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“Evening,” “Forced Prayer,” Council of War,” &c, &c.
    PART VI. MISCELLANEOUS These embrace a large collection of Paintings, Artistic Gems, Dissolving Views and Transformation Scenes, which have been procured at great expense, and for faithfulness in perspective and beauty in design, they stand unrivalled. The whole will be enlivened with NUMEROUS COMIC SCENES
    Electricity Without Extra Charge A very fine Galvanic Battery is provided for any who may wish to try it. This is an excellent remedy for Rheumatism, Neuralgia and Headache.
    Be sure to come before the show begins if you want to try it.
    Positively Everything Advertised on this Bill will be Shown
    REMEMBER, THE PRICE OF ADMISSION IS ONLY
10 CENTS FOR ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY
    Doors Open at 7 O’Clock.
    Begins at 8 O’Clock.
     
    Travels, Art, History, Astronomy, Fun & Electricity—Bamber’s Dime Show was entertainment shovelware to rival CD-ROM. First a weird gizmo, the so-called planetarium, presumably an orrery. Then astronomical slides, no doubt accompanied by a proto-Saganesque cosmic narrative from Bamber. Then telepresence—“all cannot travel,” but a virtuality is beautiful and cheap. Then a melodramatic disaster—the repeated mentions of “rolling,” “sailing” and “reefing” strongly suggests these so-called “paintings” were partially animated. Magic lantern slides were often quite mechanically complex.
    A bit of mild bawdry and ethnic humor in part four. Then the statuary—their placement in the show seems odd and anticlimactic, unless the statuary included female nudes, which might make sense as the children have probably left by this time. Then, “miscellaneous” or basically the leftover contents of the professor’s trunk from the previous four tours, with a bang-up ending of eye-boggling “dissolving views.”
    Bamber also boasts an interesting sideline in voltaic placebo snake-oil—“Electricity Without Extra Charge.” People can be impressed by gadgets, entertained by gadgets, forced to laugh or weep by gadgets. The truly daring charlatan can even cure the sick by gadgets. The “magic” of the magic lantern was closer to the healing magic of the witch doctor than we might credit today.
    Source: THE HISTORY OF MOVIE PHOTOGRAPHY by Brian Coe, Eastview Editions, Westfield NJ, 1981, ISBN 0-89860-067-0
     

Silent Film, Diorama, Panorama
    From Alan Wexelblat
    This collection of essays deals with the philosophy, theory, and sociology of film viewing.
    In “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator” Tom Gunning takes on the myth that early film audiences ran in fear from a film of a train apparently coming at them. He discusses several of the (now dead) technologies that immediately preceded film and shows how they were used/presented in such a way as to achieve maximum amazement. He shows that while audiences may have been amazed by the new moving images, they were not apt to confuse these images for reality. An important debunking of popular mythology.
    In “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris,” Vanessa Schwartz discusses Parisian’s methods of self-amusement in the immediate pre-film period. Flanerie (the taking in of sights while strolling/shopping) translated itself into a bizarre entertainment spectacle whereby the Paris Morgue became a medium of reality display. Bodies of crime victims were put on display, ostensibly so the public could identify the people but in fact for entertainment. Her description of the many-days display of the corpse of a child is particularly interesting. She also discusses a couple of other dead techs—the diorama and the panorama—and talks about how the newspapers of the day combined ‘true crime’ stories and serial novels.
    Source: VIEWING POSITIONS: WAYS OF SEEING FILM, Linda Williams (ed.), Rutgers University Press 1995 ISBN 0-8135-2133-5, 1995.
     

Leaflet grenades and the Monroe