the LuDiC aRChive

MEREDITH A. BAK

The Work of Playing with

Optical Toys
 Within theories of education and human development, play consti-

tutes a means of discovery—a way of learning. This valence of play,

and its relative importance, is peculiarly associated with children

and childhood. It often dissipates in relation to adult endeavors, where work is seen to

replace play, the latter now understood to be preparatory activity for the former. Although

a similar association between play and innovation energizes some commercial sectors,

notably industries such as technology and design, this mind-set rarely characterizes

scholarly activity, which is often celebrated for its rigor or systematic nature. However,

some kinds of scholarly inquiry, especially within the humanities, where epistemological

processes and interpretive methods must flexibly adapt to the subject matter and critical

questions raised, necessitate more experimental and experiential approaches. In what

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follows, I contend that there is fruitful application for play within the scholarly context,
particularly in the archival study of historic toys and the children who played with them.
Optical toys such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and prax-
inoscope were in wide circulation on both sides of the Atlantic for the majority of the
nineteenth century, a time when the worlds of labor and leisure were becoming sharply
defined in opposition to one another within the adult workforce. This division simulta-
neously collapsed in the domain of middle-class childhood, embodied by the emergent
concept of rational recreation, or the idea that particular kinds of play and playthings
might also be educational and thus productive for the child’s future self. Optical toys,
like other playthings, such as kindergarten learning materials, served the dual purpose
of education and entertainment. While primarily studied in relation to their technological
and intellectual property ties to the cinema, my research instead considers optical toys
in relationship to nineteenth-century children and childhood and their role in positioning
children as media makers and spectators.
The following is an experiential account of my archival research across sev-
eral repositories, in which I argue for play as a key methodology in the archival study
of pre-cinema apparatus.1 I suggest that play is not solely an act but also an attitude,
mind-set, or approach that facilitates productive encounters and discoveries within the
archival context. Extending previous scholarship, this account first demonstrates how
play both as a conceptual category and as a methodological approach addresses an
ethical dimension of this research by enabling a better understanding of these devices
as open ended in the hands of their users, countering a technologically determinist or
overly theoretical interpretation. Second, embracing the notion of play in the archive
enables the researcher to experience a fuller range of interactions with the objects. For
too long, optical toys have been examined primarily within the context of pre-cinema
or reduced to a discussion of how they work. I argue that the researcher who wishes
to explore these devices’ roles in nineteenth-century visual culture should take into
consideration a broader range of experiences, such as their acquisition as commercial
products and the contexts in which they were used. A deeper understanding is thus gained
through the affective experience of play, particularly with these toys that, themselves,
“played” with the senses. These sensations cannot be felt in written accounts or digitized
versions. Finally, I discuss the negotiation between preservation and access within the
archival setting in defense of continued opportunities for hands-on work with artifacts
in a time of increasing digitization.
I learned firsthand the importance of play in the study of these devices during
my time working in the Education Department at the Museum of the Moving Image in
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Figure 1. Optical toys on display

in the Behind the Screen
New York, where I led daily gallery-based programs for
exhibition at Museum of the
K–12 students. Near the beginning of the museum’s Moving Image, Queens, New
York. Photograph by the author.
core exhibition, Behind the Screen, a display features
a thaumatrope, a phenakistoscope, and a zoetrope. These toys, developed in the 1820s
and 1830s, feature short animated sequences (or, in the case of the thaumatrope,
two superimposed images) and demonstrate persistence of vision, the alleged visual
phenomenon that would later be proposed as the basis for the illusion of motion in the
cinema.2 In the museum gallery, three sturdy working replicas are affixed to a table,
with examples of the corresponding historic artifacts in a glass case above them, a
juxtaposition of artifact and replica that aptly demonstrates the importance of tactile
interaction over mere observation (Figure 1). To understand the unique experience of
each toy as a plaything, one must play with it, a process of discovery and trial and error
that I observed hundreds of times. I watched as children thoughtfully wound up the
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strings of the thaumatrope to make it spring to life, only to learn that the device works
best and the bird appears in its cage when the strings are rolled between the fingers
in real time. It is, in other words, a device that creates its perceptual effect in real time
rather than a “playback” device. I monitored as students jostled for position in front of
the spinning phenakistoscope, which is best viewed by only one person at a time. Time
and again, the crowd of students straining to see would eventually fall back and wait for
a chance to see it individually, acknowledging the single viewer-to-apparatus constraint
of the device. Perhaps the most transformative experience occurred around the zoetrope,
which can accommodate a group of simultaneous spectators. There, spectators crowd to
peer over the top of the spinning drum, disappointed to see only a jumbled blur. Slowly,
however, they begin to step back and peer through the slots instead. From that angle,
the slots function as shutters and make the animated sequence appear in sharp relief,
though the user must arrange her body in a particular way around the apparatus. More
than a century and a half after their invention, these optical toys still elicit gasps of
wonder, but these moments of recognition and discovery only occur through active play.
One of my first introductions to optical toys as research objects came within
the context of silent cinema cultures and, in particular, the community convened at the
Giornate del Cinema Muto, which brings together a unique network of scholars, archival
specialists, curators, and institutions. The Giornate’s programming has long incorporated
pre-cinema within the broader rubric of silent cinema, exemplified by programs such as
lantern performances by Laura Minici Zotti of the Museo del Precinema in Padua and the
1991 exhibition Masterpieces of Animation, 1833–1908, curated by David Robinson for the
Tenth Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Within this context, not only did I learn of many major
European collections and interested parties related to optical toys but I also appreciated
it as an event governed by a spirit that is enthusiastically rigorous yet playful. I conducted
the majority of my research in eight institutions: the Strong National Museum of Play and
George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum) in Rochester, New York; the
Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University; the American Antiquarian Society in
Worcester, Massachusetts; the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London; the
Bill Douglas Centre (now the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum) at the University of Exeter;
the Museum of Precinema in Padua; and the National Cinema Museum in Turin. Drawing
examples together from this range of collections demonstrates how researchers might
broaden the conception of what constitutes the pre-cinematic archive. I was fortunate
that many of the institutions where I conducted research already embraced the concept
of play, either because their scope encompassed the experiences of historical childhood,
such as the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, the Cotsen Children’s Library, and
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the Strong National Museum of Play, or because their collections incorporated objects
that defy easy categorization, such as the movable toy books at the American Antiquarian
Society and the paper ephemera at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. These were thus
institutional contexts where my investigation of these objects as toys and their relation
to children and play would be sympathetically, even enthusiastically, entertained.
Without committing to a concrete definition of play, I hope to nuance the
concept and avoid its romanticization by focusing primarily on a few core attributes,
such as play’s improvisational, repetitive, and multisensory nature. This framework is
in alignment with Johan Huizinga’s definition of play as free, open ended, and voluntary,
something that cannot be reduced to a cultural practice (as it also exists independently of
human culture) but is often an engine of social change.3 Roger Caillois’s typology of play
more finely articulates various points at which play practices interface with social and
cultural forces.4 The sentiment that play can be both recreational and serve productive
ends applies to optical toys as educational playthings both in the nineteenth century and
today. Play is, as Rachel Shields writes, both “embodied and affective,” a metaphysical
experience that oscillates “between unleashing a complex, multifaceted flow of ideas,
memories, and sensations and arresting this flow into forms that can be clearly thought
and communicated.”5 Such a definition aptly describes the process and mind-set of
archival research, where the immersed scholar is charged with sorting and assembling
the fragments of history. As will be explored, there is both political and practical efficacy
for taking play seriously in the research of pre-cinema apparatus.

THE POTENTIAL OF PLAY: UNEARTHING THE AGENCY

OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHILD PLAYERS

When I began my archival research of optical toys in 2010, I found few sustained mod-
els of how best to approach these objects—and almost no work that regarded them as
children’s playthings. A gulf seemed to exist between committed materialist accounts
and primarily theoretical works; the former provide exquisite details about the devices
themselves without significant critical perspective, and the latter offer theorization but
often lack material grounding. I took cues from the media archaeological tradition, whose
practitioners stress the consideration of a medium or form in relation to its discursive
frameworks and are attentive to broad contexts and recurring types of apparatus.6 Ad-
ditional work in material culture analysis, an interdisciplinary field concerned with the
specificity of objects as evidence, provided both practical and philosophical direction.
My guiding research questions necessitated a methodological approach that considered,
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not only how these toys worked, but also who played with them and why they might have
played, and that ventured to imagine what that experience of play was like. Less drawn
to these toys’ role exclusively in histories of cinema and media, I instead endeavored
to understand how this early media history relates to the history of childhood and how
these toys factored into the nineteenth-century playscape. The standard history that sees
optical toys only as short-lived precursors to the cinema undervalues the significance of
children as a main audience and market for these devices. They were things that children
made and played with and through which they learned about vision.
My call for a deeper and sustained consideration of these toys’ ludic legacies
is bolstered largely by a shift within film and media history exemplified by historical ac-
counts that consider the cinema within a broader network of audiovisual experiences in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often interdisciplinary, such work draws
not only from film studies but also from visual studies, art history, and related fields. In
particular, optical toys have enjoyed increased critical attention since Jonathan Crary’s
seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990) and subsequent work within film and media
history and media archaeology.7 Likewise, comprehensive compilations and reprints
of primary sources, as well as thorough accounts of references of these toys in textual
materials,8 have proven invaluable resources. However, relatively little scholarly work
has advanced extensive theoretical claims about optical toys based primarily on archival
research; the tendency instead is to rely on singular examples of toys as prototypical of
their broader formal characteristics, which leaves little space to contemplate variation
and does not necessarily address the user’s experience or capacity for agency.
Crary advances an understanding of optical toys as principally disciplinary in
nature, both emblematic of and contributions to new perceptual regimes aligned with the
mechanization and quantification of capitalism. Subsequent scholarship has tempered
and complicated this largely Foucauldian theorization, focusing these objects’ ability,
as toys, to be played with and manipulated, thereby allowing for the possibility that
the user is not inescapably bound to the ideological logic underpinning the devices’
operation. This shift is critical to an understanding of the toy’s user as a possible agent,
transforming him into an active participant in play.9 Because my research examines
optical toys in relation to histories of children’s visual and material culture, a unique
ethical dimension emerges as I seek to reclaim and recognize the experiences of subjects
who have historically been underrepresented. Archival sources, Karen Sanchez-Eppler
writes, can reveal important dynamics between adult agendas and children’s compliance
and resistance.10 Children’s artwork, scrapbooks, and handwritten marginalia from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal the creative and complex ways that young
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people responded to and negotiated their personal and social worlds.11 Homemade opti-
cal toys likely represented an equivalent expressive outlet for children. Although there
are few, if any, extant optical toys made by children, we know that they were included
in innumerable books of build-your-own parlor toys and as paper cutouts in popular
periodicals and newspapers, in addition to being sold premade. Particularly as toys like
the thaumatrope engaged in puns and wordplay, they provided children opportunities for
creativity and humor, with common motifs including subjects like the friction between
cats and dogs, riders being pitched from horses, and textual epigrams offering political,
romantic, and literary commentary. A research approach that endeavors to imagine the
original users’ experience and how they played in both sanctioned and unsanctioned
ways, then, orients the researcher as a player, one encountering the objects for the first
time, learning how they work through experimentation and experiencing their surprising
visual effects on their own terms.
Material culture analysis provides a valuable conceptual framework for just such
an archival experience, characterized by immediacy and spontaneity, with the investi-
gator’s assumptions kept at bay. Jules David Prown’s foundational “Mind in Matter: An
Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method” advances a method for approaching
artifacts involving description, deduction, and speculation, which moves the researcher
from recording initial observations to sensory and intellectual engagement and affec-
tive response, then to develop hypotheses to be explored through further research with
ancillary evidence.12 Such an approach furnishes “hopelessly culture bound” researchers
with a degree of remove, dampening their predispositions, an orientation of great value
for research that attempts to dislodge optical apparatus from the teleological history
of cinema where they have long resided.13 Though systematic and goal oriented, the
process might nevertheless be regarded as playful, as its unfolding depends on the
real-time, immediate engagement between artifact and user. It is, as Kenneth Haltman
writes, “concerned not just with what but with how the object signifies,” and it allows
the researcher to regard “the object as a site of contested meanings.”14

ANTICIPATION, ASSEMBLY, MANIPULATION:

PLAYING WITH A PURPOSE IN THE ARCHIVE

The archival encounter is a unique opportunity not to re-create the experience of the
children who originally played with these toys but to inhabit an equivalent viewing
position, affording a researcher the chance to remain attentive to both the artifacts
and their imagined historical users. Considering optical toys within Caillois’s typology
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of play, Wanda Strauven places them in Caillois’s category of ilinx, or games that gen-
erate the sensation of vertigo or dizziness, associated more with paidia, or free play,
than with ludus, or rule-based play. As Strauven explains, these toys were handheld
and controlled by their users; they did not mandate a particular time limit save for
the user’s attention span.15 Such play, however, was not consistent with Huizinga’s
characterization of play as a disinterested activity that need not serve ends beyond
itself. On the contrary, although much of the appeal of playing with optical toys came
from the striking visual effects they produced, those effects also demonstrated a per-
ceptual peculiarity, explained in the nineteenth century as the scientific principle of
persistence of vision. Optical toys thus occupied a distinct position within the Victorian
child’s playscape as objects that were both amusing and instructional, embodying the
notion of rational recreation. As their origins within scientific contexts and inclusion in
juvenile popular science literature attest, their use was not a mere diversion but rather
represented a particular kind of play seen as productive, as edifying. It was the “right
kind” of play for the aspirational children of the burgeoning middle class. Like children
in the nineteenth century, my play with optical toys was not exclusively for the fun of it
but also to learn something, albeit something different from what their original users
learned. In both cases, an understanding of play not as diametrically opposed to work
but as an activity both pleasurable and instructive informed the interaction between
user and toy, a shared characteristic of both the nineteenth-century child’s play and
my own archival activities.
What exactly does it mean to play with these toys in the archival context? To
reduce play with optical toys to the act of watching their visual effects neglects a range
of affective and tactile experiences that would have encompassed play in the nineteenth
century, such as anticipation of the toy’s arrival in the home, the process of assembling
it and learning how it works, and even the gradual decline of interest. Children in the
nineteenth century undoubtedly enjoyed optical toys in action but also eagerly antici-
pated their acquisition, extending their pleasure beyond the optical effects themselves
to incorporate the experience of receiving the toy as a commodity.16 My archival work
similarly mirrored the consumer experience from acquisition and assembly to play and
manipulation and, eventually, the decision to repackage the toy and move on to the next.
In many cases, I was fortunate that toys had been retained and stored in their original
packaging, requiring me to “unbox” or unveil them.17 This enabled me to engage in an
important pre- or “foreplay” process, which, Joel Best argues, is integral rather than
peripheral to understanding the meaning and value of play.18 Original packaging pro-
vides evidence of how play was modeled for nineteenth-century users, by, for instance,
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depicting the toy in use and including printed instructions, which children could have
chosen to follow or to ignore.
Often sold by booksellers, many toys required a degree of assembly, such as
putting wooden pieces together, cutting picture strips apart, or, in the case of paper do-
it-yourself kits, folding or gluing. These acts of assembly afford the user a familiarity with
the object and how it would work, an important factor given that these toys’ purpose was
to manipulate the user’s perception. During my time at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema,
which holds the Prolo and Barnes collections, two of Europe’s largest collections of these
toys, I was surprised by how many variations of the phenakistoscope there were. Some,
like one made by Alphonse Giroux, were of conventional design: a single slotted disc
printed with an image on a handle to be spun facing a mirror. Another came with a mirror
that could be set up like a picture frame in front of the spinning disc. Still others eliminated
the mirror altogether and instead worked with two discs mounted parallel to one another:
a plain one with slots and a second with the animated sequence, mounted parallel sev-
eral inches away and turning on a common axle. One tabletop model, advertised as the
Pantinoscope, included a four-legged wooden base and long spindle with two nuts to
hold the disc in place. Wooden screws held the spinning discs in place along a slender
wooden pole. Another included a turned wooden base requiring assembly that resembles
an ornate tabletop football end post. Because these toys worked both to educate and to
trick the eye, assembly served a purpose similar to inspecting a magician’s apparatus
before a trick; confirming the specifications and details of the device would add to the
pleasure when it transformed the series of still pictures into an animated sequence. The
perceptual principles remain consistent, and each of these examples is classified as a
phenakistoscope, yet design variations and aesthetic flourishes demonstrated the many
forms the device could assume, all underscored by the process of assembling each one.
To reduce each example to a single type thus disregards important historical information,
such as the role of these design elements in making the toy “fit” with the furnishings
and accessories of the nineteenth-century home, providing one node of what Kenneth
Ames calls “horizontal constellations” of artifacts.19
Once each toy was assembled, I could experience the thrill of actively ma-
nipulating its parts. Far from inviting passive spectatorship, most of these toys were
designed for play that was engaged, experimental, and characterized by repetition
and variation. Illustrated media such as bands and discs were typically sold in sets
or multiples, begging to be changed frequently, a hypothesis that is substantiated by
an examination of the worn centers of phenakistoscope discs. Likewise, we know that
some instructions accompanying the zoetrope encouraged users to put strips together
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in different combinations for humorous effects.20 Part of the pleasure was surely derived
from the interchangeability of strips and discs. Other toys, such as anamorphic images,
which appear distorted until viewed in the reflection of a cylindrical mirror, encourage
play that is like deciphering a code or puzzle. While working with a set of these images
at the Cotsen Children’s Library, I examined each distorted picture first, speculating
about its contents, then tested my hypotheses in the mirror, placing it and removing it
repeatedly to apprehend the mathematical logic underlying its distortion. At the Victoria
and Albert Museum of Childhood, I played with an anorthoscope, Joseph Plateau’s rare
device that mixes the form of a phenakistoscope with the distorting qualities of the
anamorphic images: a jumbled image is made to appear fixed when viewed through a
spinning four-slotted disc. To play with these toys, then, is much more than simply to
operate them and observe how they work. Free play also encompasses the user’s desire
to play and replay, to exchange and combine, and even to grow tired of the toy. Tactile
manipulation was at the heart of this process, though such interactions can, at times,
run counter to institutional policies that prioritize preservation over accessibility, raising
complications for research.

PLAYING BY—AND WITH—THE RULES: ACCESS, SPACE, AND DIGITIZATION

Like much archival research, my work with optical toys required negotiating the complex
interplay between the conflicting imperatives of access and preservation that cultural
institutions face. Digitization is increasingly employed as a means of reducing this
tension, and while the creation of digital copies and surrogates can be of tremendous
benefit, these practices also shape research by altering opportunities to interact directly
with artifacts, not to mention the archival staff that preserve them. For example, one
of the most significant ways that my research shifted was to expand the scope of the
project to include movable toy books. This was facilitated by an incidental encounter I
had during a visit to the Getty Research Institute to view optical apparatus in the Wer-
ner Nekes Collection. While there, I conversed in passing with a librarian in a separate
department who suggested that the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton might hold
relevant materials. Working from within a film and media studies context, children’s
libraries had not occurred to me as potentially applicable repositories. At Cotsen, the
curator introduced me to movable toy books, a category of objects previously unknown
to me. These works often remediated and adapted the themes and formats of earlier
visual entertainments, such as the panorama, peep show, and magic lantern. She further
alerted me to secondary resources of the handful of scholars linking these books to the
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pre-cinematic tradition.21 My work at Cotsen, in turn, led me to the American Antiquarian

Society, where I examined the colorful movable toy books of New York–based picture book
publisher McLoughlin Brothers. Working on-site at the archive always means to work with
limitations, but those conditions can prove fruitful. Moreover, a playful ethos on the part
of archival staff can also help to creatively interpret those limitations, when necessary.
Contrary to children’s free play with optical toys in the nineteenth century,
my own archival play was governed by many rules, which variously provided insightful
limitations and, at times, necessitated creative interpretation by the archivists and staff
with whom I worked. Institutions’ access policies dictated how many objects I could see
at a time, whether I could handle them with or without gloves, and even whether I could
handle them at all. In one instance, for example, institutional policy prohibited my direct
contact with artifacts, posing a particular challenge when studying objects that must be
held, turned, and manipulated. In this case, while examining a kaleidoscope, I implored
the curatorial assistant helping me to hold the toy up to my eye level and rotate it slowly. It
was an awkward and humorous arrangement, but rather than inhibiting inquiry, it became
a spontaneous opportunity to ponder the disjuncture between touch and sight. Most of
these toys were as much about tactility as they were about vision, and the experience of
having the kaleidoscope operated for me illustrated the strangeness of isolating these
senses from one another. My distance from the kaleidoscope, mediated by another per-
son, evoked the anxious anticipation of someone waiting her turn or expected to share.
In this way, as I observed the colorful objects skittering around the transparent cell at the
end of the pasteboard tube, I experienced the longing associated with being allowed to
look but not touch, likely as common a sentiment for nineteenth-century children as it is
today. Conversely, it required intense focus and concentration, momentarily transforming
me into a “kaleidoscomaniac,” utterly absorbed by the spectacle.22
Because of the nature of the artifacts I consulted, investigating them often
challenged conventional standards of acceptable archival practice, as I spun, flipped,
and handled each toy. Working with optical toys and related artifacts like movable toy
books differs from working with regular books and paper ephemera, materials for which
archival supports such as foam wedges and weighted book snakes are designed. Some
of the movable toy books I examined at the American Antiquarian Society, for example,
were meant to replicate a diorama’s three-dimensional effect. So instead of lying flat,
one end of the cover is raised vertically, revealing multiple planes of depth. Other peep
show formats accordion out lengthwise, rendering traditional book supports useless.
I spent one afternoon constructing a new acquisition, the New Pretty Village, a set of
die-cut cardboard buildings, objects, and people published by McLoughlin Brothers in
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1897 that can be made into a bustling town. The project of assembling all twenty-nine
cutouts took over the full space of a table in the reading room. Some of these objects
were thus inherently playful or improvisational in the archival context because their
shapes, sizes, and forms confounded the guidelines typical of such research.
In addition to the libraries and reading rooms at Princeton’s Firestone Library,
the American Antiquarian Society, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and the Strong Na-
tional Museum of Play, where I consulted books and paper-based epherma, when working
with artifacts, I enjoyed a wide variety of atypical workspaces, such as basement storage
facilities, a makeshift worktable set up in a corridor, a shared office, and, at one point, the
inside of a bank vault. These settings were a far cry from the well-appointed middle-class
parlors in which the toys were originally enjoyed, but they nevertheless helped bolster
a playful approach to the objects, as each place required improvisation and flexibility.
A final unique dimension to this research concerned the ability to draw together
objects and ephemera in one place. There is great importance in thinking about medium
and content together, or, as Ian Christie articulates, constructing “a materialist history
based on taking into account the machinery as well as its products.”23 Like the study
of many historical media formats, there is much to be gained through experiencing the
content or “software” (i.e., the animated images) in their original form, in this case,
the “hardware” of the physical toy, though these are frequently classified and stored
separately. For example, optical devices at the George Eastman Museum are held within
the Technology Collection, but the media that fit within them—the paper strips of the
zoetrope and praxinoscope—are housed in the Moving Image Stills, Posters, and Paper
Collection. I was fortunate that for my visit, the curator arranged all the toys to be view-
able with their respective media, including a rare example of a projecting praxinoscope.
Without fetishizing the physical encounter with the object, it is nevertheless
worth mentioning some ways that processes of data migration and digitization complicate
rather than alleviate the tension between preservation and access. Since my time in the
archives, optical toys have enjoyed increased visibility online, perhaps most notably with
the widely publicized and circulated set of images from the Richard Balzer Collection,
which makes fine use of the animated GIF format to depict much of this iconography
in motion.24 The benefits of having these images available cannot be underestimated.
They serve as invaluable reference material, helping to document the iconography as-
sociated with these toys and permitting the study of their animated sequences in detail.
Nevertheless, as the preceding examples suggest, on-site access yields unique insights
about these toys that can only be gained through sustained physical contact. The bal-
ance between access and preservation is delicate, but there is also a risk of being overly
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attentive to the latter. Moreover, it is often through in-person encounters that valuable
syntheses are made, such as my introduction to movable toy books, otherwise easily
missed in a too-narrow search. An individual researcher’s priorities do not always align
with an institution’s priorities of what to digitize (and those priorities themselves may
not be apparent). The risk of conflating what is immediately searchable or accessible
online with totality is thus potentially problematic.25

CONCLUSION

Playing with pre-cinematic apparatus in the archive enables the researcher to participate
in a particular kind of interaction between object and user characterized by openness
and potential rather than predetermination. Object in hand, it is possible to regard its
design attributes, its material and sensorial qualities, and to consider it on its own terms
rather than exclusively in relation to what came next. In her close reading of Benjamin’s
“Mechanical Reproduction” essay alongside his other writings, Miriam Hansen argued
that for Benjamin, play emerged as a pivotal concept with the capacity to result in social
and political change. Benjamin maintained that a childlike orientation to technology,
exemplified by the notion of Spiel, enables the subject to reject a determinist account
of technology’s role in dictating the future, instead imagining multiple possibilities.26
Understood in this way, play is a potentially transformative practice. It allows research-
ers studying these devices to work against a traditional account that positions users as
unavoidably subject to new perceptual regimes commensurate with capitalist expan-
sion. Within the archival setting, play holds out the possibility for the articulation of
alternative experiences.
It has been my hope to demonstrate the utility of play as both a philosophical
orientation and a methodological approach to archival research on optical toys. Play, as
a concept, attitude, and action, has the capacity to open up new avenues of exploration
for research. Flexible, open ended, and repetitious, play invites an exploratory mind-set
that might seem at odds with the rigor and precision typically associated with scholarly
research, but it can prove useful in discovering new ways of thinking about primary arti-
facts. It becomes an especially important theoretical lens and methodological approach
when considering these toys as objects related to historical childhoods. Many of these
devices have received renewed critical attention, particularly with regard to their roles
in the history of intellectual property and media technology, yet there are many contexts
in which they operated that have been overlooked, their place within the history of child-
hood chief among them. Such shifts in focus necessitate a shift in approach, one that
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attempts to imagine (even if it cannot replicate) the experiences of the historical users of
these devices. Archival research is always haunted by what is inaccessible, the people,
things, and experiences about which researchers have little choice but to speculate.
Play, and the act of spending time and tactile attention with these devices, is one way for
us to inhabit or approximate that original position. It thus represents a helpful starting
point for approaching pre- and early cinema. Expanding the archive and the things that
can be done there, in turn, may expand our thinking about the past.

Meredith A. Bak is an assistant professor of childhood studies at Rutgers

University–Camden.

Notes
The author wishes to thank the many archival professionals and advisors
who have given their time and help in support of this project, in particular,
Todd Gustavson at the George Eastman Museum, Andrea Immel at the
Cotsen Children’s Library, and Laura Wasowicz at the American Antiquarian
Society. I am indebted to Peter Bloom, whose guidance from the beginning
set the project on the course of archival investigation. As well, my partici-
pation in the 2015 NEH Summer Institute in American Material Culture:
Nineteenth-Century New York, directed by David Jaffee at the Bard Graduate
Center, was integral to the completion of this piece. Research was supported
by a grant from the Friends of the Princeton Library, a Jay and Deborah Last
Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, and the Albert and Elaine
Borchard Foundation.

1. The term pre-cinematic is used here as a chronological rather than a

teleological indicator. Optical toys are chronologically but not exclusively
“pre-cinematic.”
2. The accuracy of persistence of vision has been called into question.
However, the theory (in conjunction with other phenomena, such as critical
flicker fusion and the phi phenomenon) remains widely used in explanations
of cinema’s effect of motion. For more, see Joseph and Barbara Anderson,
“The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45,
no. 1 (1993): 3–12.
3. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
4. Roger Caillois, “‘The Definition of Play’ and ‘The Classification of
Games,’” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie
Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman, 122–55 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2006).
5. Rachel Shields, “Ludic Ontology: Play’s Relationship to Language, Cultural
Forms, and Transformative Politics,” American Journal of Play 7, no. 3
(2015): 299–300.
 15 t h e l u d i c a rc h i v e

6. See François Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds., Cinema beyond Film:
Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010); Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Ap-
proaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011); and Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2012).
7. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
8. See C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of Cinema (London: Thames and Hud-
son, 1965); Stephen Herbert, A History of Pre-cinema (London: Routledge,
2000); and Laurent Mannoni and Richard Crangle, The Great Art of Light
and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter
Press, 2000).
9. Some examples of work that either directly responds to Crary’s assertions
or that deepens investigation of optical toys include Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Tom Gunning, “The Play
between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’
and Their Discourse,” in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography,
Algorithms, ed. Eivind Røssaak, 27–44 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2011), 40; and Wanda Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch
or Not to Touch,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Im-
plications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 148–63 (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2011).
10. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “In the Archives of Childhood,” in The Children’s
Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, ed. Anna Mae Duane (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2013), 216.
11. See Andrea Immel, “Frederick Lock’s Scrapbook: Patterns in the Pictures
and Writing in the Margins,” The Lion and the Unicorn 29, no. 1 (2005):
65–86; Sanchez-Eppler, “In the Archives of Childhood.”
12. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture
Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19.
13. Ibid., 4.
14. Kenneth Haltman, introduction to American Artifacts: Essays in Material
Culture, ed. Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, 1–10 (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2000).
15. Strauven, “Observer’s Dilemma,” 151–52.
16. Such anticipation was common, for example, in relation to the acquisi-
tion of new magic lanterns. See Meredith Bak, “‘Ten Dollars’ Worth of Fun’:
The Obscured History of the Toy Magic Lantern and Early Children’s Media
Spectatorship,” Film History 21, no. 1 (2015): 120.
17. Similar to the contemporary “unboxing” phenomenon that is widely seen
in YouTube culture, in which consumers of all ages record themselves open-
ing and unpacking new products.
18. Joel Best, “Too Much Fun: Toys as Social Problems and the Interpretation
of Culture,” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (1998): 205–6.
19. Kenneth L. Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian
America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Summer 1978): 19–46.
20. André Gaudreault and Nicolas Dulac, “Heads or Tails: The Emergence
 b a k
16

of a New Cultural Series, from the Phenakistiscope to the Cinematograph,”

Invisible Culture 8 (2004), https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture
/Issue_8/dulac_gaudreault.html.
21. See, e.g., Eric Faden, “Movables, Movies, Mobility: Nineteenth-Century
Looking and Reading,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2007): 71–89;
John Plunkett, “Moving Books/Moving Images: Optical Recreations and
Children’s Publishing 1800–1900,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, no. 5 (2007), doi:10.16995/ntn.463; and Jacqueline
Reid-Walsh, “Activity and Agency in Historical ‘Playable Media,’” Journal of
Children and Media 6, no. 2 (2012): 1–18.
22. See Erkki Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes to-
ward an Archaeology of the Media,” Leonardo 30, no. 3 (1997): 221–24, for an
explanation of the origin of the term.
23. Ian Christie, “Toys, Instruments, Machines: Why the Hardware Matters,”
in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James
Lyons and John Plunkett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 4.
24. The Richard Balzer Collection online: http://dickbalzer.tumblr.com/.
25. Julia Knight, “Archiving, Distribution, and Experimental Moving Image
Histories,” The Moving Image 12, no. 1 (2012): 67.
26. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cin-
ema,” October 109 (2004): 6–21.
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