The Magic Lantern Castle

One day, you might find yourself driving on the Austin Highway in San Antonio. Among the suburban sprawl, you might not notice too much, just the regular chain businesses that pollute the country all over. After a bit, you might see a Wal-Mart. If you look on the other side of the street, and aim your eyes high, you might also notice this:

And when you lower your eyes again, you’ll see this:

Whatever this once was, it is now Jack Judson’s Magic Lantern Castle, a small, privately owned museum solely dedicated to the magic lantern purportedly invented by Athanasius Kircher. A bunch of us, organized by Barna Kantor, went on a little trip there the other day and it’s a small locale of wonders with thousands of slides and hundreds of different kinds of magic lanterns dating back to the 1700s. Judson gave us a small tour of the museum, describing all the varieties of lanterns, lighting devices and a small presentation of some of the slides. It was absolutely incredible to look at so many facets limited to only one element of what is generally termed pre-cinema. I only wish we could look at more slides. They include everything from landscape shots, to short comedic sketches (like The Rat Catcher) to “phantasmagorias“, little horror shows depicting the dead, where the projectionist would move the lantern closer to the screen to make the image bigger and freak people out.

Many of the slides also had little levers and things to make them actually move. A couple of years ago I had attended a small exhibit at MOMA put together by Ernie Gehr showing off some of these philosophical instruments (as well as the slides themselves.) Some of them I had an incredibly difficult time wrapping my head around; there were sometimes two or three layers of movement within a projection: a landscape where it changed from day to night, where it snowed and where a windmill moved. I tried to sketch and understand how they did this, but all my assumptions were based on having simply, one lantern. The solution was the picture on the right.

Here’s some more links on Jack Judson and below is a video from the Netherlands of an actual demonstration of the device (here’s part 2.) I also want to recommend a small, out of print book, full of charm: The Magician and the Cinema by Erik Barnouw.

Article from Make Magazine (here’s a video (.mp4))

Outtakes from Interview on Boing Boing (thanks Scott!)

Article by Jack Judson