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Gothic as a genre has become more amorphous and difficult to contain. This book brings together for the first time many of the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic together with areas that have never received serious study or mention in this regard before. It draws attention to an array of dark artefacts such as Goth and Gothic jewellery, dolls, posters and food, which, though part of popular mass marketing, have often been marginalised and largely omitted from the mainstream of Gothic Studies publishing. The book moves from the earliest Gothic architecture to décor and visual aspects of theatrical design, masquerade and dance. It focuses on paintings in two historical spans from Jan Van Eyck to Henry Fuseli and from Goya to H. R. Giger to consider Clovis Trouille's works influenced by horror films and Vincent Castiglia's paintings in blood. Gothic engravings, motifs of spectral portraits, posters and signs are covered. The book then uses early visual devices like Eidophusikon and the long-lived entertainment of peepshows to introduce a discussion of projection technologies like magic lanterns and, subsequently, film and TV. Gothic photography from Daguerreotypes onwards; and Gothic font, scripts and calligraphy are then discussed. Finally, the book presents a survey of the development of newer Gothic media, such as video gaming, virtual reality (VR) games and survival horror apps.
words, cinema enacts animal sacrifice to perpetuate the life of the image. Indeed, all film is horror film. American avant-garde filmmakers from Maya Deren to Harry Smith have followed this spectral path, illuminated by magic lanterns, Phantasmagoria spectacles and the magic of Georges Méliès. For Stan Brakhage, light, or lumen , held the status of a supernatural force. The
question of great political import.21 Finbarr Flood dubbed the trial a ‘battle of the lenses’, noting the optical metaphors that permeated the debates, with remarks on prosthetic eyes or faulty vision that were referenced in satirical prints through the camera obscura and the magic lantern.22 Elephanta was not only drawn into the impeachment debates, as I show below, but deeply implicated in similar questions on representation, emerging as a paradigmatic example of Oriental mystique and its obdurate resistance to intellectual enquiry. Optical technologies were invoked in
not look back quite so far in his magisterial history of film’s emergence, The Great Art of Light and Shadow , he nevertheless finds an early ‘cinema’ in the experiments conducted by thirteenth-century scholars who projected images in a darkened room by reflecting light from outside through a small aperture ( 2000 : 5). Mannoni’s book goes on to detail a host of technologies of image capture and projection that appeared in succeeding centuries. The best-known of these is the magic lantern (see Figure 1 ), a device which peaked in popularity during the Victorian
Pakokku, Saya Ba, accepted the invitation and joined ‘with Christians to combat social ills’. He became the star turn in a series of band-of-hope-style rallies staged in 1916. It was a rare example of collaboration with ‘Buddhists in this work of public service’. 33 One other social problem was entirely new. Wayward Burmese adolescents were addicted to films. They may have picked up the bad habit from the missionaries’ magic-lantern shows, where mesmerised audiences gawped at cartoon Bible stories. By 1916, far more
Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. His television career began in the cutting-rooms at Thames Television, and his first directing experience was on the Thames TV documentaries,
Britain's overseas empire had a profound impact on people in the United Kingdom, their domestic spaces and rituals, and their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the wider world. This book considers how a whole range of cultural products - from paintings to architecture - were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. The churches and missionary societies were important in transmitting visual propaganda for their work, through their magazines, through lectures and magic lantern slides, through exhibitions and publications such as postcards. The book offers an overview of the main context in which four continents iconography was deployed after 1800: the country houses of the British elite. Publication, and subsequent distribution and consumption, offered a forum for exploration endeavours to enter public consciousness. James Cook's expeditions were particularly important in bringing exploration to a wider public audience, and the published accounts derived from them offer strong evidence of the interest in exploration at all levels of society. The exhibition of empire, typically associated with ambition, pride and expertise, also included an unruly genre: the satirical peace print. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the eclipse of the French, Spanish and Holy Roman Empires, and Britain's emergence as a 'global, naval, commercial, and imperial superpower'. Numerous scholars in recent years have noted the centrality of the Indian exhibits in the Crystal Palace and emphasised the exhibition's role in promoting commodities from Britain's colonies.
cataclysm. Like magic lanterns and ombres chinoises , from their earliest appearance, peepshows (not to be confused with paper peepshows, which were more like perspective theatres, or tunnel books) were linked with peering into and seeing that which was forbidden. Alongside this appeal were the illusions of depth, perspective and illumination. Peepshows were basically a closed box (perhaps with string
must be careful not to isolate the cinema from previous developments in visual entertainments and in particular a series of developments in the public exhibition of images that had a direct influence on the cinema. In her study of cinema and magic lantern culture, Rossell argues that in the nineteenth century audiences would have been familiar with the projected image via magic lanterns, and that it would constitute a ‘shared
recall of nothing so much as a late eighteenth-century phantasmagoria show. In Goya’s envisioning of the nightmare, monstrous imaginings and spectral effects interpenetrate. Monsters may be reason’s shadowy double, but their form is suggestively determined in the conjunction of technology and entertainment comprised by the magic lantern. The emergence of new technologies, the marvels of modernity and