User:Zalán Szakács/thesis2chapter

Chapter II
Supernatural

Phantasmagoria, an audio-visual dialogue between the dead and the living

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  Phantasmagoria Analysis

During the turbulent years of the French Revolution (1789 – 1799), the writings of Athanasius Kircher inspired the Belgian inventor, physicist and showman named Étienne-Gaspard Robertson. 26 He presented the first “fantasmagorie” at the Pavilion de l’Echiquier in Paris, whilst calling himself as a creator of “scientific effects”, notwithstanding, he never disclosed his discoveries. 27 To be able to understand Robertson’s “invention”, we need to investigate about the entomology of the word “Phantasmagoria” in Oxford English Dictionary: "a shifting series or succession of phantasms or imaginary figures, as seen in a dream or fevered condition, as called up by the imagination, or as created by literary description." 28 The technical application of the word is associated with the late eighteenth-century ghost-performances around Europe and North America composed through the use of a magic lantern.

A few years after his successful start in the show business of phantasmagorias, Robertson understood the influential aspects of the site-specific context of his performances, hence he moved them to the dark atmospheric location of an discarded Capuchin monastery. 29 Every aspect of his ghost-shows with a parting speech and a macabre coup de theatre 30, was planned into the smallest detail starting about the entrance of his “ghost-monastery”, which could be pass onto only through a cemetery. 31 Entering a somber room painted black, 32 the audience felt immediately disconnected from the real world, since there was “no foreground, no background, no surface, no distance, only overwhelming, impenetrable darkness”, as Grau has put it. 33 Multiple senses were triggered through sensory illusions by hearing the noise of thunder, a funereal bell calling forth phantoms from their tombs, and Franklin's Harmonica, a form of musical, water-filled glasses, provided a haunting sound. 34 Electrical sparks were used “for a time could make dead bodies move’’ 35, and at climax moments the audience received little electronic shocks into their chairs underlining the terror of the pre-romantic program.

In “The Great Art of Light and Shadow - Archaeology of the Cinema” Laurent Mannoni establishes a list of Robertson’s projected subjects from his advertisements in the Parisian press. As well as the unending procession of spectres and phantoms, the Fantascope projected the Witch of Endor, the Three Witches of Macbeth; the Opening of Pandora’s Box; the Head of Medusa; the Sybill of Memphis; the ghosts of Cagliostro, Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais, Franklin, and Marmontel; the Ghost of the Plenipotentiary Claude Roberjot; the Prophet Daniel; the ghost of Héloïse; Nymph Egeria and the Peacemaker; Brumaire and Napoléon Bonaparte; Belshazzar’s Feast; Mohammed and his Pigeon; Mohammed Overcoming the Angel of Death; and Young Burying his Daughter. 36 To conclude the only links were thematic: each image bore some supernatural, exotic, or morbid association. 37 (Castle, 1988)

The rapid successions between the ghostly vignettes 38 evoked images that continued to appear in the visions of the audience, called as afterimages.