the
verbal and literary. Paris’s evocation of metamorphosis exceeds the
possibility of illustrating Ovid, as the very name of this device reveals.
Let us switch our focus from thauma to trope. Paris’s original publicity
for his toy doggedly plays on the trope part of his neologism, accenting
its ambiguous translation as “turn.” Trope denotes the motility of the
device, but also references a more common meaning: a turn of phrase,
a linguistic deviation from the norm, a twist in signification. And in
fact the original offering of the thaumatrope at Stationer’s Hall
described the toy in punning terms: “The Thaumatrope being Rounds
of Amusement, or How to please and surprise by turns” (Barnes, Dr.
Paris 22). Paris keeps the pun running and gives it a peculiarly techno-
logical twist when he describes his toy as a sort of literary machine, a
device for the simultaneous creation of puns and visual tropes (and an
uncanny anticipation of computer-generated poetry):

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Hand and Ey e 505

The Quarterly Review has asserted that a certain English poem was fabricated in
Paris by the powers of a steam engine; but the author of the present invention claims
for himself the exclusive merit of having first constructed a hand-mill, by which
puns and epigrams may be turned with as much ease as tunes are played on the
hand-organ, and old jokes so rounded and changed, as to assume all the airs of origi-
nality. . . . He trusts that his discovery may afford the happy means of giving activity
to wit that has long been stationary; of revolutionizing the present system of standing
jokes, and putting into rapid circulation the most approved bon mots. (342)

Peppering his description with labored puns stressed by typography,

Paris foregrounds both the mechanical and mobile nature of his
device, liberating the verbal from its static nature.
This punning description was in part literal, for Paris’s original
thaumatrope disks printed punning jokes beneath the pictures. A disk
with a laughing face on one side and a weeping one on the other bore
the motto “the sweetest things turn sour.” Mannoni quotes a riddle and
its solution, appearing on different sides of a thaumatrope card that
oscillates between the literal and figurative meanings of “over his head.”
The riddle asks: “Why does this man appear over head and ears in debt?”
The answer is: “Because he has not paid for his wig.” The composite
image put bald-headed man and wig together, while the linguistic play
underscores the trick of the superimposed image, involving a turn or
twist in our everyday seeing and sense of meaning and a visual joke
miming the syntax of verbal wit (Mannoni 207). The technological
image fashions a space of transformation and play, of inversion of
meaning. This interchange between the visual and the verbal, turning
around the term trope, inaugurates the growth of a dynamic use of
visual tropes or metaphors, a striking innovation on the visual emblem
or allegory that enjoyed a long development within classical rhetoric as
well as the history of painting. The innovation here lies in the mechan-
ical and perceptual process of transformation: we actually see the trans-
formation from one meaning to another; the merging of the two things
is enacted, visualized. One could relate this conjunction of perceptual
change and technology, of word and image, to both Marcel Duchamp’s
spiral puns in his 1924 film Anemic Cinema and Sergei Eisenstein’s
montage tropes in his films Strike (1924) and October (1927).
While the thaumatrope has most often been approached as a
starting point in the development of the moving image, the ultimate
ancestor of film, I see these early Victorian philosophical toys as inaugu-
rating a more robust and less linear legacy, encompassing but not limited

spring 2012
506 Tom Gunning

to the appearance of motion. As I said, in demonstrating the persistence

of vision, the thaumatrope does not primarily produce an image of
movement, but rather an image involving an optical transformation—an
ancestor of the moving image, but also more than a representation of
motion. For this is an image whose nature is unfixed, liberated from
material inscription and dependent on both a mechanical operation
(manipulation and movement) and a perceptual transformation (a
literal change in the way something is seen or appears). Paris’s associa-
tion of this sort of unfixed image with both mythological metamorphosis
and verbal metaphor or trope provided a literary tradition in which the
phenomenon could be understood and developed. At the same time it
announced the subjection of the literary to the technological, a transfor-
mation whose goal is the same as that of his terrible jokes and puns, a
defamiliarization and renewal of familiar rhetoric.
This strong connection to language and writing, specifically
to the metaphorical pole of language and its transformative possibility,
hints at the means of renewal of the arts through technology. Paris
compared his device to a hand-mill turning out puns and many of his
disks combined images with written adages or jokes. His invocation of
an English poem recently fabricated “by the powers of steam” recalls
remarks attributed to the thaumatrope’s other reputed parents, when
Babbage said to Herschel after verifying massive tables of calculation,
“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!”
(Buxton 47). Tropes could be mechanized, just as images could be
manufactured. David Brewster’s discussion of the thaumatrope in his
Letters on Natural Magic claimed the principle of its composite image
could be extended to “many other contrivances.” He even imagined
linguistic thaumatropes:

Part of a sentence may be written on one side of a card and the rest on the reverse.
Particular letters may be given on one side and others upon the other or even half
or parts of each letter may be put upon each side, or all these contrivances may be
combined so that the sentiment that they express can be understood only when
the scattered parts are united by the revolution of the card. (35)

Such composite written messages are found on a number of existing

thaumatropes, combining (or confounding) the linear forms of writing
with the technological superimposition achieved by the optical device.
Paris’s jesting reference to steam-powered poems signals
the modern technological ambitions of this image device. While the

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Hand and Ey e 507

thaumatrope’s main effect appears in its composite image, an aware-

ness of the operation of the device on the part of the manipulator also
plays a central role. As I have emphasized, the philosophical toy relies
on and highlights the cooperation of hand and eye. The attraction of
the device lies as much in the pleasure derived from its operation as in
the wondrous image it produces. According to Nicholas Dulac and
André Gaudreault, “This ‘interactive’ aspect is central to the attrac-
tional quality of optical toys. The pleasure they provided had as much
to do with manipulating the toy as it did with the illusion of movement”
(233). The technology itself—its workings and manipulation, not just
its perceptual effects—instructs and entertains. The machine that
could manufacture art appears in the Victorian era not simply as
utopian fantasy, but as an essential context for the new conception of
technological images. In 1817 Brewster had already patented his own
optical instrument, the kaleidoscope, which he described as a mechan-
ical device for creating aesthetic objects. He proposed the kaleido-
scope not only as an “instrument of amusement to please the eye by the
creation and exhibition of beautiful forms in the same manner as the
ear is delighted by the combination of musical sounds,” but as a useful
industrial device in trades that used ornamental patterns, such as
fabric design, book binding, carpet manufacture, or ornamental
painting (Brewster, Patent). Brewster promoted his device as simulta-
neously a scientific instrument, a means of “rational amusement,” and
a useful industrial invention, claiming,

There are few machines, indeed, that rise higher above the operation of human
skill. It will create, in a single hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the
course of a year; and while it works with such unexampled rapidity, it works also
with a corresponding beauty and precision. (Kaleidoscope, 136)

The thaumatrope sets an important prototype for the techno-

logical image. It is the product of a mechanical (even if simple) device
that generates an image through its technical manipulation of visual
perception. In contrast to the fixed, inscribed nature of traditional
drawings or paintings, this image occurs only as a result of this interac-
tion between viewer and the device. Further, the image does not
appear static and fixed in a material base, but even without the illusion
of motion has a protean and transformative nature, a production of
thauma through trope. These terms define the thaumatrope, but how
does it work—on us?

spring 2012
508 Tom Gunning

III. Experiencing the Thaumatrope 9

Paris saw the thaumatrope as a visual amusement that could

demonstrate the processes and the fallacies of vision to children. But the
delight children took in its operation offered more than a way of sugar-
coating scientific instruction. I have claimed that the thaumatrope intro-
duces a new form of, and attitude toward, the image, that a new category
of technological image emerges from this rational entertainment. It is
the protean and unfixed nature of these images that I am stressing, a
quality often described as magical and denigrated as deceptive. Even
without evoking motion, the superimposed image produced by the
­thaumatrope displays the fascination produced by an optical image.
This oscillation between the magical and deceptive reveals an
ambivalence toward technological images that persists to this day. Paris
(or his narrator Mr. Seymour—another pun!) explains to the young
people to whom he demonstrates the toy that the composite image
derives from a “fallacy” of the eye. Even today, most discussions of persis-
tence of vision claim it results from a “defect” or “weakness” of the eye;
discussing the thaumatrope, the historian of photography Michel Frizot
declares, “the artificial reproduction of movement is only possible, para-
doxically, due to a sort of imperfection of ocular vision” (18). In observing
the thaumatrope image we are being deceived: the spinning disk is faster
than the eye. The illusion derives from the lingering, persistent after-
image, by which we see something after it has vanished from our visual
field; or, in the case of the thaumatrope’s composite image, we see an
image that does not strictly correspond to anything in reality (there is no
“bird in a cage,” only a bird and a cage rapidly succeeding each other).
This image is the product, Paris seems to claim, of a collusion between
the handheld device and our eye. Alternatively, the tricky device has
taken advantage of the weakness of our eye in order to make us believe
we see something that does not exist.
I have always found it odd to describe as an imperfection our
ability to blend two images into one; that extremely Cartesian judg-
ment drives a wedge between what we know and what we see and values
the former over the latter. Following Paris, we might view the thau-
matrope as a machine for producing young Cartesians as much as illu-
sions. Paris indicates that the philosophical toy teaches youngsters to
adopt a skeptical attitude and not to trust the evidence of their senses.

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Hand and Ey e 509

But to understand the experience of this new form of image, I think we

must let the image produced by the device speak for itself, rather than
simply accept the explanation offered.
Let us engage, then, in an elementary phenomenological
description of what we see through a thaumatrope and what our hand
does. One of the great advantages of dealing with artifacts lies in our
ability to handle and operate them and to watch them work; they
provide us with an experience, not simply a discourse. When I twirl a
thaumatrope, what do I see? Although I do see a composite image, I do
not mistake it for the equivalent of the images imprinted on either side
of the disk. The image has an unfixed quality, seen but not grasped. It
is less material than the printed images on the disk, and, as Paris
stresses in his text, less opaque. I can in effect see through it. Brewster’s
early description of the thaumatrope notes, “the revolving card is
virtually transparent, so that bodies beyond it can be seen through it”
(Letters 35). I am inclined to think of this image as visual rather than
tactile, something I can see but not touch (if I touch it, the spinning
stops). And yet I am also very aware of its production and my manual
role in producing what is in no sense an “imagined” image; it does not
seem to me like a hallucination. It may be in Crary’s sense “subjective”
(the product of my sensorium), but it is not private. It can be shared.
The commercialization of the thaumatrope and other visual
devices represents a crucial moment in the regime of the technolog-
ical image, since it put these devices in the hands of numerous people.
Technological images could be said to have first appeared at the turn
of the sixteenth to seventeenth century with the invention of image-
making optical instruments (such as the magic lantern and various
catoptric devices). But these remained in the hands of a few savants
who controlled their operation and reception, maintaining an atmo-
sphere of the mysterious around them. The full experience of the tech-
nological image became widely available and commercialized in the
nineteenth century with the philosophical toy. As Barbara Stafford has
shown, both manual dexterity (such as sleight of hand or juggling) and
the operation of machinery and other devices were viewed as poten-
tially deceptive, even diabolic, before the Enlightenment (73–127).
The philosophical toy sought to demystify magical effects and unveil
the secrets of perception and technology to the masses. And yet its role
in generating wonder has a built-in ambiguity. The perceptual novelty
of the technological image leads to its ambivalent characterizations as

spring 2012
510 Tom Gunning

both magical and deceptive. It is important to keep in mind the device’s

“magical” nature. Describing the production of these images as a trick
expresses the perceptual ambiguity they occasion without defining
them as illusions or deceptions. If I understand “trick” less as a decep-
tion than as a mechanically-manufactured effect, knowingly involving
the manipulation of our senses, its realm of power shifts from the
supernatural to the perceptual. Indeed, the manipulation of our vision
is what has been manufactured by this technology. This sort of image
strikes us less as a material object than as sight, a spectacle.
I am still groping for a proper term for this class of modern
images, dependent upon the interface between a device and the
processes of human perception, and for the moment I am retaining
the unwieldy and perhaps overly descriptive phrase “technologically
produced images.” I am not simply concerned about nomenclature,
but seek to define the criteria for this new class of images. If still a
novelty in the Victorian era, such images in our current century
threaten to overwhelm us. The images offered by cinema, video, and
the computer screen constitute their dominant form. Optical devices
produce these images and offer perhaps the simplest way to define
them. Our awareness of the devices that produce the images balances
our sense of the images themselves as somehow immaterial, percep-
tual rather than substantial.
These images’ manifestations consist in their appearance and
effects rather than their embodiment in a material object, even though
they are produced by a device. The thaumatrope image serves as a
prime example due to its elementary nature. Its initial association with
the verbal pun or trope reveals something of its tricky ontology and
our labile perceptual grasp of it. We see this image not simply as a
representation of something, but as an event, a process, an almost
theatrical turn in which the image behaves in an unexpected manner,
calling attention to its own production, making its appearance into a
performance of image-ness, of becoming visual, of appearing. As a
trick, this image surprises me not only because I know it isn’t “really
there” but also because I participate in its appearance. In his book,
Mannoni reproduces a thaumatrope disk showing a painter before a
blank canvas on one side and a small portrait of a lady on the other.
Twirling the disk, the resulting composite image places the portrait on
the canvas, as if stressing the device’s role in creating not just a
composite, but a composite image (206).

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Hand and Ey e 511

But if we are aware of the act of twirling the thaumatrope as a

form of production, we are also aware that it produces only an ephem-
eral image that vanishes as soon as the turning stops. As Wanda Strauven
stresses in her recent discussion of optical toys, the simple technology of
the optical toy creates a complex interaction among hand, eye, and
perception (or, as she phrases it, “brain”): “I wanted to underline how
the pre-cinematic observer is playing, interacting with the toy, or—to put
it differently—how the eye is depending on the hand,” she writes, adding,
“the eye communicates with the brain or better: the eye fools the brain
via the hand” (154). Mary Ann Doane nicely articulates the effect of this
interchange between the manual and tactile and visual and intangible in
philosophical toys: “The image of movement itself was nowhere but in
the perception of the viewer—immaterial, abstract, and thus open to
practices of manipulation and deception. The toys could not work
without this fundamental dependence upon an evanescent, intangible
image.”10 Yet this immateriality of the image is balanced by our aware-
ness of the device that produces and displays it. As Doane puts it: “The
tangibility of the apparatus and the materiality of the images operated
as a form of resistance to this abstraction, assuring the viewer that the
image of movement could be produced at will, through the labor of the
body, and could, indeed, be owned as a commodity.” The philosophical
toy places the control of transformation and movement directly in our
hands, even in the hands of children.
The interactive nature of optical toys makes them direct ances-
tors of one of the dominant technological images currently, the
computer game, showing the poverty of relegating these devices to the
category of “pre-cinema” (Dulac and Gaudreault 233; Strauven 154).
Some readers might assume that I describe the hand-eye coordination
demanded by philosophical toys in order to differentiate this earlier
tradition from later cinema, in which the hand seems to play no part.
Dulac and Gaudreault distinguish between what they call a “player
mode of attraction” typical of these toys and a “viewer mode of attrac-
tion” that appears as optical devices become theatricalized (as in the
projected cinema or, even earlier, Reynaud’s Pantomimes lumineuse):

In the case of the optical toys, the viewer became one with the apparatus; he or she
was in the apparatus, became the apparatus. In the optical theater, the image put
into motion was, on the contrary, completely independent of the viewer. The
viewer was cast beyond the limits of the apparatus and was kept at a distance from
it, no longer having anything to manipulate. (239)

spring 2012
512 Tom Gunning

As perceptive as these comments are, my goal is less to divide the tech-

nological image into opposing camps than to explain the new experi-
ence of imagery underlying it. In this respect I agree with Strauven,
who sees more continuity between these modes despite the change in
emphasis in theatrical cinema from actual manipulation to a more
global knowledge of the technology involved: “I believe that in the case
of the optical theater this ‘knowledge’ was not suddenly erased; on the
contrary, it enriched the viewing experience and turned the viewer
more consciously into a perception maker” (154).
The double awareness of device and image returns as the
defining aspect of the technological image, broadly conceived. The
perceptual image remains accessible through the viewer’s interface with
the technology. Dulac and Gaudreault’s description of the viewer as “cast
beyond the limits of the apparatus” in theatrical cinema takes the appa-
ratus too literally, as a spatial object. Even in the theatrical situation,
which removes the technology from immediate perception, the viewer is
still firmly placed within an apparatus, not only the film theater but also
the whole process of film projection and viewing. The dependence of the
technological image on a device remains sensed by the viewer in the
possibility of a breakdown or stopping of the device. This same essential
rhythm characterizes our interaction with the thaumatrope.
The technological image allows access to thauma through
techne and, I would claim, vice versa: making us aware of and curious
about technology through an experience of wonder. While the impli-
cation of Paris’s Cartesian discourse is that the thaumatrope should
make us aware of the feeble and deceptive aspect of our senses, I
wonder if the imagery of the disks, with their often irreverent sense of
humor and fantasy, encourages such sober disillusionment. Why
shouldn’t this ability to see the superimposed image be viewed as a
faculty, an ability, rather than a defect? I believe approaching this
device in terms of its demonstration of the fallibility of our vision
ignores the ludic and aesthetic fascination of the toy, the delight it
allows us to experience in playing with our perception. Rather than
demonstrating a perceptual flaw, my production of this image extends
my experience of vision. After all, this is a toy, a device to give pleasure,
not to cause frustration and impotence. We certainly feel as we twist
the thread of the thaumatrope and watch the image it produces that
we are surpassing ordinary boundaries. We are seeing in a different
manner. We glimpse a virtual world. It does not resemble the fixed and

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Hand and Ey e 513

static images that constitute the norm of pictorial expression. Our

perception is opened to new experience through technology.
We grasp the thaumatrope or other optical device firmly in
our hands. We can operate it and understand its process. But the
image it produces is not fixed in space, embodied in pigment or canvas;
it occurs in our perception. Yet while it may be defined as a subjective
image, taking place through our individual processes of perception, it
is not a fantasy or, in a psychological sense, a hallucination. But its
ontology wobbles and amazes us precisely because it plays with our
vision, exposing its limits and possibilities. It shows us something
virtual rather than tangible and opens to my mind not only a new cate-
gory of image but also a new modern environment of images.
University of Chicago

NOTES

1
The phrase appears, for instance, in the very useful and reliable reference
work Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan.
2
For a detailed account of the development of the cinema during this period,
focused especially on Britain, see Barnes, Beginnings. For an account of the industrial
and commercial infrastructure of production, distribution, and exhibition see Brown
and Anthony.
3
See the thorough account of these films in Barnes, Beginnings, volumes 2 and 5.
4
On the Boer War films, see Barnes volume 4 and the contemporary account of
filming in South Africa by William K. L. Dickson, The Biograph in Battle.
5
The term “media archaeology” has been introduced for the investigation of
the foundations of our media culture. This essay certainly forms part of this project.
For a thorough and thoughtful discussion of this term, its history, and its range of
methods see the recent anthology Media Archaeology, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi
Parikka, especially Huhtamo and Parikka’s excellent introduction (1–21).
6
I will not attempt to reference the extensive work on Victorian visuality, but I
do want to indicate my debt to Martin Meisel’s classic work Realizations: Narrative, Picto-
rial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, as well as the more recent work of
Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modern Aesthetics.
7
The book is available in several reprint editions, as well as online from Google
Books.
8
This reference to Cartesians does not appear in the book’s first edition. As
John Barnes points out, the thaumatrope description was greatly revised in the third
edition.
9
Some parts of this section occur in a slightly different version in my discussion
of the thaumatrope in my essay, “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nine-
teenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’ and their Discourse.”

spring 2012
514 Tom Gunning

Doane’s essay has been published in German translation, but I have used a
10

manuscript of the English version kindly provided by the author. Doane is speaking of
the flipbook and therefore of a “moving image” but her keen observation applies to the
thaumatrope images as well.

WORKS CITED

Anemic Cinema. Dir. Marcel Duchamp. 1924. Film.

Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longmans, 1864.
Barnes, John. Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901. 5 vols. Exeter: U of Exeter
P, 1996–98.
‡‡‡. Dr. Paris’s Thaumatrope or Wonder-Turner. London: Projection Box, 1995.
Brewster, David. The Kaleidoscope, its History, Theory and Construction with its Application to
the Fine and Useful Arts. London: John Murray, 1858.
‡‡‡. Patent AD 1817 no. 4136 (Kaleidoscope).
‡‡‡. Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott. London: J. Murray, 1832.
Brown, Richard, and Barry Anthony. A Victorian Film Enterprise: A History of the British
Mutoscope and Biograph Company 1897–1915. Trowbridge: Flick, 1999.
Buxton, Harry. Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq., F. R. S.
Cambridge: MIT, 1988.
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
Ceram, C. W. Archaeology of the Cinema. New York: Harcourt, 1965.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge: MIT, 1990.
Dickson, William K. L. The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South Africa War. Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Movement and Scale: From Flipbook to the Cinema.” 2006. TS.
Dulac, Nicholas, and André Gaudreault. “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the
Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series.” The Cinema
of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2006.
227–44.
Frizot, Michel. La chronophotographie, avant le cinématographe: temps, photographie et mouve-
ment autour de E.-J. Marey. Beaune: Association des Amis de Marey, 1984.
Gregory, R. L. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. London: World University Library,
1997.
Gunning, Tom. “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Phil-
osophical Toys’ and their Discourse.” Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography,
Algorithms. Ed. Eivind Rossaak. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. 31–34.
Herbert, Stephen, and Luke McKernan, eds. Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema. London:
British Film Institute, 1996.
Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and
Implications. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011.
Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: U
of Exeter P, 2000.

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 3

Hand and Ey e 515

Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century

England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
Neer, Richard. The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2010.
October. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Sovkino, 1927. Film.
Paris, John Ayrton. Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest. An attempt to illustrate the first
principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports. London: John Murray,
1849.
Robinson, David, and Laurent Mannoni. Light and Movement: The Incunabula of Motion
Pictures. Gemona: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995.
Rossell, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: SUNY, 1998.
Stafford, Barbara. Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
Education. Cambridge: MIT, 1994.
Strauven, Wanda. “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or not to Touch.” Huhtamo and
Parikka 148–63.
Strike. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Goskino, 1924. Film.
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009.

spring 2012
 ..........“Memory Bytes is an important contribution to

MEMORY BYTES
Digital culture/Media studies
the growing body of scholarship taking the current moment of media change as an LAUREN RABINOVITZ AND

incitement to re-examine earlier moments in media history. The range of media,

historical periods, and disciplinary perspectives is spectacular, representing inter- ABRAHAM GEIL, EDITORS 
disciplinary collaboration and conversation at its very best.”—H E N R Y J E N K I N S ,
coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture .......“Anyone who
teaches courses in digital culture or media studies knows how difficult it is to find
scholarly essays on new media that consider these developments in relation to social MEMORY BYTES
and technological precedents. Memory Bytes fills this gap.”—B R I A N G O L D F A R B,

author of Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom ........Digital
culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices,
and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to
counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its
social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context.
Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital
media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a
number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change.
While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media
and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society
at different moments in time........These essays from scholars in the social sciences
and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass
communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how
the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over
the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files, comparing
the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic”
sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s, or calling for a critical history of electricity from
the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes is a lively, enlightening examination Edited by
of the interplay of technology and culture. ......LAUREN RABINOVITZ is Professor
Rabinovitz
of American Studies and Cinema at the University of Iowa. She is the author of For
the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago and Points and Geil

of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–1971
and coeditor of Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, also
published by Duke University Press. ABRAHAM GEIL is an instructor in media
history at the New School University in New York City. . ......
DUKE History, Technology, and Digital Culture
Duke University Press ...........................
Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660 www.dukeupress.edu
 Lauren Rabinovitz

MORE THAN THE MOVIES

A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale’s

Tours, Imax, and Motion Simulation Rides

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard

their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my
dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of
information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlim-
ited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates
finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human
life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on
which we depend for our continued survival.
—n. katherine hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Modernity is hence conceptualized in terms—shock, trauma—which
suggest a penetration or breach of an otherwise seamless body. . . . The
threats associated with shock and trauma, with modernity’s assault
on the body and its perceptual powers, can be ameliorated through a
certain logic of the spectacle supported by a vast technology. . . . This
is in effect accomplished in the cinema through the progressive
despatialization and disembodiment of the spectatorial position.
[The body of the spectator is deimplicated], producing it as a pure
de-spatialized gaze.—mary ann doane, ‘‘Technology’s Body’’
I just call it immersive entertainment. By that I mean experiencing a
total sense of being inside the movie.—douglas trumbull,
Imax Corporation

The history of cinema has always assumed that moviegoing affords

a means for achieving a blissful state of disembodiment. Classical
models of movie spectatorship presume that cinema produces mod-
ernist subjectivity through being a giant, disembodied set of eyes.
Even when alternative views have surfaced, dominant film theories
have perpetuated a belief in a single, unitary viewing position—cen-
tered, distant, objectifying—that makes the spectator an effect of
a linear technological evolution from the camera obscura to pho-
tography to cinema. Involvement in the cinema has always meant
the fantasy of a despatialized, dematerialized self. Psychoanalytic
and feminist theories, arguably the most powerful developments in
the last twenty-five years, may critique and even vilify the ideology
of the spectator position that promises an illusory power and co-
herence in subjugation to vision itself. But they do not challenge
the assumption that the spectatorial process is essentially a dis-
avowal of corporeal presence (embodiment) and an absorption into
the distant world of image and sound. Cinema, whose purpose is
to articulate the frontiers of audio-visual technologies, contradicts
this model of subjective experience. Since the inception of cinema,
movies that claim to reveal the future of cinema have regularly de-
pended not on fantasies of disembodiment and absorption into vir-
tual worlds but on the reflexivity of embodied spectatorship.
Cinema was arguably the single most important new communi-
cation technology at the outset of the twentieth century and the
best one for prefiguring the digital technologies that promise virtual
worlds and simulated realities. By 1900, cinema was already tout-
ing its future in an extravagant, multimedia spectacle at the 1900
Paris International Exposition 1 and, a few short years later, at lavish
disaster shows (e.g., Trip to the Moon; Fighting the Flames) at Coney
Island and other urban amusement parks. The culmination of this
trend in early cinema was Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World (1904–
1911), a railroad car featuring travel films from the point of view of
a moving train where the image is coordinated with sensory and
atmospheric effects such as motion and train whistles. Contrary to
our received notion of moviegoing, these first ‘‘ridefilms’’ simulated
railroad travel in order to foreground the body itself as a site for sen-
sory experience. Hale’s Tours articulated a seemingly contradictory
100 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
process: it attempted to dematerialize the subject’s body through its
extension into the cinematic field while it repeatedly emphasized
physical presence and the delirium of the senses.
Although Hale’s Tours disappeared soon after the U.S. film in-
dustry became systematized, ridefilms and related cinematic phe-
nomena reappeared after World War II, the years that represented
a downward economic turn for a Hollywood that seemed to re-
quire new technical gimmicks in order to boost movie attendance.
Experiments in 3-d, their cyborgian implications in bespectacled
audiences, and their shock effects of objects ‘‘coming at you’’ fore-
grounded bodily orientation to the screen and identification. New
widescreen products like This Is Cinerama (Mike Todd, 1952) and
Cinerama Holiday (Louis de Rochemont, 1955) relied on exaggerated
uses of forward motion and objects flashing by at the margins, as
well as publicity rhetoric, to argue for the spectator’s increased im-
mersion in the spectacle. But, like Hale’s Tours, Cinerama provided
an enlarged sense of corporeal involvement that made immersion
an imaginary effect of reflexive spectatorship.
Experiments in 3-d, widescreen processes, new sound technolo-
gies, and the reappearance of new ridefilms like Trip to the Moon
(Disneyland, 1955) and Impressions of Speed (Brussels’s World’s Fair,
1958) were all most successful not at suburban cinemas trying to
outdo television and other forms of leisure entertainment but at
amusement parks and expositions. It is tempting to align their ap-
pearance in such showcases of utopic technological determinism
with the foundational era of the information age and an accelera-
tion of disembodiment rhetoric in relationship to the erosion of the
liberal subject. (At the same time, the development of flight train-
ing simulators in World War II, the postwar continuation of this
technology and its extension to automobile driving simulators, and
the rise of video games—all offshoots of technologies developed
for military application—are central to my history.2 Their histories,
however, are beyond the scope of this essay.)
It was in the 1970s that this alternative cinema became more fully
systematic, when Imax Corporation introduced a giant film image
several stories high (approximately ten times the size of a 35mm
movie). At first, Imax projected only at world’s fairs—Expo 67 in
Montreal and Expo 70 in Osaka. But then the company equipped
special theaters at a variety of exceptional sites—museums, zoos,
tourist centers—thereby developing a circuit of tourist cinema. In
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 101
the 1990s, new systems and competing companies complemented
Imax’s initial project—Omnimax or movie domes, ridefilms, 3-d
interactive movies, and 360-degree circular films. By relying on a
vocabulary of high camera angles and movements that create ver-
tiginous body orientations, these movies regularly utilize computer-
generated imagery in order to manifest themselves as cinematic vir-
tual voyages—digital updates of an old technology that resuscitate a
complex machine for phantasmagoric pleasures and reveling in the
physicality of one’s own body.
Contemporary movies at the frontiers of cinema, now available
worldwide in more than five hundred locations—amusement parks,
shopping malls, theaters, museums, and hotel entertainment com-
plexes—reproduce Hale’s Tours’s original purpose. They develop a
triangulated relationship among a compressed version of travel,
heightened, and intensified relations between the body and the
machine, and the cinematic rhetoric of hyperrealism. They do so
by appealing to multiple senses through experiences featuring for-
ward movement, wraparound screens, objects or lights flashing in
the viewer’s peripheral vision, subjective camera angles, semisync
realistic sound, seat or floor movement, and narratives that alter-
nate danger and command. They foreground the bodily pleasures
of the cinematic experience, pleasures already inherent in cinema
itself and important in such ‘‘body-oriented genres’’ as pornog-
raphy, action adventure, horror, and melodrama. But Hale’s Tours
carefully coordinate the spectator’s physical and cognitive sensa-
tions, whereas one might argue that the standard Hollywood ap-
proach involves substantial conflict between various cognitive cues.
These movies challenge our prevailing ideas about cinema in
four ways. First, they regularly return movies to the fairgrounds,
as it were, and uphold the ‘‘cinema of attractions’’ as an alterna-
tive tradition throughout the history of cinema.3 Second, they en-
gage multiple senses: they define the cinematic experience not as
a pure visual relationship to a screen but as the pleasurable, physi-
cal self-awareness of coordinated perceptions within an architec-
tonic space. Third, by grounding experience in the audience’s bodily
awareness, they demand a different kind of film spectator and pro-
duce an alternative spectatorial pleasure to the monolithic, ahis-
torical model of ‘‘distracted’’ spectatorship that shapes our under-
standing of the history of cinema. And, fourth, they preserve haptic
knowledge grounded in the body in relationship to vision at mo-
102 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
ments of radical technological transformation when there is a crisis
in visually ascertaining truth.

Theorizing Cinema as Sensory Spectacle

Admitting this alternative cinema into the discussion is important

because cinema may be understood as the paradigmatic modern-
ist experience of the twentieth century and as a significant model
(both historical and theoretical) for knowledge of digital culture.
But in order for cinema to occupy fully this role it must be con-
textualized within more than cinema. Thinking about how spec-
tators experience cinema requires larger interdisciplinary frame-
works that theorize perception and social subjectivity, and that
historicize them beyond the confines of twentieth-century modern-
ism and postmodernism. When N. Katherine Hayles asserts that
postmodernism’s erasure of embodiment is also a feature of lib-
eral humanist subjectivity originating in the Enlightenment, she
provides an important basis from which we can also understand
cinema’s origins not as the mechanical inventions of the apparatus
but as the historically conditioned subjectivity of the movie audi-
ence.4 Hayles receives unlikely support from art historian Jonathan
Crary, who initially seems to contradict her: he argues that modern-
ism does signal a historical break. But because he suggests that mod-
ernism as we understand it is not so much a radical affront to the
past as it is a consequence of shifting regimes of vision and percep-
tion put into place in Enlightenment liberalism, he actually concurs
with Hayles’s historical justification.5
Crary amplifies Hayles’s assertion in important ways because her
definition of subjectivity is based on a Lacanian model of conscious-
ness constituted through language with little regard for the ways
that visual representation exceeds the linguistic structure of spo-
ken language. Crary contends that nineteenth-century visual cul-
ture was founded on the collapse of classical subject-object duality
and on the admittance of sensory activity that severs perception
from any necessary relationship to an exterior world. Furthermore,
Crary claims that at the historical moment in which visual percep-
tion is relocated as fully embodied—the period in the nineteenth
century in which a series of photographic practices replaced the
cultural importance of the camera obscura—the way was paved for
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 103
the historical emergence of autonomous vision understood as a cor-
porealization of sensation. Crary’s latest effort demonstrates how
the interplay between such a localized embodiment and modern-
ism’s shock and effect of alienation results in the physiological map-
ping of vision, making the modernist subject itself the consequence
of narrowly materialized disciplinary effects of attention, fascina-
tion, and even distraction.
Crary’s interest in writing the body back into the field of signi-
fication and his attentiveness to a historical rupture in the fixed
model of classical spectatorship within a Foucauldian historio-
graphic framework—against Hayles’s belief in historical change as
‘‘patterns of overlapping innovation and replication’’—sets up a dia-
lectical relationship in which I wish to consider cinema’s histori-
cal context.6 Cinema depended on reconciling bodily experience
(and cognitive understanding) to the ascendancy of vision as the
privileged self-sufficient source of perceptual knowledge. In other
words, if cinema is—as so many have claimed—the paradigmatic
vision machine of modernism, it is so only by hyperbolizing vision
in relationship to an embodied perceptual spectatorship. Rather
than theorize cinema as a disembodied fantasy, I argue here that
cinema attempts to effect and promise embodiment as a prophy-
lactic against a world of continuing disembodiment. Indeed, this is
the model against which all of cinema should be read (as promising
embodiment in relationship to disembodiment): cinema represents
a complex interplay between embodied forms of subjectivity and
arguments for disembodiment.
I propose a model of cinema that shifts from a technologically de-
terminist cinema as an ongoing effort for improved cinematic real-
ism. In fact, cinema ‘‘at the cutting edge’’ always promises more
than this: it promises to be more than the movies. As one critic has
said about Imax, ‘‘Representation is boring because it has all been
seen before. The actual subject of the film is superfluous. Imax is
about the spectacle of seeing and the technological excess neces-
sary to maintain that spectacle.’’ 7 These films are not visions of
cinema’s future because of what they depict but because of the ways
they represent an instantiation of the apparatus. They continue the
oldest tradition of cinema: like the earliest film exhibitions where
the name of the apparatus, not the names of the films, received bill-
ing on the programs, Hale’s Tours or Imax supercede the name of
any particular movie being shown. In fact, at a number of Imax
104 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
theaters, employees introduce the equipment to the audience be-
fore each screening.8 These techno-spectacles promise to perfect
cinema’s basic drive wherein the apparatus itself is organized, to
quote Francesco Casetti, as a ‘‘snare ready to capture whoever enters
its radius of activity.’’ 9
Movies at the technological edge are not about what is being de-
picted except insofar as they reveal the capacity of the apparatus for
summoning novel points of view, for extending the panoptic gaze,
and for eliciting wonder at the apparatus. It is no wonder then that
beginning with Hale’s Tours travel films have been particularly well
suited for that purpose. Hale’s Tours and its competitors offered vir-
tual travel to remote areas that the railroad had recently opened
up for tourism in the United States, Canada, and Europe (e.g., Nia-
gara Falls, Rocky Mountain and Alpine passes, the Yukon). They
also featured travel to colonial ‘‘frontiers’’ at the height of the age
of industrial empire—China, Ceylon, Japan, Samoa, the Fiji Islands.
Today’s films are likewise dominated by voyages to new frontiers—
pushing the envelope in speed and flight; outer space; lost civiliza-
tions; vanishing rain forests and other endangered ‘‘natural’’ worlds
and species; remote areas of Africa, Asia, and the Arctic; inside the
oceans; even inside the human body. Such travel is always presented
as a cinema of attractions: it offers the transformation of the land-
scape into pure spectacle.
By conquering space not only with the gaze, such spectacles fore-
ground the body itself as a site for sensory experience within a
three-dimensionally contained space. They coordinate the cine-
matic images with a range of other cues: visual and auditory effects
may emanate from different points in the auditorium; atmospheric
or environmental stimuli affect skin responses and sensations; and
there may even be efforts to produce kinesthesia (or actual move-
ment). The degree to which these movies have been historically suc-
cessful at these attempts may be exemplified by a continuous, unin-
tended side effect: historian Raymond Fielding has suggested that
Hale’s Tours incited nausea in some of its participants.10 His remark
echoes modern observations that at Imax shows ‘‘even the slightest
tilt or jiggle [of the projected camera shots] can be felt in the stom-
ach’’ 11 or that an Imax movie about flying is ‘‘so realistic that view-
ers may feel a little airsick.’’ 12 Furthermore, attendants often warn
audiences at the beginning of today’s motion simulation rides and
Imax or Omnimax shows: ‘‘If you start to feel nauseous, simply close
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 105
your eyes.’’ Tourist cinema thus invokes the physical delirium of the
senses, sometimes so much so that it overdoes it. But what is most
important is the degree to which all of these examples bind vision
to a wider range of sensory affect—cinema to a multimedia event.
Across the century, Hale’s Tours, Imax, and modern ridefilms ar-
ticulate a seemingly contradictory process for the spectator: they
attempt to dematerialize the subject’s body through its visual exten-
sion into the cinematic field while they emphasize the spectator’s
body itself as the center of an environment of action and excitement.
They have to sensationalize and smooth over the gaps between the
in-the-body experience (affect) and the out-of-the-body sense of
panoptic projection. Their promise of an embodied spectatorship
seemingly celebrates a heightened interactivity, although such re-
sistance to a pure passive gaze may not generate a truly active spec-
tator. Instead, these films simply require that we frame the history
of moviegoing differently, as a spectatorship of sensory fascination,
a jouissance instead of distraction.

Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World

American entrepreneur-promoter George C. Hale first introduced

Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition of St. Louis. His success led to a more permanent instal-
lation for the 1905 season at the Kansas City Electric Park. With his
partner, Fred Gifford, Hale took out two patents for his ‘‘illusion
railroad ride.’’ 13 They licensed it to others for several years until it
is likely that the increased systematization and consolidation of the
movie industry forced them out of business sometime after 1910.
Hale’s Tours was composed of one, two, or even three theater
cars that each seated 72 ‘‘passengers.’’ The company advertised that
an installation could ‘‘handle as many as 1250 persons per hour
with ease.’’ 14 The movies shown out the front end of the other-
wise closed car generally offered a filmed point of view from the
front or rear of a moving train, producing the illusion of movement
into or away from a scene while mechanical apparatuses and levers
simultaneously vibrated, rocked, and tilted the car. Representative
film titles include: A Trip on the Catskill Mt. Railway; Grand Hotel to
Big Indian; and The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express (all pro-
duced in 1906 by American Mutoscope & Biograph). Steam whistles
106 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
 The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express
(American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1906).

tooted, wheels clattered, and air blew into the travelers’ faces. It
was the first virtual voyage, a multisensory simulation of railway
tourism.
By the end of the 1906 summer season, there were more than five
hundred installations at amusement parks and storefront theaters
in all major U.S. and Canadian cities. Hale’s Tours also opened in
Mexico City, Havana, Melbourne, Paris, London, Berlin, Bremen,
Hamburg, Hong Kong, and Johannesburg.15 They were highly suc-
cessful and often were among a park’s biggest moneymaker conces-
sions.16
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 107
 Imitators and variants that capitalized on Hale and Gifford’s im-
mediate success quickly followed. In New York and Chicago there
were Palace Touring Cars, Hurst’s Touring New York, and Cessna’s
Sightseeing Auto Tours. Another, Citron’s Overland Flyer, differenti-
ated itself merely by offering draw-curtains at the side windows that
could be opened and closed in synchronization with the beginning
and end of the motion and sound effects.17 (Hale and Gifford even-
tually bought out Citron’s patents.)18 Other modes of transporta-
tion varied the formula only slightly. Auto Tours of the World and
Sightseeing in the Principal Cities changed the railroad vehicle to an
automobile and added painted moving panoramas to the sides of
the open car. In addition, they ‘‘stopped the car’’ in order to take
their passengers to an adjacent electric theater showing a variety of
moving pictures.19 White & Langever’s Steamboat Tours of the World
applied the Hale’s Tour concept to water travel. They employed an
actual ferry to transport patrons to a ‘‘marine-illusion boat,’’ where
moving pictures were projected in the front of a stationary boat that
seated up to two hundred people. Mechanical apparatuses rocked
and oscillated the mock boat, rotating paddle wheels beneath the
deck ‘‘simulat[ed] the sound of paddle-wheels employed for propul-
sion,’’ and fans blew breezes in the face of the audience to ‘‘give the
impression that they are traveling.’’ 20 The illusion boat included a
steam calliope as well.
Hruby & Plummer’s Tours and Scenes of the World appropriated all
these concepts but made them more generic for traveling carni-
vals so that they could set up a train, boat, or automobile.21 Hruby’s
rocked and oscillated both the seat bases and the upper portions of
the chairs.22 Other movie-illusion rides simulated hot air balloon
travel, including one patented in 1906 by Pittsburgh film manufac-
turer Sigmund Lubin.23
A Trip to California over Land and Sea, however, may have been the
most ingenious of the imitators. It combined railway and marine
illusion travel. It offered first the fantasy of a cross-country rail jour-
ney to California, followed by the sensation of the car being dropped
into the water to turn the vehicle into a boat for travel down the
California coast. Its advertisement proclaimed that the effect was
‘‘the car being instantaneously transformed into a beautiful vessel
which gives you a boat ride along the coast, the performance ending
with a sensational climax (a Naval Battle and Storm at Sea).’’ 24
Hale’s Tours films typically featured the landscape as the train
108 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
picked up speed so that the details accelerating into the foreground
were the featured information. The films employed both editing
and camera movements but usually only after presenting an ex-
tended shot (often one to two minutes or longer in a film seven to
eight minutes in length) organized by the locomotion of the cam-
era. The initial effect then was a continuous flow of objects rushing
toward the camera. The camera, mounted at a slightly tipped angle,
showed the tracks in the foreground as parallel lines that converge
at the horizon, an important indicator of perspectival depth. Tele-
phone poles, bridges, tunnels, and other environmental markers in
the frame also marked continuous flow according to the lines of per-
spective. Passing through tunnels effected a particularly dramatic
difference of darkness/light, no image/moving image, and inter-
ruption/flow. The repetition of all these elements contributed to an
overall impression that the perceptual experience of camera motion
is a re-creation of the flow of the environment.
Hale’s Tours, however, did not have to maintain a strict cowcatcher
point of view to get across its sensations. The emphasis on flow
and perspective of travel was frequently broken in order to display
dramatic incidents and bits of social mingling between men and
women, different classes, farmers and urbanites, train employees
and civilians, ordinary citizens and outlaws. Changes of locale oc-
curred abruptly through editing, moving the camera position, or
abandoning altogether the perspective from the front or rear of the
train. When this happened, the film usually expanded its travel for-
mat to offer views of accompanying tourist attractions or to stretch
the travelogue with comic or dramatic scenes. A 1906 advertisement
in the New York Clipper for Hale’s Tours listed five ‘‘humorous rail-
way scenes’’ that could be included in Hale’s Tours programs.25 Trip
Through the Black Hills (Selig Polyscope, 1907) covered ‘‘the difficul-
ties of trying to dress in a Pullman berth.’’ 26 In addition, the early
film classic The Great Train Robbery (Edison Manufacturing Com-
pany, 1903) played in Hale’s Tours cars.
It was not unusual for the films to cut regularly to the interior of a
railroad car, producing a ‘‘mirror image’’ of the social space in which
the ridefilm patron was seated. These films were thus not purely
travelogues but also addressed the social relations and expectations
connected with the experience of travel. They suggest that what was
fundamental to the ridefilm was not merely the sight of the ‘‘destina-
tion’’ and the sensation of immersion in it, but the experience—both
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 109
 Grand Hotel to Big Indian
(American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1906).

physical and social—of being in that place. Thus, Hale’s Tours com-
modified the logic of a new experience—the inscription of being of
the world.
Early accounts of these ridefilms are reminiscent of the reception
of the earliest Lumiere films: ‘‘The illusion was so good that . . .
members of the audience frequently yelled at pedestrians to get out
of the way or be run down.’’ 27 It is noteworthy that in the latter
report spectators do not jump out of the way (as they did in the
reports about Lumiere film showings) because they do not under-
stand things coming at them inasmuch as they understand them-
110 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
selves moving forward; they instead yell at onscreen pedestrians to
get out of the way. As film historian Noel Burch summarized: ‘‘These
spectators . . . were already in another world than those who, ten
years earlier, had jumped up in terror at the filmed arrival of a train
in a station: [they] . . . are masters of the situation, they are ready
to go through the peephole.’’ 28 But Burch makes the mistake of think-
ing that Hale’s Tours depended entirely on its capacity to effect this
visual, out-of-body projection into the diegesis. He fails to see that
these illusion rides were always more than movies; they were about
a physiological and psychological experience associated with travel.
Hale’s Tours riders themselves may have recognized this element.
One reporter describes a rider: ‘‘One demented fellow even kept
coming back to the same show, day after day. Sooner or later, he fig-
ured, the engineer would make a mistake and he would get to see a
train wreck.’’ 29 The ‘‘demented fellow,’’ ostensibly a victim of hyper-
realism, may have actually recognized the delicious terror of Hale’s
Tours better than Burch, because it is precisely the anticipation of
disaster that provides the thrill at the heart of Hale’s Tours and all
other ridefilms. The new mode of railway travel that Hale’s Tours
worked so hard to simulate was not necessarily understood by its
public as the simple, safe technology we assume it to be today. Wolf-
gang Schivelbusch has shown that railroad passengers generally felt
ambivalent about train travel and that, despite their thrill at being
part of a ‘‘projectile shot through space and time,’’ passengers also
had an ‘‘ever-present fear of a potential disaster.’’ 30 The turn-of-the-
century press certainly thrived on stories of streetcar and railway
disasters and death.31 Indeed, Lynne Kirby persuasively argues that
Hale’s Tours best unified ‘‘the perceptual overlap between the rail-
road and the cinema’’ and that the ‘‘imagination of disaster’’ repre-
sented the experience of both railway traveler and moviegoer.32 The
fantasy of seeing technology go out of control and the pleasure in
the resulting terror is integral to the spectatorial process.
Illusion ride manufacturers understood this fact. Their adver-
tisements privileged the motion effects and the physical sensation
of travel. (Their patent applications, after all, asked to cover the
motion effects and the installation rather than the projectors and
screens, which were already patented to other companies.) They re-
peatedly emphasized the synchronization of visual, kinesthetic, and
sound effects as the unique property of the apparatus. More than
what was viewed out of the window, the cognitive convergence of
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 111
sensory information provided the basis for the illusion that ‘‘you are
really there.’’
The content of Hale’s Tours was important for its contribution to
the overall effect of the spectator made over into a traveler, and it
did not require a visual point-of-view literalism for the realism of
the experience. What was fundamental to the illusion ride was not
merely the sight of the ‘‘destination’’ but the sensation of visual im-
mersion, because vision was linked to the physical and social ex-
perience of being in that place—a place that extended the notion of
the phantasmagoric space of cinema from the screen to the theater
itself.

Imax

Imax is a Toronto-based international corporation that, since 1970,

has made camera and projection systems that accommodate an ex-
ceptionally large screen format by turning standard 70mm film
stock on its side.33 Imax Corporation designs special viewing spaces
and produces films using Imax cameras for exclusive distribution to
Imax theaters (the name Imax is derived from ‘‘maximum image’’).
There are currently some 183 Imax and Omnimax theaters world-
wide, whose combined attendance in 1995 was sixty million peo-
ple.34 While theater specifications may vary, they generally feature
a wide screen that is five to eight stories tall, state-of-the-art digi-
tal sound systems that allow sound and music to emanate from
and even travel across different points in the auditorium, laser light
effects, and seats steeply banked in relationship to the screen. They
may also include three-dimensional imaging systems (at least forty
theaters have this capacity) or more futuristic systems such as that
at Poitiers, where a transparent floor is a window to a second screen
that runs synchronously with the regular forward or surround
screen.35
Although they play to a much smaller market than does stan-
dard Hollywood fare, Imax films have been remarkably successful.
To Fly (1976), one of the earliest Imax films, made over $150 mil-
lion and is the highest-grossing documentary ever produced. An-
other film, Everest, on its initial release in 1998 was the fifteenth
highest-grossing film in North America, despite the fact that it only
played in thirty-two theaters.36 Sony Imax theater in New York City,
112 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
opened in 1994, has regularly been the highest-grossing screen in
the United States, and Imax films overall have played to more than
510 million people since 1970.37
Imax films feature swooping, sailing, and soaring shots taken from
a variety of vehicles in flight. One Imax film director explains, ‘‘[We
applied] camera movement as much as we possibly could. This
would help us move away from just another series of pretty post-
cards and also would allow for a more subjective experience . . .
Slight perspective changes would bring the audience more of a feel-
ing of being there . . . Camera movement is particularly necessary
and effective.’’ 38 Film scholar Charles Acland describes it similarly:
‘‘imax films soar. Especially through the simulation of motion, they
encourage a momentary joy in being placed in a space shuttle, on a
scuba dive, or on the wing of a fighter jet.’’ 39 Imax has made movies
about outer space, complete with views of the earth taken by as-
tronauts on their expeditions (e.g., Hail Columbia, 1982; The Dream
Is Alive, 1985; Blue Planet, 1990; Cosmic Voyage, 1996; Mission to Mir,
1997); about ecology and the balance of nature, complete with sub-
jective views of swinging through the treetops or flying off a moun-
tain (e.g., North of Superior, 1971; Skyward, 1985; Mountain Gorilla,
1991; Survival Island, 1996; Africa’s Elephant Kingdom, 1998); about
the oceans and their inhabitants (e.g., Nomads of the Deep, 1979; The
Deepest Garden, 1988; Titanica, 1992; Into the Deep, 1995); and about
flight and speed (e.g., Silent Sky, 1977; On the Wing, 1986; Race the
Wind, 1989).40
Like Burch’s description of ‘‘go[ing] through the peephole,’’ adver-
tisements for Cinerama, and Trumbull’s claim of total immersion,
Imax asserts its capacity to ‘‘put you in the picture.’’ Charles Acland
notes that ‘‘the filmic representation is less central than the effort to
create the sensation that the screen has disappeared, that it is truly
a window and that the spectator sits right in the image.’’ 41 But the
experience of total involvement is more accurately a set of coordi-
nated sensations, a program for which the models of cinema and
spectatorship by Acland, Burch, and Trumbull are inadequate.
Paul Virilio comes close to the experience when he describes his
encounter with Imax as the ‘‘fusion/confusion of camera, projec-
tion system and auditorium.’’ 42 He searches for an appropriate cine-
matic model but can only single out one lexiconic element of early
cinema—the experience of the tracking shot. His models of cinema
are equally inadequate for the task of understanding Imax’s ‘‘logis-
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 113
tics of perception which subjugate auditorium/stage and spectacle
. . . to its passengers of the moment, travelers in a cinematographic
hemisphere’’ (173). His claim that the tracking shot is the progenitor
of Imax’s status as a static audio-visual vehicle is true insofar as it is
also the semiotic foundation for Hale’s Tours. Had he known about
Hale’s Tours, he would have found a model that fully exemplifies the
cinema space reconfigured as an audio-visual vehicle, the simula-
tion of motion, and the reconstruction of spectatorship as coordi-
nated sensory involvement. Virilio does recognize, however, that
what is at stake is not merely visual projection into the screen space
but a reconfiguration of spectatorial presence to simulate physical
sensations of travel.
One might well argue that such films as Alamo—Price of Freedom
(1988), Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets (1984), Behold Hawaii (1983),
Yellowstone (1994), and Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic (1987)
are so good at replicating the sense of real travel while transcend-
ing it with a fantasy of spatial mastery that they have become the
ideal tourist simulation—a packaged replacement for the inconve-
niences and imperfections of travel while fulfilling tourist desires.
The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and Niagara Falls
all have Imax theaters on site that feature the actual park in a com-
pressed, idealized, physically intensified adventure that surpasses
direct experiences usually permeated by a range of physical dis-
comforts, the psychological frustrations of competing tourists and
lengthy waits, and the restrictions of slow exposure, incomplete-
ness, or inaccessibility to all the reaches of the park or site.
The degree to which these tourist narratives have become neces-
sary substitutes for our memories of lived experience is best illus-
trated not by any one example from these tourist centers but by the
experience of a group of travelers least likely to substitute a movie—
albeit one that preserves haptic knowledge in the body—for their
actual travel: the American astronauts. When several astronauts at-
tended a special screening of the Imax movie Destiny in Space, they
reported that it changed their experience of their own space mis-
sion: ‘‘The Imax experience was so close to what it was like for them
in space. They said that in many respects it was actually better, be-
cause they didn’t have the restricted view of being in their helmet.
They could sort of sit back and experience the gestalt of the entire
scene. They said that the Imax experience was replacing their own
real memories of what it had been like in space.’’ 43
114 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
 Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets
(Douglas Memmott and Kieth Merrill, producers; 1984).

Blue Planet
(Graeme Ferguson, producer; 1990).
 Modern Motion Simulation Rides

Modern motion simulation rides date from 1986, the year that
Douglas Trumbull installed Tour of the Universe at Toronto’s cn
Tower. His tourist attraction was a simulated space adventure that
featured Trumbull’s high-speed Showscan process of 70mm film
cinematography. It inspired Star Tours, the Disney and Lucasfilm
collaboration the following year. Star Tours (eventually installed at
all Disney theme parks) became the industry model. Like Tour of
the Universe, Star Tours was designed to show only one film and used
the theater’s architecture as well as a lobby ‘‘preshow’’ to activate
and advance the narrative. Since then, Disney has added a second
motion simulation ride at its Epcot Center in Orlando (Body Wars,
1989), a Fantastic Voyage-like journey inside a human body where
something goes wrong and the body becomes a cosmic force that
wreaks havoc on the little ship. A handful of other companies supply
motion simulation rides to Disney’s park competitors, to shopping
mall theaters, to hotels, and to other entertainment zones, and the
largest companies use their own integrated systems: Imax Corpo-
ration, Iwerks Entertainment, and Showscan.44
In 1993, Trumbull’s In Search of the Obelisk (part of a theatrical
trilogy titled Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid ) at the Hotel Luxor in Las
Vegas marked the maturation of modern ridefilms. Designed and
installed as part of the hotel’s overall conception, it demonstrates
the degree to which a motion simulation theater has become a stan-
dard feature for Las Vegas hotels and entertainment complexes. In
Search of the Obelisk relies on the surrounding narrative associations
of the hotel’s pyramid structure and a video preshow to launch a fic-
tional rescue mission through time into a lost civilization. The film
itself is a combination of live action, computer-generated imagery,
matte models, and other cinematic special effects: it results in a ver-
tiginous diegesis that spins around and upside down so much that
it eludes any references to north, east, west, or southerly directions.
The only onscreen spatial anchor is the narrative’s ‘‘pilot,’’ who ap-
pears in the center onscreen and speaks over his shoulder to the
audience/passengers ‘‘behind him.’’
While some ridefilms—like those at Disney parks, the Hotel Luxor,
Universal Studios, or Busch Gardens—are fixed (one film only) so
that they can coordinate the setting and the film, most motion simu-
lation rides change films on a regular basis and are thus housed in
116 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
more generic movie theaters, such as Iwerks’s Turbo Ride Theaters.
These ridefilms depend on computer technologies not simply for
the movies’ special effects but for software-driven movie products
that can simultaneously control and synchronize the hydraulics of
the seats. This, in turn, allows theater owners to change the bill of
fare regularly and without the expense of continuously adapting the
moviehouse for each new attraction.
Each of the major companies that builds such generic ridefilm the-
aters also produces films, but each also relies for a regular supply of
films from independent production companies. These theaters offer
a ‘‘preshow’’ only to the extent that video monitors displayed in the
lobby and halls outside plain, boxlike auditoriums repetitively loop
narrative prologues while the audience waits to enter the theater.
Just a small sample of titles includes: Alpine Race (Showscan, 1991),
Space Race (Showscan, 1991), Sub-Oceanic Shuttle (Iwerks Enter-
tainment, 1991), Devil’s Mine Ride (Showscan, 1993), Asteroid Adven-
ture (Imax Corporation, 1993), River Runners (Omni Films Inter-
national, 1993), Robo Cop: The Ride (Iwerks Entertainment, 1993),
Seafari (Rhythm and Hues, Inc., 1994), Dino Island (Iwerks Enter-
tainment, 1995), Funhouse Express (Imax Ridefilm, 1995), Red Rock
Run (Iwerks Entertainment, 1996), Smash Factory (Midland Produc-
tions, 1996), Days of Thunder (Iwerks Entertainment, 1996), Secrets
of the Lost Temple (Iwerks Entertainment, 1997), and Aliens: Ride at
the Speed of Fright (Iwerks Entertainment, 1997).
Unlike Hales Tours, which emphasized picturesque travel, topo-
graphical landmarks, and tourist travel experiences, the indepen-
dent ridefilms are dominated by fantasy travel that features the
scenery of outer space, futuristic cities, and lost civilizations (espe-
cially inside mountains, pyramids, or mines), (although there are
also representations of present-day automobile races, train pano-
ramas, and amusement park views). Ridefilms rely on the same
cinematic conventions as Hale’s Tours and Imax, in effect persuad-
ing spectators to perceive their bodies as hurtling forward through
time and space because they visually perceive a flow of environmen-
tal motion toward them. Most often, these visual cues consist of
passing vehicles or features of the landscape represented in fore-
shortened animation and of colors rendered by computer-generated
imagery that swirl and change. These cinematic light shows are
not only indirect successors to Cinerama and other widescreen spe-
cial effects but also are direct heirs to Douglas Trumbull’s famous
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 117
‘‘Stargate Corridor’’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and
owe their signification of moving forward in interplanetary space
as much to the precedent of that film’s representation of strobo-
scopic colored lights as to more conventional graphic indicators of
perspectival foreshortening and depth.
Modern motion simulation rides not only offer physically jolting
movements synchronized to the onscreen action, but they repeat-
edly inscribe technology run amuck. Vehicles that are out of con-
trol motivate the wild ride and dominate the field. The vehicles
might be racecars, airplanes, spaceships, submarines, or mine carts
and trains. Two producers of animated ridefilms say that prac-
tically all of the narratives of dangerous adventure depend on a
small number of technological and mechanical crises—a bad land-
ing, ‘‘something’s wrong with our ship,’’ ‘‘Oops! Wrong direction!’’
or an encounter with an evil creature—which may occur singly or
in combination.45 For example, Star Tours (1987) features an inter-
planetary shuttle trip with Star Wars androids who head the wrong
way, then try to hide from and avoid enemy ships, and finally crash
land the vehicle. The popular Back to the Future—The Ride (Douglas
Trumbull, Berkshire Ridefilm, 1991), which plays at the Universal
Studios theme parks in California and Florida, takes its inspiration
from the Hollywood film after which it is named. It advances a
simple plot using the movie’s characters and narrative premise in
order to combine outer space flight, time travel, the reckless pursuit
of a villain, problems with the ship’s mechanical systems, and the
requisite bumpy ride that frequently and narrowly averts disaster.
Narrativization is an equally important marker of realism in the
modern simulation rides, although it is employed differently than
in Hale’s Tours. This is interesting in light of the fact that the shift
effected by the films in Hale’s Tours was a novel one, a way of intro-
ducing narrative strategies to the cinema, whereas narrativization in
today’s ridefilms relies on a conservation of Hollywood’s dominant
strategy.
For example, Secrets of the Lost Temple (Iwerks Entertainment,
1997) offers a cinematically conventional exposition—all in third-
person point of view—of a teenage boy finding a book on the floor of
a mausoleumlike library. Opening the mysterious book, he is trans-
ported to another dimension in a blinding flash of light and demate-
rialization. Certainly, the prologue’s purpose is not only to explain

118 LAUREN RABINOVITZ

the narrative premise but also to offer up a figure for identifica-
tion in the most traditional syntax of Hollywood cinema. At this
point, the ridefilm begins and, as the audience is first lifted by the
hydraulics and then dropped, the boy onscreen simultaneously ex-
periences a fall to the floor in front of an ‘‘Indiana Jones’’ adventurer
look-alike. The two converse and, as they are about to be whisked
away on a raft down the waterways and chutes of the lost temple,
the film switches to the boy’s subjective point of view. Throughout
the rest of their ensuing wild ride, the film steadfastly maintains the
boy’s point of view as the audience is asked to assume his place. At
the conclusion of their journey the boy finds himself back in the
library, and the film reveals this reentry with a return to the third-
person point of view. The shift is synchronized with the grinding to
a halt of motion shocks and effects. The movie effects narrative clo-
sure through the boy’s discovery that he is clutching his hero’s bat-
tered fedora (an exact duplicate of the one worn by Indiana Jones in
the Steven Spielberg movies): he doffs the beloved hat and jauntily
departs.
This return to a conventional movie ‘‘ending’’ in the context of
the ridefilm is most jarring, however, in its shattering of a subjec-
tive position. The return to a third-person point of view occurs with
the loss of motion and effects. Ride manufacturer and movie direc-
tor Trumbull contrasts these two points of view: he calls the tra-
ditional cinematic one of ‘‘non-participating voyeurism’’ and the
subjective point of view coordinated with kinesthetic effects ‘‘inva-
sive.’’ 46 Trumbull’s binary opposition of spectator experience con-
flicts with his initial hype of total immersion to describe more accu-
rately that what is important about this cinema is that it acts on
the spectator’s body rather than providing a peephole into which
the spectator can dematerialize. In short, this cinema invades the
body rather than inviting consciousness to leave behind the body
and enter into the movie.
In this regard, today’s ridefilms function differently than did Hale’s
Tours, which worked to inscribe its audiences into an idealized novel
position of authoritative invisibility and surveillance. Toward this
end, permanent installations improve on ridefilm experiences like
Secrets of the Lost Temple by diffusing lines of demarcation between
embodiment, character identification, and a dematerialized gaze
and thus more gradually moving their audiences back and forth be-

MORE THAN THE MOVIES 119

tween them. Star Tours, Back to the Future, Body Wars, and other per-
manent installations extend the narrative to the social spaces of the
building beyond the movie theater.
The lobbies outside the movie auditoriums especially carry an im-
portant atmospheric weight, providing a preparatory zone for the
ride that prefigures the spectatorial processes inside the audito-
rium. Star Tours, for example, really begins with one’s entrance into
the waiting lanes in the lobby, an architectural space whimsically
presented as a futuristic space airport. The lobby features a glassed-
in control tower visible from the floor in which animatrons of the
android characters in Star Wars go about their business. An anima-
tron of the character c3po greets visitors with a running commen-
tary. The audience is already physically immersed in an interactive
spectacle even though its role, similar to that of the movie spectator,
is simply to move forward in the proper lane and to react without
any possibility of altering the narrative that envelops the audience.
At amusement parks, in particular, such an organization of space
is both a pragmatic way of controlling noisy crowds and an effec-
tive means for maintaining efficient traffic circulation. But it also
encourages rowdy crowds to behave like the distracted individuals
of idealized mass movie audiences, who respond passively more to
the stimuli of the spectacle than to each other.
More than wild narratives that reposition spectators, rides like
Star Tours and Secrets of the Lost Temple also completely recover the
gap between the index and the referent. It is not accidental that
these movie-themed ridefilms appear more realistic to the rides’
patrons than do the roller coasters, runaway trains, race cars, and
bobsleds that are also the subjects of ridefilms. In movie-themed
films, the referent is not a landscape to which the spectator might in
reality have physical access but is a movie instead. In other words,
the space landscape of Star Tours need not be measured against an
ideal referent that it can never equal but only approximate because
it is its own referent. The image of the landscape is that which it
refers to—the cinematic space of Star Wars; it is, after all, a movie
of a movie. As one computer artist put it: while it may be diffi-
cult for computer animation to look like the real world, it is easy
for computer-generated imagery to look like computer-generated
images.47 These movie- or game-themed rides close the gap between
index and referent, achieving a sublime realism that is the subject
of postmodern fantasy, of being not so much in outer space as in,
120 LAUREN RABINOVITZ
more properly, a well-loved movie or video game. Even the New York
Times acknowledges this particular ridefilm effect: ‘‘It’s like being
inside, not just at, the movies.’’ 48

Conclusion

At both the beginning and now ostensibly at the ‘‘end’’ of cinema,

a popular tourist cinema responds to dramatic technological shifts.
Hale’s Tours registered the newness of cinema’s autonomization of
vision and the process of its normalization by grafting the process
itself onto a bodily sensation of motion and coordinating it with
synchronized sound effects; it retained the experiential across the
site of the body. Almost one hundred years later, Imax and motion
simulation rides similarly compensate for the ‘‘threat’’ of digital
imagery, a threat that stems less from the fact of digital simulation
of the photographic than from the digital’s tendency to undermine
the subject’s ability to determine whether or not an image has a real-
world referent—whether it is a truthful or faithful image.
Even a sophisticated film critic responded to this point after his
experience on a motion simulation ride. Amos Vogel, writing in the
late 1950s, states: ‘‘The total impression [is] so vivid as to approach
the actual experience. The jury is stumped: Has film left behind the
‘illusion of art’ and become reality itself?’’ 49 Vogel’s words demon-
strate the degree to which tourist cinema has always granted some-
thing similar to enthusiasts and skeptics alike. Alternative tourist
cinema is always about the confusion of visual knowledge in the
face of too many visual stimuli, and it is even about certainty over
the image’s truthfulness—its referentiality. Tourist cinema makes
vision coherent by asserting its certitude in relationship to one’s
bodily experience of multiple sensations. Simulation rides rectify
and compensate for the loss of a unified, embodied subjectivity by
literally grounding a subject position in all its material and sensory
capacities. The rides initially made possible a modernist subject
position of visual omnipotence and the authority of panoptic sur-
veillance because they registered them as bodily knowledge. Today,
the spectacles of movie simulation nostalgically address their spec-
tators as diegetic movie characters, who become for the moment
unified subjects because they synthesize living inside of movies with
the locatedness of living inside of their own bodies. They chronicle
MORE THAN THE MOVIES 121
neither the realization of Hayle’s nightmare of posthumanity nor
her dream of a technologically powered feminist utopia, but rather
the social reconstruction of memory so that retrospection and his-
tory—as an ongoing dialogue between embodiment and disembodi-
ment—conforms to and transforms contemporary ideology.

Notes

1 See Emmanuelle Toulet, ‘‘Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris

1900,’’ Persistence of Vision 9 (1991): 10–36.
2 For an introduction to the relationship between gunnery, mili-
tary training, and cinema’s development, see Paul Virilio, War and
Cinema (London: Verso, 1986).
3 Although many people have commented on the ‘‘cinema of at-
tractions,’’ the seminal essay for defining this mode is Tom Gun-
ning’s ‘‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde,’’ in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas
Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 57–58.
4 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1999), 4.
5 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: mit Press,
1999), chapter 1.
6 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 15.
7 Charles R. Acland, ‘‘imax in Canadian Cinema: Geographic Trans-
formation and Discourses of Nationhood,’’ Studies in Cultures, Orga-
nizations, and Societies 3 (1997): 304.
8 Ibid. I have also experienced this introduction at both the Denver
Museum of Natural History and the Langley Theater at the National
Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. More recently, the Den-
ver museum offers a preshow slide show that describes in hyperbolic
language the equipment components.
9 Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,
trans. Nell Andrew and Charles O’Brien (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 8–9.
10 Raymond Fielding, ‘‘Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Mo-
tion Picture,’’ in Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983), 129.
11 Charles Acland, ‘‘imax Technology and the Tourist Gaze,’’ Cultural
Studies 12, no. 3 (1998): 42.
12 Richard Saul Wurman, Washington D.C. Access (New York: Harper-
Perennial, 1998), 59.
13 For descriptions of Hale and Gifford’s patents of an amusement de-

122 LAUREN RABINOVITZ

 vice (patent no. 767,281) and a pleasure-railway (patent no. 800,100),
see The Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, vol. 111 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Publications, August 1904), 1577, and
vol. 118 (September 1905), 788–789. In 1906, Hale and Gifford sold
the rights east of Pittsburgh to William A. Brady of New York and
Edward B. Grossmann of Chicago for $50,000 (Billboard, 27 Janu-
ary 1906, 20). They sold the southern states rights to Wells, Dunne
& Harlan of New York; additional licenses to C. W. Parker Co. of
Abilene, Kansas, for traveling carnival companies; and the Pacific
Northwest states rights to a group of men who incorporated as ‘‘The
Northwest Hale’s Tourist Amusement Company’’ in Portland, Ore-
gon.
14 Hale & Gifford, advertisement, Billboard, 17 February 1906, 19.
15 Billboard, 3 February 1906, 20.
16 The Billboard reported that both Hale’s Tours and the Trolley Tours
‘‘raised the standard of attractions’’ at amusement parks and were
enjoying ‘‘great popularity’’ (‘‘Parks,’’ Billboard, 9 June 1906, 24). And
as early as its initial 1906 season, Hale’s Tours and its competitors
became top-grossing popular concessions across the United States.
See, for example, ‘‘Duluth’s New Summer Park,’’ Billboard, 28 July
1906, 28. At Riverview Park in Chicago, the nation’s largest and
best-attended amusement park, Hale’s Tours was the fifth biggest
moneymaker of the fifty concessions there, earning $18,000 for the
season. It was topped only by the Igorotte Village ($40,000), the
Kansas Cyclone roller coaster ($28,000), the Figure 8 roller coaster
($35,000), Rollin’s animal show and ostrich farm ($26,000), and the
dance pavilion ($22,000). It even surpassed the revenues from the
park’s other moving picture venue, the Electric Theatre, which took
in $16,000 for the year (‘‘Riverview,’’ Billboard, 1 December 1906, 28).
17 Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, vol. 126 (January–
February 1907), 3292.
18 Hale’s Tours, advertisement, Billboard, 18 May 1907, 29.
19 Billboard, 27 January 1906, 23. Their advertisement said: ‘‘The illu-
sion of seeing the various countries and cities from an automobile
is produced by a panorama of moving scenes attached to the wall
beside the Sightseeing Auto upon which are seated the ‘Sightseers,’
and the throwing upon a screen in front of the Sightseeing Auto the
moving pictures which were taken from a moving automobile, by
this company, and which are the property of the Sightseeing Auto
Co. By an original and clever idea the ‘Sightseers’ are given a side trip
which enables them to view a variety of moving pictures, thus taking
away from the patrons of the Sightseeing Autos that ‘tired feeling’
which is produced by a repetition of the same kind and character of
moving pictures they would be forced to witness should they always
remain on the auto’’ (Billboard, 27 January 1906, 23).

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20 White & Langever’s Steamboat Tours of the World, advertisement, Bill-
board, 22 September 1906, 44. See also patent no. 828,791, Official
Gazette of the United States Patent Office, vol. 126 (July–August 1906),
2246–47.
21 This concept was advertised as follows: ‘‘A moving picture show in a
knock-down portable canvas car, boat, vehicle or ordinary tent that
can be easily set up, quickly pulled down, readily transported, yet
mechanically arranged that the bell, the whistle, and the swing of
a moving train, boat or vehicle is produced. Trips or views can be
constantly changed to suit your fancy, scenes of any railroad vehicle
or boat ride, on land or water, produced with full sensation of the
ride, together with ‘Sightseers’ sightseeing side trips covering Prin-
cipal Cities of the world’’ (Hruby & Plummer’s Tours and Scenes of the
World, advertisement, Billboard, 3 March 1906, 25).
22 Patent no. 838,137, Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office,
vol. 125 (December 1906), 1832–33.
23 Patent no. 874,169, The Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office,
vol. 131 (December 1907), 1846.
24 A Trip to California Over Land and Sea, advertisement, Billboard,
31 March 1906, 31, and 26 May 1906, 31.
25 Edison Manufacturing Company, advertisement, New York Clipper,
28 April 1906.
26 Raymond Fielding, ‘‘Hale’s Tours,’’ 128.
27 E. C. Thomas, ‘‘Vancouver, B.C. Started with ‘Hale’s Tours,’ ’’ Moving
Picture World (15 July 1916): 373.
28 Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 39. Emphasis added.
29 Thomas, ‘‘Vancouver, B.C. Started with ‘Hale’s Tours,’ ’’ 373.
30 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the
Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen, 1977),
13–131.
31 Ibid.
32 Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1997), 57.
33 Using multiple large-scale screens in three separate viewing spaces;
multiple sound systems; as many as 288 speakers; mirrors and flash-
ing lights; and altered theater viewing spaces, the filmmakers ex-
tended the idea of cinematic innovation to the very listening and
viewing conditions. Their idea was a large-scale version of what
Gene Youngblood has labeled ‘‘expanded cinema,’’ a type of experi-
mental cinema then in vogue throughout North America that tried
to push back the boundaries of cinema by celebrating the hallucina-
tory aspect of cinema in all its material and viewing conditions (see
Acland, ‘‘imax in Canadian Cinema,’’ 291).
34 There are eighteen theaters in Canada, nineteen in Japan, eighty-

124 LAUREN RABINOVITZ

 five in the United States, eight in Mexico, seven in Australia, eight
in France, eight in Germany, four in South Korea, four in Taiwan,
four in Spain, two in Great Britain, two in the Netherlands, and
one each in Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, Den-
mark, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, China, Indonesia, the Philip-
pines, Singapore, and Thailand (Imax Web site, 10 March 1999, http:
//www.imax.com/theatres/.
35 Ibid.
36 ‘‘Imax Max,’’ Forbes 168 (1 June 1998): 84.
37 William C. Symonds, ‘‘Now Showing in Imax: Money!’’ Business
Week (31 March 1997): 80.
38 American Cinematographer (December 1985): 75, 78.
39 Acland, ‘‘imax in Canadian Cinema,’’ 435.
40 For descriptions of all current Imax films, see the Imax Web site,
http://www.imax.com/films/.
41 Acland, ‘‘imax in Canadian Cinema,’’ 290.
42 Paul Virilio, ‘‘Cataract Surgery: Cinema in the Year 2000,’’ in Alien
Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed.
Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990), 173.
43 Bob Fisher and Marji Rhea, ‘‘Interview: Doug Trumbull and Richard
Yuricich, ASC,’’ American Cinematographer 75 (August 1994): 66.
44 Because the name ‘‘Iwerks’’ is well known—Ub Iwerks (1901–1971)
was Walt Disney’s original partner, an animator, and a technical
genius—it is worth noting the use of the name for this company.
Iwerks Entertainment, Inc. was started in 1986 by two former Disney
employees, one of whom is Don Iwerks, son of Ib (see http://www.
iwerks.com/.
45 Fitz-Edward Otis, Omni Film International vice president of sales,
as quoted in Debra Kaufman, ‘‘One Wild Ride: Motion-Simulation
Market Picks up Speed,’’ In Motion (October 1993): 27.
46 Trumbull, quoted in Fisher and Marji, ‘‘Interview,’’ 59.
47 Judith Rubin, ‘‘Something’s Wrong with Our Ship: Animated
Motion-Simulator Films in Theme Parks,’’ Animation World 1, no. 8
(November 1996): http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.8/articles/
rubin1.8.htm/.
48 New York Times, quoted in Entertainment Design Workshop Web
site, 1 March 1998, http://www.edesignw.com/.
49 Amos Vogel, ‘‘The Angry Young Film Makers,’’ Evergreen Review 2
(1958): 175.

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