Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: s8492430 AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, NoamMilgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History ofModern Art andMedia EBSCO Publishing :eBook Collection(EBSCOhost) -printed on6/12/2020 10:03PMviaHARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES Artificial Darkness Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: s8492430 AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, NoamMilgrom.; Artificial Darkness :AnObscure History of ModernArt and Media EBSCO Publishing :eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) -printedon 6/12/202010:03 PMviaHARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ARTIFICIAL DARKNESS An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Noam M. Elcott

University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Noam m. Elcott is associate professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room.

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0- 226- 32897- 3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0- 226- 32902- 4 (e-book) DoI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226329024.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data

Elcott, Noam Milgrom, 1978– author. Artificial darkness : an obscure history of modern art and media / Noam M. Elcott. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0- 226- 32897- 3 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0- 226- 32902- 4 (e-book) 1. Shades and shadows in art. 2. Art, Modern—20th century— History. I. Title. NX650.S55E43 2016 709.04—dc23 2015031842

This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

♾ This paper meets the requirements of aNSI/NISo Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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ackNowlEDgmENtS ix INtroDuctIoN 1 1 artIFIcIal DarkNESS 17 2 Dark thEatErS 47 3 Black ScrEENS 77 4 thE Black art oF gEorgES mélIèS 135 5 SpacElESS play: oSkar SchlEmmEr’S Dance against enlightenment 165 coDa: hIStorIcal DarkNESSES 229 NotES 241 INDEX 293 Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: s8492430 AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, NoamMilgrom.; Artificial Darkness :AnObscure History of ModernArt and Media EBSCO Publishing :eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) -printedon 6/12/202010:03 PMviaHARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES Acknowledgments

Nothing combats the solipsism of writing like the acknowledgment of debts. Indeed, it is impossible to name all the individuals and institutions that have enabled the research and writing of Artificial Darkness. Certain is that I never would have even ventured the project were it not for a handful of mentors. Years ago, Rosalind Krauss and Jonathan Crary initiated me into the history of art. To teach and think beside them has been the greatest privilege. During my graduate studies and ever since, Carol Armstrong and Hal Foster have provided vital support and guidance. Finally, my vision of art history has been expanded incomparably by the scholarship and friendship of Branden Joseph. The manuscript was read, in whole or in part, by Arnold Aronson, Lucia Allais, Karen Beckman, Dan Morgan, Matthew Solomon, and two anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press. Their insights and sug- gestions deeply shaped my thinking and writing. Whatever its failings, Artificial Darkness is profoundly better for their efforts. The Columbia University Seminars on the Sites of Cinema and on the Theory and History of Media have provided forums to test my ideas and absorb those of others. My cochairs in these seminars— Jane Gaines, and Stefan Andriopoulos and Brian Larkin— have been essential partners and guides in the study of comparative media. My coeditors at Grey Room have become inspired interlocutors and fast friends: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Eric de Bruyn, Byron Ha- mann, John Harwood, and Matthew C. Hunter. I am also enormously grateful to Alex Alberro, Nico Baumbach, Walead Beshty, Marta Braun, Kaira Cabañas, Michael Cole, Stuart Comer, Peter Geimer, Romy Golan, Tom Gunning, Chrissie Iles, Kellie Jones, Tom Levin, Anthony McCall, Tony Oursler, John Rajchman, Felicity Scott, Rafi Segal, Bernhard Siegert, and Antonio Somaini. Their impact on me pervades the book and extends far beyond it. It is difficult to imagine my academic path, let alone this book, without the scholarly rigor, intellectual dynamism, and generous encouragement of my colleagues in the Columbia University Department of Art History

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 and Archaeology. I am indebted especially to Robert Harrist and Holger Klein, who as departmental chairmen offered aid at crucial junctures. Stefaan Van Liefferinge, Emily Shaw, and Gabriel Rodriguez provided invaluable assistance with the illustrations, and Emily Gabor with everything else. Stephanie O’Rourke proved an ingenious research assistant; and Olympia Arco secured even the images that seemed beyond reach. The steadfast support of Susan Bielstein at the University of Chicago Press was a lifeline throughout the writing, editing, and production of the book. James Toftness provided indispensable assistance in the production process. Libraries, museums, archives, and cinematheques were the lifeblood of this project. In particular, I am grateful for the institutional and per- sonal support received from Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University (Carole Ann Fabian); Bauhaus- Archiv, Berlin (Sa- bine Hartmann); Schlemmer Archive, Stuttgart (Wolf Eiermann); Musée Marey, Beaune (Marion Leuba); Kiesler Stiftung, Vienna (Gerd Zillner); Museum of Modern Art, New York; New York Public Library; Collège de France, Paris; and Bibliothèque du film at the Cinémathèque française, Paris. I was fortunate to receive several invitations to present work in progress and even more fortunate to receive the constructive criticism offered by my hosts and audiences at the University of California, Berkeley; Eikones, Basel; Cambridge University, England; Deutsches Haus, Columbia University, New York; Tate Modern, London; Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Paris; Austrian Film Museum / Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vi- enna; Rice University, Houston; and the Free University, Amsterdam. Lastly, I am grateful for the generous financial support supplied by the Princeton University Barr Ferree Publication Fund; the Research Fund for Publication Support for Junior Faculty in the Columbia University Depart- ment of Art History and Archaeology; the Leonard Hastings Schoff Fund of the Columbia University Seminars; and the Columbia University Het- tleman Summer Fellowship.

* * *

My friends Yaacob Dweck, Bryan Doerries, and Michael Treadway ab- sorbed the ordeals of this project and celebrated its triumphs. The writing of this book would have been impossible without them— and utterly less joyous. I have acquired the most exceptional nuclear and extended families. No laughs are as jubilant as the ones I share with Talia and Aaron, Yaron and Miriam, Liore and David, and their families. They mark my days, seasons, and years. How fortunate I am to have gained a second caring family in

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Darkness, Ancient and Modern

In the beginning— the biblical beginning— “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”1 All cosmogonies begin in formless darkness.2 Creations commence with the creation of light. Without form, darkness was the void, the nothing, from which God created ex nihilo. The proliferation of gods in the Greek pantheon enhanced the status of darkness only nominally. The personification of darkness—Erebus, “deep darkness, shadow”—was the son of the primor- dial god Chaos. Formless, void, chaos, nothing. The status of darkness changed little in the centuries that separated the mythical beginnings of the cosmos from the disciplinary beginnings of art history. Alois Riegl, a turn- of-the- century curator of textiles at the Imperial and Royal Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, lecturer extraordinarius at the University of Vienna, and “founding father” of the discipline of art history, embraced objects, techniques, and epochs neglected or repressed by his emergent field. Yet even for Riegl, absolute darkness marked a boundary. In his pathbreak- ing analysis of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro—the dramatic rendering of light and shadow which he disarmingly translated as “spatial darkness” (Raumdunkel)—Riegl identified the limits beyond which no art history could proceed: “This spatial darkness is not absolute darkness, for then it would simply be nothing, not even space.”3 For Riegl— and anything that went by the name of art history— absolute darkness was a limit, a joke.4 The joke was told notoriously by the poet Paul Bilhaud, a member of Les Arts incohérents, a satirical art movement now most famous for its “anticipation” of sundry avant- garde techniques, not least monochrome painting.5 On August 2, 1882, Jules Lévy organized the first presentation of the Incohérents, followed two months later by an exhibition at his Pa- risian home. Infamously, Lévy exhibited a black monochrome by Bilhaud titled Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel (1882; fig. intro. 1). The French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais elaborated on the conceit with First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in the Snow, Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea, and other monochromes dutifully collected in

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 his Album primo-avrilesque (April-Foolish Album), a portfolio of seven monochromatic images and droll titles published by Paul Ollendorff in 1897.6 Émile Cohl, a father of cinematic animation and onetime Incohérent, brought the gag to the screen for the French film studio Gaumont in the summer of 1910. Titled The Neo- Impressionist Painter but clearly derivative of the Incohérents, the film depicts an artist in his studio visited by an eager bourgeois collector.7 The artist presents one monochrome after another. Intertitles announce their content—for example, “A cardinal eating lobster and tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea,” whereupon the film cuts to a red- tinted animation in which appear said cardinal, lobster, tomatoes, and seashore (fig. intro. 2). The gag is reprised with a “Chinaman” trans- porting corn on the Yellow River, a Pierrot on a pile of snow, and so forth, such that “witty”— and frequently racist8— intertitles precede tinted se- quences of animated line drawings. The collector becomes progressively more agitated until a black monochrome sends him into a buying frenzy. The black monochrome, we are told, represents “Negroes making shoe polish in a tunnel at night.” The film cuts to black leader and, in contra- distinction to every other sequence, begets no animation. The screen— and auditorium—remains a uniform black. Bilhaud, Allais, and Cohl portioned their wit from the same commonplace stew as Riegl and Hegel. The latter famously condemned the for- malism of Friedrich Schelling and others as that undifferentiated “night in which, as we say, all cows are black.”9 Hegel’s gibe helps us distinguish Bilhaud’s original joke from the elaborations proffered by Alphonse Allais, a distinction articulated clearly in the film by Émile Cohl. Whereas all the objects in a red monochrome must be red (cardinals, tomatoes, and

FIg. INtro. 1. Paul Bilhaud, Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel (aka Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night), 1882, as reproduced in Alphonse Allais, Album primo- avrilesque (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1897).

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so forth), all cows need not—indeed, must not—be black. Red is a color. Darkness is a condition. All but one monochrome in Cohl’s film were represented as discernible, animated content tinted the appropriate colors. Only his black monochrome completely negated the image, plunged the auditorium in darkness, and turned its rows of spectators into a darkling plain of black cows. Twenty years after Cohl’s film— and fifteen years after Kazimir Ma- levich introduced his Black Square (1915) as the ponderous emblem of Suprematism— the Dada- Surrealist Man Ray returned to the jocular black monochrome. The white mount of his 1930 black photograph bore the dedication “To Robert Desnos—full of things that absorb light” (fig. intro. 3). A perennial prankster, Man Ray let it be known that the image was, in fact, a cameraless photograph or “rayograph,” where objects interposed between the light source and photographic paper absorb the light and leave virginally white traces on the paper.10 The purported technique and handwritten dedication contradicted the image: a rayograph full of things that absorb light would be white, not black. The joke— now more technical than humorous— turns not only on the limits of representation but also on the intricacies of darkroom techniques. The trajectory charted from Bilhaud to Cohl to Man Ray is instructive. In less than fifty years, a witticism about darkness became a spectatorial reality and then an avant-garde quip embedded in specific media techniques. An affront to representation became a calculated deployment of real darkness and, finally, an image that braided darkness into avant- garde

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practice. This book adumbrates a similar trajectory— only rather than follow amusing content, it elaborates a multivalent technology and aesthetic strategy. For where Bilhaud saw a one-liner, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physiologists, entertainers, architects, photographers, cinematographers, and artists recognized a technology of darkness. And where Bilhaud and his ilk produced black paintings for laughs, film pioneers like Georges Méliès and avant- garde artists like Oskar Schlemmer developed technologized darkness into an art.

* * *

Darkness has a history and a uniquely modern form. Ancients and early moderns alike knew darkness as chaos and absence, night and shadow, evil gods and melancholic thoughts, the color or noncolor black. They knew darkness principally as negation. Moderns mobilized artificial light to con- quer the dark, disenchant the night, and create new media and art. The dark corners untouched by artificial light retained the qualities of ancient darkness, whatever its modern labels: gothic, sublime, unconscious, uncanny. This much is well known. Less familiar, but no less vital, is the history of artificial darkness. Modern artificial darkness negated the negative

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 qualities ascribed to its timeless counterpart: divorced from nature and metaphor, highly controlled and circumscribed, it was a technology that fused humans and images. More precisely, controlled artificial darkness negated space, disciplined bodies, and suspended corporeality in favor of the production and reception of images. In the middle of the nineteenth century, physiologists cleaved blackness from darkness; inventors patented photographic darkrooms; and impresarios extinguished the lights in their theaters. By the late nineteenth century, darkness was controlled in a series of complementary sites, above all dark theaters and the velvet light traps known as “black screens.” These sites for the production and reception of images formed circuits of darkness that helped shape modern art, modern media, and their subjects.

Dark Sites

In order to interrogate artificial darkness, we must not ask what it was but rather where. Artificial darkness was inextricably linked to a series of sites for the production and reception of images. At the precise moment the In- cohérents made ancient darkness the butt of an art joke, two revolutionary sites consolidated the power of modern darkness. In the months between the inaugural presentation and formal exhibition of the Incohérents, just a few miles west from the home of Jules Lévy, a laboratory or “Physiological Station” was erected in the Bois de Boulogne for France’s leading physiologist, Étienne-Jules Marey. Among ingenious contraptions and devices of all kinds stood a dark, empty shed. As chapter 1 demonstrates, Marey marshaled the absolute black produced by this shed in order to facilitate sequential photography on a single plate (fig. intro. 4). To prevent the plate from clouding despite scores of exposures, Marey photographed opposite the large aperture of the shed, the interior of which was painted black and lined with black velvet. The dark shed rigorously divorced light from darkness and entertained no chiaroscuro. This giant velvet light trap ensured that little to no sunlight reflected back to the camera, except from those objects— such as seagulls, soldiers, and scientists—who flew, marched, and jumped before the dark face of the deep shed. Objects clad in black and placed before the black shed vanished but for their suits’ stick- figure traces. Marey made these multiplied traces famous under the rubric of chronophotography, a designation that resonated perfectly with Richard Wagner’s contemporaneous pronouncement “Time here becomes space.”11 Less famously, Marey labeled them “cinematic analyses.” Unlike the nothingness of cosmogonies, Marey’s black screen was a fully formed void, a darkness that was something. In one respect alone did Riegl’s dictum hold: Marey’s absolute darkness was not even space. In contrast to the bright sunlight that surrounded it, the impenetrably deep darkness appeared like a two-dimensional surface. Marey dubbed it “the black screen.” While Marey perfected the black screen and Lévy collected absurdist

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black monochromes, Richard Wagner consecrated his Festival Theater at Bayreuth (fig. intro. 5). The July 26, 1882, premiere of Parsifal was described by Wagner as his Bühnenweihfestspiel, or “festival play for the con- secration of the stage.” In the history of artificial darkness, the music of Parsifal was incidental. Instead, it was “the revolutionary darkness of the Festspielhaus,” as media theorist Friedrich Kittler proclaimed, “to which all the darknesses of our cinemas date back.”12 The darkness of the cinema— christened “Wagnerian darkness” at the turn of the twentieth century— was, as chapter 2 elucidates, a second instance, alongside Marey’s black screen, in which absolute darkness was something formed, not a formless nothing. The absolutely dark theater was no less crucial to the experience of cinema than was the luminous moving image. A generation after Riegl championed chiaroscuro as spatial darkness (Raumdunkel), Rudolf Harms, an art historian turned media philosopher, disarmingly identified the conditions that presided over cinema interiors as “spaceless darkness” (raum- loses Dunkel).13 As all moviegoers know, when the lights are extinguished we do not remain in the dark but rather forget the confines of our environment and project ourselves into the film. In the words of the Surrealist poet and cinephile Robert Desnos, “the hall and spectators disappear.”14 Cited, imitated, and amplified across the globe, Wagner’s darkened theater and Marey’s black screen were the paradigmatic sites of controlled darkness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But they

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 were in no way site specific. Bayreuth and the Physiological Station were at most metonyms for dispositifs of artificial darkness soon reproduced the world over with nearly identical results. Indeed, the specificity of these two sites lay partly in their capacity to negate site, along with space.15 Black screens and dark theaters could be erected anywhere. But as argued in chapter 2, they were most effective when erected in tandem. Wagner’s Festspielhaus codified the darkened auditorium and autonomous luminous screen as the dominant mode of theatrical and cinematic spectatorship. Marey established the principal configuration and nomenclature for the black screen: a rectangular wall of darkness in a luminous environment. Each ensemble epitomized the strict separation of light and darkness that came to be known as “absolute black” or “absolute darkness.” And yet absolute darkness was manifest in precisely inverted fashion in dark theaters and black screens: on the one hand, luminous screens in dark spaces; on the other hand, dark screens in luminous spaces. Struc- turally inverted, these darknesses performed a reciprocal set of operations linked to a series of fundamental reversals in the history of art and media. First, the dark theater and black screen prioritized darkness over light. More precisely, they initiated the strict circumscription of darkness in place of the interpenetration of light and shadow. Second, the sites for the production and reception of images gained parity with or even primacy over the individual images produced and received. Wagner’s sets were mired in nineteenth- century mise- en- scène; his theatrical revolution was architectural, not scenic. Similarly, Marey employed his black screen to produce scientific images; but the same procedures proved at least as effective in the production of stage illusions, photographic and

FIg. INtro. 5. Richard Wagner’s Festival Theater in Bayreuth, after 1882.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 cinematic tricks, and abstract dance. In the orbit of artificial darkness, the most successful images did not interrogate their own intrinsic qualities; rather, they exploited their relations to the dark sites of their production and reception. Third, the primary procedures carried out at Bayreuth and at the Physiological Station were functions of invisibility rather than visibility. Indeed, the visibility of the stage (Wagner) or of minute movements (Marey) hinged largely on operations of invisibility: subjects disappeared within Wagnerian darkness and before the black screen. (The invisibility of artificial darkness helps explain how it has largely escaped detection.) Finally, the dark theater and black screen operated through spacelessness rather than in space. Spacelessness was a discursive trope that accompanied artificial darkness: “spaceless darkness,” “spaceless stage,” and “spatial negation” number among the prototypical phrases that litter this history. But the distinction between space and spacelessness as a product of darkness is most readily graspable in phenomenological terms. The sense of disembodiment and spatial dislocation familiar in the cinema— and equally pronounced before the black screen— is completely reversed when one is forced to grope in pitch blackness. If, as Eugène Minkowski asserted and Maurice Merleau- Ponty echoed, night “is pure depth without foreground or background,” artificial darkness is pure surface without depth or space.16 Four reversals punctuate the history of artificial darkness: light to darkness; image to site; visibility to invisibility; space to spacelessness. These four reversals do not exhaustively map the operations of artificial darkness. But they do provide the framework in which to locate its history in relation to more familiar histories of art and film.

Medium vs. Dispositif

Modernists recount a history of painting preoccupied since the Renais- sance with the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. Sometime in the mid- nineteenth century, however— Édouard Manet is the artist most frequently linked to the phenomenon— painters affirmed the material reality of paint and canvas over and against the illusionistic virtual window on the world inherited from the Renaissance.17 “Re- member,” the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously entreated in 1890, “that a painting—before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other— is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”18 After nearly a half- millennium of illusionism, painting owned up to its two-dimensionality. Just across Paris, however, Marey’s black screen turned modernist flatness inside out. Marey’s dark shed, now ten meters deep, created the illusion of a perfectly flat surface or screen. Whereas Manet, Denis, and generations of painters affirmed the reality of two- dimensional images in the face of three- dimensional illusionism, Marey perfected the illusion of two dimensions from the reality of three-dimensional space. And whereas Denis pronounced painting to

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 be “essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” Marey belonged to a motley crew of scientists, entertainers, and artists who improvised black screens from diverse materials assembled in a certain order. As the chapters ahead demonstrate, proper assemblages were also realized in John Henry Pepper’s Ghost illusion, Wagner’s Festival Theater, Méliès’s Montreuil studio and Théâtre Robert- Houdin, Schlem- mer’s Bauhaus theater, and generic photographic studios and cinematic theaters worldwide. Finally, just as modernism asserted the material reality of the sign, artificial darkness enabled the spectral virtuality of the body. Whether in Wagner’s dark theater or before Marey’s black screen, spacelessness was the condition through which the physical space of bodies fused with the virtual space of images. It was left to Schlemmer— painter, teacher, choreographer, and dancer— to marry modernist aesthetics and technologies of darkness. The union was troubled from the start. Modernist painting was essentialized as flat. Theater, in turn, was hypostatized as spatial. Schlemmer exploited technologies of darkness to modulate between the illusion of two dimensions and the reality of three. And he did so with the utmost attention to individual media and art forms—painting and photography, theater and dance— but with total disregard for the essentialist claims that sequestered each into a silo of its own. As chapter 5 argues, Schlemmer’s dance with darkness arrived at an apogee of modern art through a defiance of modernist orthodoxies. His refusal to adhere to the proper number of dimensions or restrain his practice to the development of individual media (or mediums) made Schlemmer an isolated and overlooked member of the avant-garde. But the cult of medium specificity was hardly Schlemmer’s lone hindrance. The Bauhaus master published widely and kept extensive diaries. But at no point did he acknowledge artificial darkness as his primary domain. At the Bauhaus and beyond, the avant- garde doctrine was clear as day. “This century belongs to light,”19 declared another Bauhaus master, László Moholy- Nagy, alongside countless others, not least Schlemmer himself. The avant- garde located the essence of theater in space and light. Schlem- mer choreographed a dance with spaceless darkness. Schlemmer and the avant- garde lacked the aesthetic framework, technical history, and basic vocabulary to describe his ambitions. But his ambitions, struggles, and successes are plain to see once they are reinserted into the history of artificial darkness.

* * *

The marriage of artificial darkness and film was no less fraught. Main- stream and avant-garde filmmakers and exhibitors of the interbellum tried to divorce their art from the morally and physically compromised space of cinema. Sabine Hake perspicaciously registers this rupture in a widespread German terminological shift from Kino to Film around the end

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 of the First World War. “Whereas Kino emphasized the side of reception, including the framework of exhibition and the diverse cultural practices associated with the cinema as an experience and event, Film referred primarily to the finished production, in its function either as a commodity or a work of art. Film drew attention to the filmic text, whereas Kino put a stronger emphasis on the social setting.”20 Overwhelmingly, the history of film has been just that— the history of film, not cinema: cinematography and cameras, surely; editing or montage, of course. But as Gabriele Pedullà recently asserted: “The reflection of a small number of architects excepted, the movie theater has remained the great lacuna in twentieth- century film theory.”21 Pedullà’s grand assertion must be qualified. Recent scholarship has pursued the site of cinema from at least two different perspectives: first, sociological and empirical study of cinema audiences and exhibition practices, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century; second, in relation to the more recent proliferation of moving images across diverse sites and platforms, not least art galleries and museums. Notwith- standing these valuable and substantial bodies of scholarship, however, there remains a palpable reticence to do away entirely with the specificity of “film,” whatever that might mean. This book ventures a genealogy of cinema in terms of artificial darkness, one in which film, light, projected moving images, editing, and even cameras play ancillary roles. Primary, instead, are the “Wagnerian darkness” that presided over cinemas and the “cinematic analyses” executed before Marey’s black screen— that is, ensembles that preceded the so-called invention of cinema and endured well into the twentieth century. Such a genealogy, as elucidated in chapter 4, allows us to see Méliès’s magic theater as thoroughly cinematic even in the absence of film; and to grasp, as presented in chapter 5, the fundamental agon with cinema that undergirded much avant- garde art, theater, and dance, even as the artistic and theatrical avant- gardes produced but a handful of films. An archaeology of cinema that marginalizes film, light, projected moving images, montage, and cameras compels a radical recalibration of the origin or archē of cinema. Despite Marey’s chronophotographs, Wagner’s Festival Theater, Méliès’s Black Art, Schlemmer’s Bau- haus dances, and the works of countless others, nearly all archaeologies of cinema betray themselves as paeans to lights and cameras when they climax at the legendary Lumière screening at the Grand Café on Decem- ber 28, 1895. But make no mistake: in the history of artificial darkness, December 28, 1895, was just another Saturday.

* * *

Artificial Darkness does not advance the medium of darkness in place of the medium of painting or the medium of film. The histories of art and film presented here demonstrate not only that artificial darkness could operate between media but, more so, that it could only operate between media. Im-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 plicit in these histories, therefore, is a more radical proposition—asserted expansively by media theorists like Eva Horn—that there are no media.22 That is, there are no media “in a substantial and historically stable sense.”23 Joseph Vogl elaborates:

Media are not reducible to representations such as theater or film or to techniques such as printing or telegraphy. Nor are they reducible to symbols such as letters or numbers. Nevertheless, media are present in all of these things. They cannot be comprehended simply as a method for the processing, storing, or transmission of data. One can, however, reach their historical mode of existence through a special form of questioning: by asking how media determine the conditions they themselves created for what they store, process, and transmit.24

Artificial darkness was not a medium.25 Instead, it was a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions— in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif ]. The dispositif itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.”26 Michel Foucault’s conceptualiza- tion of the dispositif—the French, as addressed below, is decisively more accurate than “apparatus” or “mechanism”—encapsulates the workings of artificial darkness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in order to transpose Foucault’s verbal genealogy to our visual one, his definition must be extended from the said and the unsaid to the seen and the unseen. For artificial darkness was, above all, a technology of visibility and invisibility.27 At Bayreuth and in the spaceless darkness of the cinema, spectators “disappeared from the auditorium.” Black-clad subjects similarly vanished before Marey’s black screen. Pepper, Méliès, Schlemmer, Man Ray, and countless others mobilized artificial darkness to render bodies invisible, in whole or in parts. The invisibility engendered by artificial darkness required specific architectures, insensitivities to specific light spectra, specific physiological thresholds, or the reflectivity of specific paints. But it was not medium specific. A matter of ontics rather than ontology, invisibility was among several qualities and subject effects endemic to artificial darkness that were not the product of any one medium but rather the product of heterogeneous elements assembled in a certain order—in short, the product of a dispositif. The term dispositif can be traced back millennia.28 I will limit this inquiry to two centuries. In its modern technological usage, a dispositif is an arrangement of devices or apparatuses (appareil). In nineteenth-century manuals of photography, science, or magic, for example, a camera might be called an appareil, whereas a black screen, photographic darkroom, or theatrical attraction was more likely to be described as a disposition or dispositif. Controlled darkness was almost always an arrangement, a dispositif, rather than a self- contained device. At its most modest, a dis-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 positif is neither more nor less than a proper arrangement. The term’s two other modern meanings, however, point toward the broader network of relations central to this study. In military use, the dispositif is the proper arrangement of equipment and troops. In a juridical context, it is the le- gal decision, independent of the opinion. At its most forceful, a dispositif disciplines bodies and shapes discourses. But just as there are no media in a substantial and historically stable sense, a dispositif is always provisional, strategic, and historically specific. There was no dispositif of artificial darkness independent of the architectural and artistic forms, regulatory and administrative decisions, scientific and philosophical statements, discourses, institutions, and subjects that produced it and that were produced by it.29 The recursion inherent in this definition serves as a firewall against axiomatic first causes, such as the autonomy, specificity, and ontology tirelessly—and tiresomely—claimed for modernist arts. Artificial darkness was exploited by modern artists and filmmakers but it was not a modernist medium. In other words, this study of artificial darkness is anchored not in the false bedrock of ontology but in an ocean of discourse and praxis, tethered to a historically contingent dispositif.

Exclusions/Elaborations

Throughout Artificial Darkness we will encounter individuals, techniques, and sites that advanced the positive value of modern darkness. At this introductory stage, however, artificial darkness may be most legible as a negative image of its ancient counterpart. These negations are nuanced throughout the book but warrant brief and schematic summary here. Not total darkness. Not night. Not shadows. Not black. Not race. Not artificial light. Not total darkness. As a technology of controlled darkness, artificial darkness was incompatible with total darkness. When black screen techniques were exploited for magic performances, for instance, the stage was ringed with dazzlers— gas or electric lights with reflectors directed at the audience—to intensify the contrast and enhance the illusion. Audiences recalled bright lights rather than darkness. Not night. Artificial darkness was divorced from its natural counterpart, night, and representations thereof in nocturnes or nightscapes— subjects with extensive historiographies of their own.30 Early seminal manifestations of artificial darkness— such as the Diorama or Marey’s black screen— functioned exclusively by daylight.31 Others, like cinemas, were essentially blind to nocturnal and diurnal cycles. Not shadows. Artificial darkness demanded the concentrated presence and strict separation of light and darkness and so suffered few shadows— a penumbral phenomenon with a massive historiography that rarely over- laps with the phenomena in question here.32 Not black. Artificial darkness was distinct from the color black and

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 its abundant symbolism.33 Black monochromes were irreverent jokes or aesthetic provocations that marked the limits of established art, but they rarely channeled the operations of artificial darkness. What is more, the products of artificial darkness were often iridescent. Méliès regularly shot trick films before the black screen only to have them hand colored for distribution. And while most of Schlemmer’s costumes were sewn from light- absorbent black fabrics, they invariably included glistening blue- green-silver overlay, cardinal red tucking, or dazzling yellow spheres. Techniques of artificial darkness often produced variegated, even gaudy color images. Not race. The history of artificial darkness unfolded by and large independently from discourses on race. Nevertheless, a promising avenue for further critical scholarship is the uncomfortable union of artificial darkness and race instantiated only sporadically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but explored potently by a number of contemporary artists. Darby English establishes the terms through which any such discussion would have to unfold in his analysis of David Hammons’s Con- certo in Black and Blue (2002): “How to see a work of art in total darkness? One cannot, of course, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances, such as when darkness itself forms the condition of the work’s visibility.”34 Not artificial light. In name and in practice, artificial darkness was much more proximate to artificial light than to other forms of darkness. Substantial scholarship has chronicled the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century35 and the use of artificial lighting in art, architecture, and theater.36 But these histories, too, must be disentangled from that of artificial darkness. At a technical level, artificial darkness could and did function independently of artificial light; as already mentioned, sunlight powered many of the early dispositifs of artificial darkness, not least Marey’s Physiological Station. More interestingly, photographic and cinematic studios erected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were consistent in their deployment of artificial darkness, even as they amalgamated or alternated between natural and artificial light. The histories of artificial light and artificial darkness overlap at important junctures; but ultimately they are distinct. Nevertheless, the history of artificial darkness cannot be hermetically sealed off from total darkness, night, shadows, black, race, or artificial light. Commonalities could certainly be found in baroque tenebrism;37 Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Temple of Death;38 the Claude glass or “black mirror”;39 the mutual imbrication of gothic tropes and modern media;40 James Whistler’s nocturnes and “black portraits”;41 blue tinting or day- for- night shooting (nuit américaine);42 and hosts of recent projects in and around the ascendant black box gallery. (This book’s coda makes a few pre- liminary gestures in this direction.) Artificial Darkness focuses on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century rise and consolidation of artificial darkness around a specific circuit— black screens and dark theaters—

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 and certain of the art, media, and subjects formed therein. Artificial Dark- ness does not endeavor, however, to be the last word on artificial darkness.

Outline

Artificial darkness was formed at a series of sites that proliferated over the course of the long nineteenth century. The first two chapters of Artificial Darkness map these sites. First, in chapter 1, Marey’s Physiological Station and nineteenth-century physiology are tackled broadly alongside photographic and cinematic studios, understood as transfer stations between scientific and spectacular discourses and practices. In the second chapter, Wagner’s Festspielhaus is situated within a longer history of theater architecture, in particular cinema architecture. Chapter 1 begins with scientists and entertainers cleaving darkness from blackness. Chapter 2 culminates in the contestation of cinematic darkness by state regulators, cinema architects and operators, and avant- garde artists. Chapter 3 delineates the varied applications and consistent qualities of artificial darkness as manifest in a range of black- screen technologies over the course of the long nineteenth century— understood not only as the political arc traced from the French Revolution to the First World War, but also as a media epoch that spanned the introduction of panoramas and phantasmagorias in the late eighteenth century and the rise of cinemas in the early twentieth. The chapter opens with late eighteenth- century phantasmagoric slides; visits assorted scientists, entertainers, charlatans, magicians, and photographers in the nineteenth century; and concludes with the supersession of black-screen techniques in early and interwar cinema. Enumerated at the start and verified throughout the chapter are a series of material supports, qualities, subject effects, and gender relations that defined the black screen as a modern media dispositif. In ample evidence is an unexpected but utterly consistent subject of artificial darkness: men whose power was equaled only by their self-mutilation. Marey’s Physiological Station, Pepper’s Royal Polytechnic Institution, the studios of amateur and professional photographers, the stages of Black Art magicians, and the films of major French and American studios were all haunted by dismembered and duplicated male bodies brought forth by the black screen. The topos was consistent for over a century, but it was not a product of aesthetic influence. Rather, diverse implementations of the black screen required a consistent set of material supports, qualities of darkness, and body techniques, and yielded a consistent subject effect and iconography. Chapter 3 thus establishes the basic parameters perpet- uated, exploited, and challenged in the black-screen practices of Méliès and Schlemmer. The first three chapters pursue a media archaeology of artificial darkness. The final two chapters advance this media archaeology into film and art histories. Chapter 4 explores circuits of artificial darkness in early cin-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 ema through the exemplary figure of Georges Méliès (1861– 1938). Long heralded a father of trick and even narrative film, opposed to the Lumière brothers and cinematic realism, Méliès remains a touchstone of film history and modern visual culture more broadly. But father figures and sim- plistic dichotomies do little to recognize Méliès’s accomplishments and even less to situate him within a history of artificial darkness. Indeed, the Méliès unearthed in chapter 4 problematizes the alleged origins and essence of the medium or art form he purportedly helped found. Generations of film scholars relegated Méliès to the medium’s “theatrical” (and therefore “uncinematic”) past. Revisionists recognized in Méliès’s techniques many of the core elements of classical cinema, particularly montage, albeit in markedly different forms. Chapter 4 contends that Méliès’s “theatrical” past was already thoroughly “cinematized” through its exploitation of the black screen; it argues, alongside recent scholarship and overlooked insights from within the avant-garde, for continuity between Méliès’s theatrical and cinematic magic and newly identifies artificial darkness as their common underlying technology. Chapter 5 grapples with avant-garde art, theater, and dance alongside the enigmatic Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943). Scores of exhibitions, books, and articles have assured Schlemmer’s position in the histories of modern art, theater, and dance; but the precise coordi- nates of that position have remained stubbornly obscure. A father—yet another!— of abstract theater and dance and a noted pedagogue, Schlem- mer had no immediate followers. The Triadic Ballet (1922), his magnum opus, was performed only seven times during his life and abandoned thereafter. Schlemmer’s legacy is now scattered among treatises, paintings, costumes, production photographs, extensive commentary, notes, letters, reviews, programs, and other ephemera. Schlemmer’s Triadic Bal- let, Bauhaus dances, and related art and documentation—from finished paintings to a one- off film fragment— refuse integration into any familiar genealogy of art, theater, or dance. But once located in a history of artificial darkness, Schlemmer’s singular accomplishments are immediately recog- nizable as black-screen techniques no less proximate to Méliès’s magic than to Bauhaus abstraction. Constellated accordingly, Schlemmer’s fundamental preoccupation—the human body in relation to abstract space— gains, for the first time, aesthetic and technical precision. Schlemmer’s dance with darkness, in sum, attains visibility against the invisibility of the black screen. Despite his mastery of the black screen, Schlemmer repressed any affinity to artificial darkness and publicly and privately preached the avant- garde gospel of light. Schlemmer was symptomatic of the avant- garde’s entrenched aversion to darkness, and the silence, passivity, and death that purportedly accompanied it. A media archaeology of artificial darkness thus serves as a necessary corrective to established histories of avant- garde art. At the same time, however, avant- garde art, thought,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 and action inflect and disturb the archaeology of artificial darkness at its most important junctures. The spaceless darkness codified at Bayreuth and promulgated in cinemas was redirected most adroitly by Dadaists and Surrealists. Méliès’s ecstatic engagement with artificial darkness left no trace among contemporaneous audiences but was registered profoundly by successive avant-gardes. Finally, Schlemmer’s black-screen antics may have borne a superficial resemblance to commonplace cabaret, but only Schlemmer’s Bauhaus theater made the complex imbrication of the human body, abstract space, and technologized darkness acutely visible. Just as avant-garde practices like Schlemmer’s are illegible without a media archaeology of artificial darkness, so too is the history of artificial darkness inaccessible without the multivalent interventions of the avant- garde. The cross- fertilization of media archaeology and art and film histories requires the overthrow of several avant-garde binaries—above all the opposition between art and life. Peter Bürger famously began his theory of the avant-garde with the problem of artistic autonomy in bourgeois society and the concomitant and insuperable gap between art and life.43 Bürger’s powerful framework dovetailed notably with practices and discourses across the avant-garde gamut. The imperative to restore art to the praxis of life undergirded a multitude of avant- garde projects and innumerable analyses thereof. What is lost in this equation— however potent and productive— is a second set of historical conditions, parallel to the autonomy of modern art: namely, the ubiquity of modern images. The historical avant- gardes are simply unthinkable without a world, a life, already suffused with images of greater and lesser artistry. The fusion of art and life not only was an aim of the avant- gardes; it was also their condition of possibility. The murmur that disturbs every chapter of this book can be formulated as a question that doubles as an imperative. How does one best live in a world of images? This book ventures one set of answers in relation to a largely uncharted but ubiquitous image sphere, the dispositif of artificial darkness, and to the art and media that gave it form.

Artificial darkness is controlled darkness. The configuration of that darkness hinges on the sites that control it. By the end of the nineteenth century, sites of controlled darkness emerged as centers of image production and reception. Conditions once localized in early nineteenth-century attractions like panoramas and dioramas became, by the end of the century, a generalized dispositif recognized, albeit piecemeal, in scientific treatises, photography and cinema handbooks, theater and magic manuals, and architecture anthologies. By the early twentieth century, artificial darkness was a touchstone for wide-ranging avant-gardes. Artificial darkness was never limited to a single site and so was never a monolithic entity. Three sites in particular instantiated the invisibility, spacelessness, and disembodied discipline that were the hallmarks of most artificial darknesses. The principal two sites were dialectical twins: black screens (set in luminous environments) and dark theaters (home to luminous screens) anchored the dispositif of artificial darkness as it consolidated in the late nineteenth century. Black screens and dark theaters were often joined or mediated by a third site: photographic and cinematic studios, in particular, darkrooms. These three sites formed circuits of artificial darkness that at times operated seamlessly. Just as often, the dark current was staggered, asymmet- rical, and complex. On occasion, it short- circuited. The dispositif of artificial darkness has gone unremarked for the last century because, as Friedrich Kittler asserts, “the facts of physiology and media technology remain too dumb or too unconscious for critics.”1 Yet physiology and media technology were precisely the domains in which artificial darkness thrived. Artificial darkness took hold the moment physiologists and media impresarios saw absolute darkness as an opportunity rather than a limit. They recognized that for every “extension of man”2 afforded by media, there were no fewer occasions to confound him or her. The highly coordinated effort— after all, a dispositif is little more and nothing less than judicious coordination—required that three conditions be met: darkness was cleaved from blackness; artificial darkness was mobilized in diverse sites of image production; and it was deployed system-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 atically in sites of image reception. These conditions gathered steam over the course of the long nineteenth century and came to a head in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In physiological debates and devices, photographic and cinematic studios, and darkened purpose-built theaters, darkness attained its modern form. The aim of this chapter is less to identify the qualities of artificial darkness— a task taken up in chapter 3— than to map its emergence in late nineteenth-century sites, technologies, discourses, regulations, architectures, operations, and their systems of relations.

Cinematic Darkness I: Étienne-Jules Marey

The black screen was no screen at all. Instead it was a cavity or chamber, draped in black velvet, whose open side circumscribed a darkness so impenetrably deep as to appear two-dimensional (fig. 1.1). As Albert Hopkins and nearly every other informed author noted, black-screen techniques were perfected not in theaters or portrait studios but rather at a laboratory constructed for the French physiologist Étienne- Jules Marey.

The condition most difficult of fulfillment is the absolute darkness of the screen before the photographs are taken. Little light as there is, the screen might reflect upon this sensitized plate, during a single exposure, small quantities of light, which would tend to fog the plate. A wall painted with any black pigment, or even covered with black velvet, exposed to the sun, reflects too much light for a plate to withstand. The term “black screen” is used in a metaphorical sense. In reality the work is done before a dark cavity, being in truth what is known as “Chevreul’s black.” To obtain these favorable conditions, a chamber nearly thirty-three feet deep and of equal breadth was constructed; one face of this chamber was open, and restricted by movable frames to the exact height necessary. The interior of the chamber was completely blackened, the ground was coated with pitch, and the back hung with black velvet.3

Marey credited the eminent French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul with the discovery of the phenomenon that undergirded his black screen. “Absolute black,” as Chevreul dubbed it, soon garnered the moniker “Chevreul’s black,” a homage that reflected Marey’s commendation no less than Chevreul’s seniority. At the time he introduced the black screen, Marey was already the most prominent physiologist in France. He had made a career in the study of movement, perfected the “graphic method” to transcribe animal motion as legible traces, and was elected to the Collège de France and the Académie des sciences. Through a range of ingenious devices, often of his own design, Marey rendered graphic the pulsation of muscles, circulation of blood, beating of wings, and trotting of hooves.4 These utterly precise graphic representations remained ensconced in scientific treatises and journals, as they lacked the visual immediacy demanded by a general public. Such visual immediacies and publics were the lifeblood of one

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.1. Marey, black screen at the Physiological Station, 1886. Fonds Marey, Collège de France. Negative: Album H, plate 4, Musée Marey, Beaune.

Eadweard Muybridge.5 An entrepreneurial photographer rather than a scientist, Muybridge successfully captured a galloping horse midstride on a series of photographic plates. Impressed by the sharpness of the images but disappointed by the lack of methodological rigor, Marey set out to improve on Muybridge’s work. In an effort to render his own graphic method photographic, Marey turned to the black screen. The principle behind black screens was timeless: a properly arranged light trap whose impermeable darkness appeared like a two- dimensional, absolutely black screen. A cave and high-noon sun could serve as a perfectly functional black screen—as Marey’s letters attest.6 Dark fields had been used previously for microscopy and virtually all astronomy— the night sky is nothing if not an absolutely dark field interspersed with luminous or illuminated bodies, such as stars and moons—but few attempts were made in human proportions.7 By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the once insuperable gap between exact sciences such as astronomy and human sciences such as physiology narrowed. Dark fields were among the bridges that conjoined “the surveillance of the heavens and surveillance of man.”8 Marey’s black screen gave form to this scientific drive. Marey’s Physiological Station has generally been understood as a site arranged for the production of visibility. François Dagognet anchors his study of Marey precisely in the victory of light over darkness. “No one was as successful at making visible what kept to the shadows. How were these dark areas to be lighted? The forces of life are hidden; by transposing them he brought them fully into the light.”9 At the Physiological Station, however, metaphors of light and visibility rested upon technologies of

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 darkness and invisibility. In November 1881, the municipal council of the city of Paris granted Marey, the newly elected chair in medicine at the Académie des sciences, a plot of land, known as the Parc des Princes, in the Bois de Boulogne. Over the next half decade, Marey erected three separate black screens at the Physiological Station.10 By the summer of 1882, he produced his first chronophotographs against a black background. The initial configurations were primitive and the results were unsatisfactory: a simple lean- to (1882) was soon replaced by a shed three meters deep, fifteen meters wide, and four meters high (1883), whose interior was painted black and draped in black velvet. An 1883 chronophotograph of middling quality illustrates the necessary symbiosis between the various elements (fig. 1.2). The shed alone was not dark enough to obscure a ladder and other bric- a- brac (visible at the far right) or create the necessary contrast by which Marey’s striding figure would be visible as anything more than a ghostly trace. Only the combination of black shed, black costume, and black velvet created an operative black screen against which “cinematic analysis” could unfold. Yet even these early, ineffective attempts evinced a revolutionary principle whose execution Marey quickly perfected. Unlike Muybridge, who captured movement sequentially with a bank of cameras opposite a white wall, one image per camera, Marey captured multiple exposures on a single, stationary plate. The black screen opposite the camera ensured that (virtually) no light reflected back onto the photographic plate. Marey explained his method in a September 1883 article in La Nature, translated into English and published two months later in the American journal Science:

The apparatus [disposition] employed at the physiological station for the instan- taneous photography of movements comprises two distinct parts,— first, the photographic apparatus [l’appareil photographique], with the room on wheels [chambre roulante], which holds it; and, secondly, the black screen [écran noir], on which appear in white the men and animals whose pictures are being taken, as well as the instruments for measuring the distance run, and the time consumed between two successive photographs.11

FIg. 1.2. Marey, chronophotograph, 1883. Gelatin silver bromide glass negative, 1⅛ × 4⅛ in (2.7 × 10.3 cm). Fonds Marey, Collège de France.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.3. Marey, Physiological Station, c. 1886. Photograph and text from albums assembled and annotated between 1882 and 1889, under the direction of Marey. The caption reads “Black screen and camera-on- wheels arranged [disposés] for chronophotographic experiments.” Fonds Marey, Collège de France.

A large camera outfitted with a slotted disc for a shutter was placed opposite a deep, blackened shed (fig. 1.3). Once the disc attained a regulated speed of eight or ten revolutions per second, the subject—man, beast, or object; naturally, painted, or clad in white—would pass in full sunlight before the mouth of the shed. The end result was a photograph comprised of a white subject multiplied across a uniform black background. The black screen was a velvet light trap that enabled the pristine exposure of a single plate tens or scores of times. Circumscription and proper disposition reduced darkness to two dimensions. As such, inchoate darkness could be formed, that is, transformed into a positive term, an enabling condition, an apparatus. Indeed, Marey insisted on a distinction largely lost in English translation. The apparatus— Marey used the term disposition and, later, dispositif 12— constructed at the Physiological Station consisted of a photographic apparatus— an appareil photographique—as well as the black screen. The camera was just one apparatus within a complex dispositif. Alongside “black screen,” Marey advanced a potpourri of terms:

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.4. Marey, black screens from 1886 (at the left) and 1887 (at the rear). Album H, plate 5, Musée Marey, Beaune.

“black field” (champ noir),13 “deep” or “dark shed” (hangar profond, obscur),14 dark cavity (cavité obscur), black opening (ouverture noire), black ground (fond noir), and other compound terms steamrolled, in contemporaneous translations, into the English omnibus “dark chamber”15—a particularly maladroit translation as the French equivalent, chambre noire, was reserved for the camera, the appareil photographique. And yet the translator’s confusion among the various “dark chambers” in Marey’s dispositif be- trayed the complementary darknesses that bolstered chronophotography. The subjects chronophotographed by Marey were channeled between the apertures of two dark chambers: one whose named denied its chamber (the écran noir or black screen) and a second properly so called (chambre roulante or room on wheels). In 1887, likely influenced by Muybridge’s experiments, Marey added two more cameras and black screens in an effort to photograph subjects from three sides. Atop a pylon erected over the black hangar of 1886, Marey mounted a camera aimed straight down to capture subjects from above. (See the pylon at the rear of fig. 1.3.) For this zenith camera, the path before the black shed was covered in bitumen (asphalt) to serve as a rudimentary black screen.16 A second, proper black shed was erected perpendicular to the first (fig. 1.4). Subjects— in particular birds in flight— could now be captured in a sophisticated dispositif consisting of three cameras and three black screens. In this circuit of artificial darkness, Marey’s room on wheels com- bined the attributes of photographic cameras and darkrooms: the operator of the photographic apparatus could follow the various motions he studied through a “red glass,” which also safeguarded the all-important “chemical” darkness within.17 Ensconced in a chamber in which dark-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 ness bespoke photographic production more than human observation, Marey was the very emblem of the objective scientist who, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s scornful reflection, “lets himself be emptied until he is no more than an objective sheet of plate glass.”18 Indeed, Georges Demenÿ’s metic- ulous diagram of the disposition of apparatuses establishes a symmetry and equality between the chamber, in which Marey and his camera are enshrouded in darkness, and the black screen, which cloaks an apparatus for the registration of pressure behind a wall of darkness (fig. 1.5). Marey became a hero of scientific objectivity by literally writing himself out of his (photo)graphic method. In 1878, Marey outlined his methods and instruments, and their relationship to scientific observation as hitherto practiced: “Not only are these instruments [appareils] destined to replace the observer, at times, and accomplish their role with an incontestable superiority; but they also have their own domain where nothing can replace them. When the eye ceases to see, the ear to hear, and touch to feel, or even when our senses provide us with deceptive appearances, these instruments are like new senses of astonishing precision.”19 Sphygmographs, chronographs, myographs,

FIg. 1.5. Georges Demenÿ, “Figure showing the arrangement [disposition] of devices used in experimental mechanics research on human locomotion at the Physiological Station, Parc des Princes,” December 1884. Dépôt du Collège de France en 1975, Musée Marey, Beaune. Photo: J.- C. Couval.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 polygraphs, and a host of other devices invented or perfected by Marey helped solidify a new model for scientific research. As historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue, Marey was a pioneer of the mechanical objectivity that undergirded scientific discourse and practice from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Das- ton and Galison define objectivity first and foremost as the countering of subjectivity through heroic self-discipline, such that “where human self- discipline flagged, the machine would take over. [. . .] Marey and his contemporaries turned to mechanically produced images to eliminate suspect mediation.”20 Marey succeeded so thoroughly in the elimination of subjectivity that photography historian Joel Snyder doubts whether one can even speak of human intervention at the Physiological Station: “In most of Marey’s experimental work there is no place (literally or figuratively) for human intervention, nothing for a mediator to mediate.”21 Marey’s chambre roulante— a chamber of artificial darkness— was literally and figuratively the “no place” from which he launched his self- disciplined, self- annihilating photographic conquest of objectivity. In Daston and Galison’s magisterial account, mechanical objectivity was bound to a scientific self that aspired to “self-denying passivity [. . . ], self-discipline, self-restraint, self- abnegation, self- annihilation, and a multitude of other techniques of self- imposed selflessness.”22 As discussed in chapter 2, late nineteenth and early twentieth- century scientists shared a self- abnegating subjectivity with contemporaneous spectators annihilated and disciplined by dioramas, theatrons, spectatoriums, cinemas, and other darkened auditoriums. More immediately, Marey’s dispositif of darkness produced its own double: the self-disciplined, self-annihilating scientific subject within the dark room on wheels was mirrored by the self- disciplined, self- annihilating subject before the black screen. As Marey increased the number of exposures in an effort to trace movements with ever greater precision, he quickly understood that the complete presence of the body impeded its chronophotographic inscription. Overlapping limbs—the result of closely spaced exposures—delivered illegible photographs (fig. 1.6). To render body parts invisible— and, thus, movement more legible— Marey partially dressed subjects in black and photographed them against the black screen, a technique he dubbed “partial photography”23 (fig. 1.7). Eventually his subjects, beginning with his collaborator Georges Demenÿ, dressed in full-body black suits adorned with metallic buttons at joints and metallic strips along extremities (fig. 1.8). These “human skeletons”24 performed movements in front of— and thus disappeared into—the black screen.25 The ensuing image— what Marey labeled “cinematic analysis” years before the introduction of the Cinématographe—contained highly graphic, nearly abstract notations of human motion, the chronophotographic traces of minuscule human movements visually unmoored from bodies and space26 (fig. 1.9). Marey’s

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.6. Marey, chronophotograph, c. 1882. Photograph and text from albums assembled and annotated between 1882 and 1889, under the direction of Marey. The caption reads “Successive images of a marching man.” Fonds Marey, Collège de France.

FIg. 1.7. Marey, chronophotograph, c. 1883. Photograph and text from albums assembled and annotated between 1882 and 1889, under the direction of Marey. The caption reads “Successive partial images of a

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.8. Georges De- menÿ in the “human skeleton” suit, 1884. Album A, plate 12, Musée Marey, Beaune.

FIg. 1.9. Marey, chronophotograph, 1883. Photograph and text from albums assembled and annotated between 1882 and 1889, under the direction of Marey. The caption reads “Cinematic analysis of running.” Fonds Marey, Collège de France. Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 cinematic analysis before the black screen was a linchpin between the physical space of bodies and the virtual space of images. Kittler’s genealogy of “cinema” leaps over Marey and unearths the differential equations of the Weber brothers in the 1830s, where “cinematics in the French sense of the word [. . .] becomes cinematics in the modern sense: it calculates virtual movements in virtual, that is, visualizable spaces.”27 For Kittler, virtual movements and spaces were necessarily mathematical. As deployed by Marey, however, the spacelessness of Chevreul’s black enabled the interpenetration of virtual movements with real human bodies. Marey’s black screen thus expedited the perfection of the graphic method. Before the black screen, humans were transposed into graphic notations. Human skeletons gave way to living stick figures. Cinema, according to Marey, was nothing less than a superhuman or ex- trahuman form of vision that offered astonishing precision where human organs suffered deceptive appearances. Inevitably, the question arose: how best to capitalize on this superhuman vision? Marey was more interested in the science of motion than in its applications, but he and Demenÿ eventually mobilized the black screen to discipline the bodies of soldiers and students.28 They worked— with the financial and logistical support of the French military—to maximize the efficiency of citizen soldiers. Their methods were developed by the engineer Charles Fremont and, later, by Frank B. Gilbreth, the founder of Scientific Management, to optimize the productivity of workers. Albert Londe, a follower of Marey’s, would use similar techniques to discipline mental patients at Charcot’s Salpêtrière.29 As Anson Rabinbach argues, “Marey’s accomplishment, to establish a science of the human motor [. . .] was also a modernist politics, the politics of a state devoted to maximizing the economy of the body.”30 That black- screen technologies could be deployed on a range of docile bodies was recognized immediately by state, military, and industry. Artificial darkness was therefore a dispositif in a second and broader sense, manifest in a range of fields with no direct relation to photography. As such, it approached the level of generality ascribed by Foucault to the panoptic dispositif, for example, even as it reversed aspects of that dispositif’s paradigmatic configuration in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.31 In plan and elevation, the Panopticon was little more than a circular building with individual cells at the periphery and a guard tower at the center. But Bentham’s model, as elaborated by Foucault, points toward a far-reaching power-knowledge system:

All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism [dis-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 positif panoptique] arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon. [. . .] Full lighting and the eye of a superior capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.32

The inmates internalized the gaze of an invisible and thus omnipresent guard. This much is familiar. Less remarked upon, but no less remarkable, were the precise configurations of visibility and invisibility, light and dark, stipulated by Bentham and cataloged by Foucault. The Panopticon’s actor- inmates— individualized and perpetually visible against a luminous backdrop—were the precise inversions of the invisible guard in the central tower. The invisibility of the guard, guaranteed by the Panopticon’s luminous exterior and dark interior, protected him and rendered his physical presence superfluous.33 Bentham’s appeal lay partly in allaying late eighteenth-century fears of dark, hidden places. He advanced “power through transparency” and subjection by “illumination.”34 Visibility and enlightenment— in the literal and metaphoric senses— coincided in the Panopticon to discipline the body of the inmate. Marey’s black screen pursued the same disciplinary enlightenment but reversed its relationship to visibility and light. Bentham’s Panopticon and Marey’s black screen attended to a similar menagerie of docile bodies. But whereas the Panop- ticon aspired to “absolute visibility”35 and transparency, the consumma- tion of Marey’s black screen was attained through the proper disposition of invisibility and “absolute black.” For Marey and his sundry followers, enlightenment was achieved through darkness. Invisibility was a trap.

Absolute Black: Cleaving Darkness from Blackness

The artificiality of darkness first came into focus against the backdrop of nineteenth- century physiology and its claims on human vision. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as Jonathan Crary has astutely argued, “the body that had been a neutral or invisible term in vision was now the thickness from which knowledge of the observer was obtained.”36 By midcentury, that thickness dominated multifarious technologies and knowledges of the body. Concurrently, however, corporeal thickness was met with the deceptive flatness of the black screen. Knowledge obtained from the newly visible body was used to render the body invisible. This invisibility was no longer a philosophical a priori; dark spaces like the camera obscura ceased to serve as models for human vision. Rather, invisibility was the result of bodily discipline and technological precision: black-clad figures vanished before black screens. The designation “Chevreul’s black” inextricably linked late nineteenth- century technologies of darkness to early nineteenth-century physiology. At first blush, it is not hard to imagine why Marey would have credited Chevreul with the discovery of absolute black. By the 1880s, Chevreul was

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 renowned on at least three separate counts. First, there was his work in chemistry, in particular fatty acids.37 Second, his 1839 treatise The Princi- ples of Harmony and Contrast of Colors served, directly and indirectly, as a touchstone for much nineteenth-century color theory and painting practice.38 Third, he had lived through the French Revolution and not only was still alive but remained quite active in scientific discourse, not least at the Académie des sciences, where Marey also held a chair.39 Beginning in 1876, around his ninetieth birthday, Chevreul published a series of notes in the Comptes Rendues des séances de l’Académie des sciences on the distinction between material and absolute black.40 Chevreul determined that the law of simultaneous contrast— a physiological phenomenon akin to afterimages, the retention of a visual image after the stimulus has ceased— held so long as the contrast occurred between colored and blackened pieces of paper. But the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast failed to materialize when a black paper circle was replaced by a hole that opened onto a darkened cavity. In the first instance, the blackened paper reflected just enough light to engender the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast. “Material black,” to use Chevreul’s neologism, always reflected at least a modicum of white light, no matter how much it was darkened. The second example involved not a surface but a hole that opened onto a dark cavity and allowed no light to escape. This Chevreul christened “absolute black” (noir absolu). Chevreul had successfully identified an instance where the properties of blackness and those of darkness did not correspond. Chevreul was hardly the first to employ a velvet light trap for experiments in color and perception.41 But he had the good fortune of inspiring Marey, who, in turn, instigated generations of media inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists. “Chevreul’s black” became a staple of media technology. Tellingly, even Chevreul’s study of absolute black originated in photography. Years earlier, Chevreul had collaborated with the photographer Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor. (Niépce de Saint-Victor was a second cousin of photography pioneer Nicéphore Niépce; his greatest contribution to photography was his 1848 introduction of glass negatives using albumen, an invention presented to the Académie by Chevreul.)42 Chevreul and Niépce de Saint- Victor collaborated for decades on a range of topics pertaining to photography, color, and black.43 In an 1866 note, Niépce de Saint- Victor articulated the principle that would later undergird Marey’s photographic deployment of Chevreul’s absolute black. “At the request of M. Chevreul, I photographed a hole: the result was negative, that is, there was no man- ifestation of active radiation.”44 Ten years would pass before Chevreul elaborated the physiological implications of this discovery. And only in 1882 would Marey return this photographic insight to the realm of photography. But Niépce de Saint-Victor’s 1860s photograph of a black hole and Marey’s 1880s photographs into a black shed close a media circuit of dark chambers in which humans figured only provisionally, if at all. For both Niépce de Saint-Victor and Marey, absolute black was a property of

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 certain dark chambers (velvet light traps and black screens) best captured by other dark chambers (cameras and darkrooms). After a short squabble with a certain Auguste Rosenstiehl regarding the paternity and nomenclature of absolute black— Rosenstiehl claimed prior- ity and advanced his own neologism, noir idéal or “ideal black”45— Chevreul published a second major treatise on color vision in 1879 that, despite his great name and senior status, failed to impact scientific discourse beyond Marey.46 The reason was twofold. First, neither Chevreul nor Rosenstiehl could claim credit for the distinction between material and absolute black. That division was already established in the field of physiology— and was intuited, if untheorized, for centuries. Second and more important, recent advances in physiology demonstrated that Chevreul’s absolute black was a contradiction in terms, at least from the perspective of human vision. In- deed, Chevreul’s discovery was but a symptom of a much broader cleaving of blackness from darkness that unfolded in the mid- nineteenth century. In the early 1860s, as part of a series of studies on retinal excitation, the German physiologist Adolf Fick developed a black box (schwarzer Kasten) so dark that the darkest black paper appeared gray by comparison.47 Fick’s black box with its “absolute black background”48 preceded Chevreul’s by more than a decade and, in turn, was surely preceded by others. What distinguished Fick from prior— and, in the case of Chevreul, later— experiments was his insistence that even a perfectly executed black box was not absolutely black: “rather, on the one hand, a small quantity of light did escape from the box and, on the other hand, the intrinsic light of the retina [Eigenlicht der Netzhaut] was active in the black areas.”49 Fick’s first reservation was later echoed by Marey, who maintained that in theory the black screen should permit infinite photographic exposures but that in practice several hundred successive images tended to fog the plate, which “proves that a small quantity of light emanates from this source.”50 Fick’s second reservation leaped from media technology to human physiology. Fick chastised Joseph Plateau— the Belgian physicist most famous for his 1832 invention of the phenakistoscope— for utilizing black surfaces that were not absolutely black. It appears that Plateau took the chastise- ment to heart. In the early 1870s, Plateau similarly distinguished absolute from material black, elaborated the experimental conditions necessary for its realization, and asserted its limited value to the science of human vision. In a short study on physical and physiological sensation, Plateau constructed a series or scale from the darkest black to the lightest white articulated, perhaps for the first time, through relative rather than absolute values. In an aside, Plateau acknowledged that even the blackest square always reflected a modicum of light and recommended that scientists substitute for the blackened square a “space entirely deprived of light which thus creates a sensorially absolute black [noir sensiblement absolu].” In a single sentence, Plateau successfully distinguished between material and absolute black—to use Chevreul’s terminology—to which he added a

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 crucial caveat, that absolute black is always relativized by the human sensorium. Plateau specified that his analysis discounted the weak sensation of “subjective light”— what Fick described as “intrinsic light”— which the eyes perceive even in the most complete darkness and which is the product of physiological actions.51 The seemingly self- evident and largely unspoken equivalence between blackness and darkness was contradicted by the oft- observed fact that a protracted immersion in perfect darkness yielded the visual sensation not of increased blackness but rather its opposite: the perception of subtle luminosity independent of any external stimulation. Observed and theorized by early nineteenth-century figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jan Evangelista Purkyně, the condition attained a host of appellations over the ensuing decades: light chaos, light dust, self-light, idioretinal light, intrinsic brightness or darkness, retinal noise, and, most famously, intrinsic light (Eigenlicht) and intrinsic gray (Eigengrau).52 Herein lay the kernel of a radical physiological distinction between darkness and blackness— between the absence of stimulation and the positive sensation of black— a distinction systematically repressed in the physiological literature prior to the 1860s.53 From at least Aristotle until the mid- nineteenth century, black was persistently equated with absence and negation.54 “Black” and “darkness” were— and remain— nearly synonymous.55 In the nineteenth century, however, the self- evident equivalence that bound blackness to darkness came under pressure. From the 1860s through the 1880s, scientists cleaved the subjective perception of black from the objective phenomenon of darkness. As Crary has shown, Goethe led a revolution from geometrical optics to physiological optics in the early nineteenth century.56 Yet even as he reserved an erroneously seminal place for darkness in his color theory, Goethe nevertheless maintained that “black, as the equivalent of darkness, leaves the organ in a state of repose; white, as the representative of light, excites it.”57 The case of Johannes Müller is even more startling. His multivolume handbook for physiology (published beginning in 1833) was not only “the most respected physiology text for much of the nineteenth century”58 but also, as Crary has demonstrated, among the most radical nineteenth-century texts in terms of the elision of internal and external sensation.59 Nevertheless, Müller repeatedly insisted that “darkness, or the color black, is the mere negative result of certain parts of the retina, or its entire surface, being in the state of repose or freedom from excitement.”60 Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Müller equated darkness, retinal repose, the absence of stimulation, and the color black— preserving the dominant opinion of philosophers, color theorists, and physiologists since Aristotle. Hermann von Helmholtz inaugurated a revisionist account in his own multivolume handbook for physiological optics, published between 1856 and 1866 (and issued together in 1867). Thenceforth black would be un-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 derstood as a positive term. In a popular publication of 1868, Helmholtz expounded the precarious status of black. “Black is only darkness— that is, simple absence of light. But when we examine the colors of external objects, black corresponds just as much to a peculiarity of surface in reflection, as does white, and therefore has as good a right to be called a color.”61 In his more scholarly writings, Helmholtz sharply distinguished, first, the absence of light (darkness) from an object that reflects little or no light (black), and, further, the sensation of black from a complete lack of sensation. Among his quotidian proofs for the latter, he observed that objects behind us, from which we receive no sensation, do not appear black; they simply do not appear. More to the point, the darkness perceived with closed eyes does not extend beyond our visual field.62 For Helmholtz’s nemesis, physiologist Ewald Hering, these observations did not go far enough. Hering was one of the most vociferous advocates of subjective vision in the second half of the century. He separated what he called the inner eye— that is, the neural visual system comprised of retina, optic nerve, and the related parts of the brain— from the outer eye, namely, the dioptric mechanism often likened to a camera obscura. “The whole visual world and its content,” Hering wrote, “is a creation of our inner eye . . . in contrast to . . . the outer eye.”63 For decades, Hering stridently attacked Helmholtz as erroneously providing physical or psychological answers to physiological problems.64 Hering singled out for ridicule that aspect of earlier and competing models that posited the field of vision of the darkened eye as “a blackboard erected in the human soul” on which variegated images are painted through external light or internal stimuli. Worse yet, scientists summarily ignored this “blackboard” in favor of the images thereon. The sensation of black, Hering avowed in 1874, must be studied with the same rigor as the sensation of brightness.65 Toward this end, Hering affirmed Helmholtz’s distinction between the sensation of black and the lack of all sensation but hastened to add that “what Helmholtz did not mention is that we see a deep black only when the visible field elsewhere is well illuminated.”66 In the context of physiological optics, Hering argued, absolute black was an imaginary limit, and even deep black is “but an illusion [Täuschung] produced by contrast effects.”67 Hering posited a distinction between the photosensitive layer of the retina (Empfangsstoffe, i.e., the rods and cones) and the neural layer (Sehsubstanz). The former processes color roughly in accordance with the Young-Helmholtz- Maxwell model and its optical primaries of red, green, and blue.68 The neural network extending from the retina to the brain— what Hering called the Sehsubstanz—processes optical stimulation antagonistically: red versus green, yellow versus blue, and white versus black, a mode of processing inadvertently adopted in color television decades later.69 Recent neuroscience has largely vindicated Hering’s theory of color opponency.70 In the nineteenth century, the best proofs for color

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 opponency were found, first, in the precise qualities of afterimages; second, in explanations of color blindness, particularly red-green blindness; and, finally, in the fundamental fact that humans see nearly every combination of colors with the exception of reddish greens (or greenish reds) and bluish yellows (or yellowish blues). Red-green and yellow-blue are opponent pairs. For Hering—and more recent neuroscience—the assertion that black is the absence of light is no more valid than the definition of green as the absence of red.71 Black is a sensation like any other, antagonistically bound to white such that the increase of one requires the diminution of the other.72 The only major distinctions between black– white opponency and red– green or yellow–blue opponency are, first, that black is triggered indirectly, and, second, that we are able to perceive mixtures of black and white as gray, whereas we cannot perceive reddish greens or bluish yellows. Additionally, in order to perceive black as a positive sensation, the eye maintains low- level neural activity for both black and white sensations. In the absence of any external stimulation— for example, during a prolonged stay in a completely darkened room— the inner eye arrives at a gray equilibrium, an Eigengrau or intrinsic gray, produced by low- level black and white neural activity. For this reason, “one generally perceives deep black only in an illuminated room”73 or after exposure to strong illumination— in short, as a contrast effect. Two crucial points emerge from this brief history of the physiology of black. First, the simple fact that the physiology of black— that is, black as a positive sensation and not merely the eye’s repose—first emerged as a major issue in the 1860s and ’70s, despite the rise of physiological optics and the preponderance of evidence decades earlier.74 Second, Chevreul’s absolute black— used as a backdrop for experiments in simultaneous contrast—was more often a mere illusion produced by contrast effects. From the perspective of contemporaneous physiology, Chevreul’s fundamental distinction between absolute and material black was largely bunk. That “absolute black” found few adherents among physiologists requires no further explanation. The question, instead, is why Marey— the leading French physiologist of the second half of the nineteenth century— gave so much credence to Chevreul’s theory. The media archaeological answer is obvious. Cameras produce no intrinsic gray; and the Eigengrau produced by humans can be subdued readily through dazzlers and other stark lighting schemas. If the physiology of absolute black quickly fell into scientific oblivion, the black screen, as it came to be known among photographers, magicians, cinematographers, and others, was widely adopted as a central component of the emergent dispositif of artificial darkness. The crux is this: Chevreul championed absolute black as a tool to investigate human vision. Marey and a host of scientists, entertainers, and artists deployed Chevreul’s black as a dispositif to replace or overwhelm it.

The distinction between physiological black and media darkness was well known to photographers. John Herschel, William Henry Fox Talbot, and other photographic pioneers recognized the photochemical effects of “invisible rays which lie beyond the violet” and envisioned environments in which “the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.”75 More relevant to the photographic studio and to an archaeology of artificial darkness was the inverse of this phenomenon: in the darkroom, human eyes could see plainly where the photographic plate registered nothing. Stated simply: photographic darkrooms were not dark. At least not to the human observer. In the “cabinet obscur,” according to one of innumerable photographic manuals that addressed the subject, “one cannot take the word ‘obscure’ literally.”76 Incessantly, photographers were warned: “Do not commit the too common error of having this room too dark.”77 The light should be “not only reliable, but also sufficiently bright; once the eyes have adjusted to the darkness, one should be able to read printed matter like this [book] at a distance of 50 cm from the lamp.”78 A nonphotographer could legitimately ask: What made the darkroom dark? The manuals answered this question as well. “It need not be dark in a visual, but only in a chemical sense.”79 Contemporaneous manuals regularly featured strong shadows cast by the sun while the darkroom was in use (fig. 1.10). The darkroom provided shelter from actinic light and produced “a sort of chemical darkness [obscurité chimique].”80 Actinic light. Chemical darkness. Darkrooms that must not be dark. We have entered spaces no less foreign to our digital present than they must have been to the eighteenth- century past. For the darkroom was one in a series of spaces designed around mediated light and darkness. Collectively, they marked a radical departure from the long line of studios from which they ostensibly descended. Artists’ studios, of course, have existed for centuries.81 The quality of light in them was often, if not always, a central concern. But only with the advent of photography— followed immediately by the proliferation of photographic studios in the 1840s—did mediated light and mediated darkness become the norm. Nineteenth-century photographic studios were characterized by a slight variety in layouts82 and a wide spectrum of sumptuousness.83 But as dispositifs of light and darkness, they varied little.84 The centerpiece of every photographic studio was the atelier where portraits were taken. Commonly known as “glass rooms” or “glass houses,” they assured the all- important proper disposition of light:

No subject concerns the professional photographer more deeply than the glass room. Chemicals, lenses, and cameras he can always obtain of excellent quality from dealers of reputation, but in the construction of the glass room he must de- pend to a large extent upon himself, acting under such information and instruc- tion as he can obtain. It is certain that a very clever operator will occasionally

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.10. A. Jahan- dler, representation of a darkroom in Edward L. Wilson, Wilson’s Photographics, 1881. The caption reads “The drawing below supplies an admi- rable model, though supplied with rather more than properly belongs to the work of the dark-room.”

obtain good pictures in almost any glass room; this is not, however, what is wanted. The disposition of light should be such as to facilitate to the utmost the really difficult task of regular success.85

For the proper disposition of light, quality trumped quantity. Photogra- phers were encouraged to build studios atop buildings (quantity) and have windows and skylights face north (quality). But northern windows— advanced for artists’ studios at least since Leonardo da Vinci—proved insufficient regulators for photographic practice. So photographers, chem- ists, inventors, and entrepreneurs turned to a series of media for the control of light and darkness. In certain respects, the studio’s primary operations required diametrically opposed spaces. As elucidated by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, among the leading photochemists of the late nineteenth century: “These operations cannot be carried out in one and the same room [Raum], all the more so as they demand diametrically opposed conditions: to record the model, ample light; to prepare the plates, darkness. Thus, every photographer requires a complex of premises [Räumlichkeiten] that nonetheless can often be re-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 duced to two: the atelier and the ‘darkroom’ [‘Dunkelkammer’].”86 However disparate their functions, early glass rooms and darkrooms were in fact linked by the logic, techniques, and discourse of mediation. Already the first edition of renowned photochemist Josef Maria Eder’s hugely influential photography handbook included a chapter dedicated to the “effects of colored and colorless media in relation to photography.”87 As Eder and countless others enumerated, the quality of actinic or “chemical” light88 and nonactinic or “chemical” darkness depended on the colored glass, cloth, or paper medium interposed between the light source— be it natural or artificial— and the photographic plate. Brandished in darkrooms and glass rooms, on windows and lamps (gas and electric), these colored “media”—among the first media technologies to be so named89—figured centrally in the organization of early photography studios. They were described exhaustively in generations of manuals and in a handful of patents filed in the first days of the medium. Louis- Jacques- Mandé Daguerre, the shrewd and judicious artist- entrepreneur, famously relinquished his photography patent to the French state in exchange for a lifelong pension—and made the daguerreotype process available to all in his country.90 Less famously, he secured a patent in England to capitalize further on his lucrative asset.91 Through Miles Berry, a British patent agent, Daguerre sold an all- but- exclusive license to Richard Beard, for an enormous annual fee, to practice the daguerreotype process in England and Wales. Previously, however, he had sold a license to Antoine Claudet, scion of a French glass- manufacturing family and inventor of a cylindrical glass-cutting machine, for which Prince Albert eventually awarded him the medal of the Society of Arts. Claudet rebuffed Beard’s attempts to purchase his license. The history of photography quickly had its first two competing camps.92 In the annals of photohistory, the clash has largely been studied for style: Beard’s straightforward modernism ap- provingly opposed to Claudet’s artifying retrogression (retouching, color- ing, and so forth). Crucially, these stylistic traits cannot be divorced from certain media technologies advanced by each pioneer. Beard opened the first public photographic portrait studio in Europe in March 1841 on the roof of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London (fig. 1.11). The rooftop location ensured sufficient quantities of light under most conditions—oftentimes too much. The intensity and duration of light exposure necessitated by early daguerreotypy proved disagree- able to many sitters, who were forced to remain immobile and refrain from blinking. To alleviate the sitters’ discomfort, Beard adopted a technique proposed by Alexander Woollcott whereby their eyes were shielded through liquid filters. He designed and patented a circular studio lighted from above by a flat roof of blue glass, which allowed actinic light to pass without excessive glare for the sitter.93 Beard’s colored-glass house thus enabled the most natural possible poses for sitters, whose compulsory still- ness otherwise would have led to stilted or contorted portraits.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.11. Richard Beard’s Daguerreotype Studio as depicted in George Cruikshank’s woodcut cartoon titled Photographic Phenomena, or The New School of Portrait- Painting and published in George Cruikshank’s Omnibus, 1842. Rare Book and Manuscript Li- brary, Columbia University.

In June 1841, Claudet established a glass-house studio on the roof of the Royal Adelaide Gallery, a competitor to the Polytechnic. He, too, quickly filed a multipart patent for improvements to the daguerreotype process. Daguerre’s original English patent made no provision for mediated light or darkness; instead it noted only that the preparation of the plates “should be conducted in a darkened room into which light is admitted sideways not from the Roof. The box should be placed in a dark room where the light enters but feebly, as through a door ajar.”94 Claudet identified a crucial lacuna. In addition to clauses on interchangeable lenses, chemical processes, painted backgrounds, and artificial light, Claudet’s patent covered a fifth item, essential to an archaeology of artificial darkness: “The fifth and last of my improvements consists of performing all the operations upon the plates which were formerly carried on in the dark now in a room lighted through the media of various colors, such as red, orange, green and yellow, but red I prefer, which, having very little effect upon the plates covered with the sensitive coating, allows the operator to see how to perform the work without being obliged as before to remain in a dark room.”95 The darkroom

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 was invented and patented at the moment of its selective illumination. Or, more precisely, the darkroom emerged when media darkness was successfully cleaved from physiological black and the repercussions of this division were entered into patent offices, photographic manuals, and studio techniques— in short, into the embryonic dispositif of artificial darkness. In the first decades of its existence, the photographic studio did not oppose the brilliance of the glass room with the obscurity of the darkroom. Rather, both spaces uncoupled mediated light and darkness from the human sensorium. As Claudet explained in an oft- quoted paragraph:

Thus we might construct a room lighted only through an inclosure of light yellow glass, in which light would be very dazzling to the eye, and in this room no photographic operation could be performed; or a room inclosed by deep blue glass, which would appear very dark, and in which the photographic operation would be nearly as rapid as it would be in open air.96

London’s Glasshouse Street was so named because of the prevalence of glass- house studios. But to revise Paul Scheerbart’s revision of Goethe, “Not more glass!—‘more colored glass!’ must be the watchword.”97 Neither light nor darkness per se, but rather their mediation. With the darkroom— and its glass room correlate— the dispositif of artificial darkness gained a foothold in manifold sites of image production. The darkroom and its manuals established effective and reproducible techniques practiced by professional and amateur photographers.98

* * *

Of outsized import to an archaeology of artificial darkness was the threshold where glass room and darkroom converged. As Bernhard Siegert has argued, “The door is tightly connected to the concept of threshold, a zone that belongs neither to the inside nor the outside and is thus an extremely dangerous place.”99 The thresholds that strictly separated luminous spaces from dark ones were functional dark cavities, black openings, black grounds, or, to speak with Marey, black screens. As recommended by myriad manuals on photographic manipulation published toward the end of the century: “The system employed by the author of these [trick] photographs is that of the natural black background obtained through the open door of a dark room.”100 These thresholds afforded technical and aesthetic opportunities available to neither space alone. Yet until the final decade of the nineteenth century, studio photographers rarely availed themselves of these opportunities. Previously the as-yet- unnamed black screen served pictorial ends that strove to replicate paintings rather than explore the unique possibilities available to photography or artificial darkness. A case in point was the so- called Rembrandt effect, which represented the sitter’s head “against a dead black surface. [. . .] The background must send no light back, and is best made of black velvet.”101 Svetlana Alpers has

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 described the theatricality of Rembrandt’s seventeenth-century studio, whose nineteenth- century afterlife was transposed into photography against a black ground.102 In these contrived photographic portraits, the intricate study of chiaroscuro vital to the efforts of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other Dutch painters was reduced to textbook instructions. If “light is not assumed by Vermeer, it is studied,” as Alpers maintains, then light was thoroughly studied by the authors of studio operating manuals so that it could be assumed by portrait photographers and their patrons.103 In nineteenth-century portrait photography, light and darkness were not wild universes to explore but effects to be ordered out of a catalog. The portion of a studio draped in nonactinic velvet for Rembrandt- like contrasts was also used to make so-called Cartes Russes, wherefrom photo- portrait busts were isolated against colorful paper backdrops. (Because of the popularity of the Cartes Russes, the nonactinic backdrop composed of black or red velvet was often referred to as a fond russe or “Russian background.”) If Rembrandt effects and Cartes Russes represented the “artistic” recuperation of artificial darkness— that is, as style and fashion— the radicality of nonactinic backgrounds was recognized early on only in its “unnatural, inartistic, and unpleasing” manifestations, that is, in its elimination of chiaroscuro. The editors of the Photographic News lambasted a correspondent who wrote to the magazine for guidance: “The feeble effect you describe in your glass positives is probably owing to your black background. What ever can induce you to use a background so unnatural, inartistic, and unpleasing? It will have the effect of completely ‘killing’ the delicate shadows of the face and give it the flat feeble appearance of which you complain.”104 The death of shadows and birth of unnatural backgrounds were precisely the ambitions behind the black screens of Marey, Chevreul, and, as we will see, a host of media entertainers and avant- garde artists. But neither the Rembrandt effect nor Cartes Russes took full advantage of the qualities unique to black screens. These studio practices remain of interest only as counterpoints to techno-determinist histories: given the radical possibilities of artificial darkness, most studio photographers preferred instead to imitate Old Masters and create silhouettes. Artificial darkness may have afforded new aesthetic opportunities, but resistance was long and fierce. It should come as no surprise that Claudet, an early expert in artificial darkness and its manifold techniques, would advance a practice at once technologically precocious and aesthetically regressive. Faced with the dif- ficulties endemic to the uniform exposure of a subject, Claudet attempted to control the darkness rather than intensify the light. As he reported in 1847:

I looked for some mean as to modify the effects of the light. The idea occurred to me to employ Screens covered with black Velvet, to shade the parts of the subject which reflect too much light, and to retard the action until the parts in shadow

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 have produced sufficient effect. The operator, placed at some distance from the person, and furnished with a screen in each hand, moves them constantly in the direction from which the strong light is projected. This prevents Solarization, and produces artistic effects.105

Claudet concluded with an analogy that belied the radicality of his insight: “In fact, these screens in the hands of a skillful operator resemble brushes in the hand of a painter, by which he obtains all the effects which seem desirable.”106 More apposite would have been “chisels in the hands of a sculptor.” For Claudet’s black screen solution advanced photography as a subtractive medium, like sculpture, rather than an additive one, like painting. (Decades later, when photographic and cinematic studio design shifted from glass houses to windowless bunkers known as “only- artificial- light- studios,” cinematographers fancied themselves not inaccurately as “painters with light.”)107 But perhaps Claudet’s awkward metaphor was radical enough. In place of painting in light—a moniker that would res- onate with László Moholy-Nagy’s later neologism Lichtnerei108— Claudet endorsed painting with artificial darkness.

* * *

Throughout the nineteenth century, black screens straddled the multifarious worlds of effects: artistic effects (like Claudet’s and other studio photographers’), physiological effects (like those studied by Chevreul, Hering, Helmholtz, and others), and media effects (such a chronophotography and other photographic, cinematic, and theatrical ventures). As- pects of all these effects were jumbled together in the world’s first film studio, the Black Maria. In the summer of 1889, Thomas Alva Edison paid a visit to Marey at his Physiological Station. When he returned to Amer- ica, he abandoned his earlier cinematic experiments with wax cylinders and wrote a new caveat (a precursor to a patent), clearly influenced by Marey, from which he would develop the Kinetoscope.109 From December 1892 through February 1893, Edison had his lieutenant W. K. L. Dickson build a “tunnel”-style studio with uniform black interior and exterior—a combination that precipitated its famous nickname, the Black Maria, from the American slang for paddy wagon (fig. 1.12). Like most tunnel- style studios— also known in Europe as atelier de forme américaine110—the Black Maria included a skylight (here in the form of a retractable roof) and a long, dark tunnel for the (Kinetoscope) camera. Behind the camera lay the darkroom. All but uniquely among photographic and cinematic studios, the entire structure was mounted on rails, allowing it to turn on its axis and receive proper sunlight throughout the day. Also dissimilar to most photographic studios, the camera faced a second dark cavity, later described by Dickson as a “black tunnel”111 (fig. 1.13). As Dickson soon noted: “It obeys no architectural rules, it embraces no conventional materials

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.12. The earliest known photograph of the Black Maria, March 1894. Courtesy US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Thomas Edison National His- torical Park.

and follows no accepted scheme of color.”112 The seminal precedent for this curious disposition— where one dark chamber faced off against another— was, of course, Marey’s Physiological Station. But when the black screen migrated from Marey’s laboratory in the Bois de Boulogne to Edison’s lab- oratories in West Orange, New Jersey, its raison d’être was lost in transit. Marey’s and Edison’s respective exploitations of black screens make for an instructive comparison. After Marey built his final black screen in 1886, he walled in the prior incarnation, painted the wall white (1887), and used it for chronophotography on moving filmstrips (beginning in 1888).113 By that year, Marey had invented the basic technologies for the atomization of movement into sequential frames on a photographic strip— sequential images that Edison and the Lumière brothers, among others, later synthe- sized and projected under the banner of cinema. In November 1890, years before Edison or the Lumières would exhibit moving images of any kind, Marey presented his results at the Académie des Sciences.114 Indeed, it is widely suspected that Edison’s “failure” to secure cinema patents in Europe was a tacit recognition that Marey’s many technological innovations— all of which he entrusted to the public domain—would have thwarted any attempt to enforce cinema patents in Europe. The images Marey exhibited at the Académie des Sciences, however, took the form of paper bands roughly fifty centimeters in length—not the form of a “movie.” Marey

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.13. (a) W. K. L. Dickson, Interior of the Black Maria, 1933. Earl Theisen Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

FIg. 1.13. (b) Scenes in the “Black Maria” ostensibly of Kinetophone films being taken with sound.

had little interest in imaginary fusion except as a control on his analytic fragmentation—for example, in a seagull zoetrope he constructed in 1887. Marey made extensive use of black screens until the end of his life. But because chronophotography on moving filmstrips— later known simply as “cinematography”— required no superimposition, the vital connection

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 between chronophotography and artificial darkness was, in this instance, broken. As Marey explained in 1894, chronophotographs on moving filmstrips “can be taken with any kind of background. And although we have generally adopted a black background, that is only because the figures stand out more sharply.”115 Dickson and Edison echoed Marey’s claim that the “black tunnel” enabled “figures [to] stand out with the sharp contrast of alabaster basso- relievos on an ebony ground.”116 But they continued to shoot films against the black screen long after weak photographic emulsions had made the practice prudent. In films like The Barbershop (1894), Edison’s crew partially or completely interposed stage flats between the black tunnel and the camera, thereby negating the black screen. With some justification, Georges Sadoul dismissed the Black Maria as a pointless imitation of Marey’s Phys- iological Station, little more than a vestigial darkness.117 Edison’s black tunnel all but reversed the basic terms of Marey’s black screen. Exemplary was Blacksmith Scene, the first commercial motion picture filmed in the Black Maria (April 1893) and among the handful of films shown at the first public exhibition of the Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science (May 9, 1893; fig. 1.14). The roughly half- minute- long film depicts

FIg. 1.14. Thomas Edison, Blacksmith Scene, frame enlarge- ments, 1893. Courtesy US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Thomas Edison National His- torical Park.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 1.15. Étienne-Jules Marey and Charles Fremont, chronophotograph of blacksmiths, 1894. Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foun- dation Gift, through the Joyce and Robert Menschel and Rogers Fund, 1987.

the eponymous blacksmiths at work (in fact, Edison employees playing the parts), passing around a bottle during a brief break, and resuming their work. Charles Musser and others have understood the film as a nostalgic look at work habits.118 Unremarked is that nostalgia pervaded both subject and form. Only one year later, Charles Fremont, an engineer studying the science of work, produced chronophotographs in Marey’s laboratory of a comparable subject (fig. 1.15). In these chronophotographs, as Anson Rabinbach observes, “Fremont’s forgers perform before a dark field with only the chronometer visible in the foreground. [. . .] These fifteen superimposed shots completely blur the body of the man, while only the hammer is visible. In order to capture the successive positions of the hammer and the hands, the chronophotographer must obliterate the worker.”119 If the worker was thus sacrificed for the science of work, the black screen served as sacrificial altar. Just not at the Black Maria. Fundamental to the official history of cinema, the Black Maria was little more than a shriveled offshoot in the family tree of artificial darkness. The French film pioneer Georges Méliès was much less intimately informed about Marey’s Physiological Station than the American Edison.120

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Yet it was Méliès who first erected a film studio around the principle of artificial darkness. Chronologically second, Méliès’s film studio was primary in terms of influence. As Paolo Cherchi Usai notes: “By 1905, this studio had established the standard to be followed by its contemporaries.”121 Méliès acknowledged the debt owed by his Montreuil-sous- Bois studio to nineteenth-century glass-house photographic studio design: “[The studio] reproduced, at larger scale, ordinary photographic ateliers.”122 To ensure an even quality of light, the walls and ceiling were glazed in frosted glass; quantity was procured through three bays of transparent glass on stage, a shooting schedule anchored around midday (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.), and, eventually, the introduction of artificial lights. Artificial darkness was

FIg. 1.16. (a) Georges Méliès, drawing of first studio, 1899. Ink and colored pencil on paper, mounted on card stock. 7½ × 10⅓ in (19 × 26.2 cm). Cinémathèque Française D083-27.

FIg. 1.16. (b) Georges Méliès studio, interior, c. 1906. (c) Exterior of Studio B, c. 1908.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 secured through a stark differentiation of the luminous environment and the black screen on stage. Where Ewald Hering insisted that deep black was but an illusion produced by contrast effects, Méliès exploited contrast effects in order to produce theatrical and cinematic illusions. The studio’s dimensions— 17 meters by 6 meters—mirrored those of Méliès’s Robert- Houdin Theater, where he projected his early films and continued to produce magical stage shows123 (fig. 1.16). The reciprocity or symmetry between Méliès’s sites of production and reception belie his distance from Marey, despite the technical proximity of their artificial darknesses.124 Where Marey replaced the observer with a photographic glass plate, Méliès positioned the camera precisely where he expected his audience. As Kittler has argued, with the “fabrication of so- called Man” around 1880, “his essence escapes into apparatuses.”125 Artificial darkness was one of the apparatuses into which the essence of the human subject escaped, reducing the human sensorium to a media standard. Marey disappeared into the chemical darkness of the photographic darkroom so that a more objective “cinematic” image, a superhuman form of vision, could emerge from its ruby-red depths. Méliès—as we will see in chapter 4— vanished before the illusionistic flatness of the black screen and appeared in the darkened theater as a superhuman cinematic image that overwhelmed human vision. As Paul Virilio has argued: “What science attempts to illuminate, ‘the non-seen of the lost moments,’ becomes with Méliès the very basis of the production of appearance, of his invention, what he shows of reality is what reacts continually to the absences of the reality which has passed.”126 No wonder Marey rarely reconstituted the movement that his apparatuses dissected so precisely. His cinema was the analytic extension of human senses. That of Edison or Méliès successfully deceived those senses. Marey’s cinematic analysis captured movements invisible to the human eye. The fathers of cinematic entertainment exploited the limitations and capacities of the human eye to create the illusion of movement. Physiologists studied human thresholds in their infinite variability. Media technicians sought to exceed them once and for all time.127 Nuance versus excess. Or, in the case of darkness, infinite shades of gray versus absolute black.

Cinematic Darkness II: Richard Wagner

Please turn out the lights. As long as we’re going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark. We have all been here before. By the time we are eighteen years old, say the statisticians, we have been here five hundred times. No, not in this room, but in this generic darkness. [. . .] We are, shall we say, comfortably seated. We may remove our shoes, if that will help us remove our bodies. [. . .] So we are suspended in a null space, bringing with us a certain habit of affections.1 hollIS FramptoN, 1968

The suspension of bodies in a null space was a product of artificial cinematic darkness. But cinematic darkness was not always generic. Indeed, at the turn of the century it was labeled “Wagnerian.” Prior to the Wagnerian darkness revolution, the auditorium—contrary to its name—was a space to see and be seen, two aims that were often in conflict.2 At baroque court theaters, attention was generally divided between the spectacle on stage and the sovereign duke or king, directly opposite or adjacent to it. (Occa- sionally these divergent objects of attention were fused; monarchs and rulers, not least Louis XIV, were known to participate in the onstage spectacles.) Lighting was equally and—from a modern perspective—bizarrely balanced between stage and auditorium such that the stage was left too dark and the auditorium too bright. As explained in an 1823 text: “The in- congruity stems from the fact that the court pays for the auditorium light, while the theater management pays for the stage lights.”3 Into the 1870s, preeminent architects including Charles Garnier voiced their dissatisfac- tion with darkened theaters and ensured that the public— now primarily bourgeois— could encounter itself not only through extensive and elaborate promenades and foyers but also in the auditorium itself. For Garnier, the disposition of light and dark at Wagner’s Bayreuth theater was handled “avec exagération.”4 Darkness became the default condition of theatrical spectatorship beginning only in 1876, with the success of Wagner’s Festival

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Theater. The radicality of Bayreuth, in turn, can be fully grasped only in light of the manifold dark auditoriums from which it descended and which it, in turn, spawned. Two basic—if by no means mutually exclusive or exhaustive— trajectories can be traced in a genealogy of theatrical darkness. Most obvious was the darkening of extant theaters. Its modern history might begin with Leone Di Somi, the sixteenth- century Jewish polymath described as “the first theatrical impresario of modern times,”5 whose “Dialogues on Stage Affairs” (c. 1560) was perhaps the first text to advocate for the ben- efits of darkness:

It is a natural fact— as no doubt you are aware— that a man who stands in the shade sees much more distinctly an object illuminated from afar; the reason being that the sight proceeds more directly and without any distraction towards this object, or, according to the peripatetic theory, the object impinges itself more directly upon the eye. Wherefore I place only a few lamps in the auditorium, while at the same time I render the stage as bright as I possibly can. Still further, these few auditorium lights I place at the rear of the spectators, because the in- terposition of such lights would but be dazzling to the eyes.6

The better part of a century passed before Di Somi’s principles were applied more widely. The Teatro di San Cassiano, the first public opera house, opened in Venice in 1637 and inaugurated the Italian- style auditorium cloaked in darkness or semidarkness. Before the start of performances, chandeliers were lifted through the ceiling, to be lowered again only to facilitate the exit of the masses, who remained as rowdy as ever despite the newfound darkness.7 From Italy, the importance of darkness migrated north of the Alps through architects and impresarios like Inigo Jones, who staged dozens of masques (a spectacular form of courtly entertainment) in Tudor England, and Joseph Furttenbach of Ulm, who eliminated all windows for his 1641 production of Moses, such that the building “remains entirely obscure / like the dark night / so that the spectators sit in obscurity” and the stage “appears all the more lovely.”8 Jones and Furttenbach studied theater techniques in Italy and returned north with the knowledge that, in Craig Koslofsky’s words, “darkness was essential to this new stage technology.”9 For Koslofsky and others, the establishment of Italian baroque perspective stages serves as a rough index of the enhanced import of darkness, theatrical and otherwise. Wolfgang Schivelbusch similarly advanced the rule, albeit one that developed in fits and spurts, whereby “the darkness of the auditorium was a reliable indicator of the degree of illusionism.”10 The situation changed little until the second half of the nineteenth century, when theatrical darkness began to proliferate in England, France, and Germany. The propagation of gas lighting in the nineteenth century accelerated experimentations in theater lighting.11 But as the syn- optic history outlined thus far in this chapter makes plain to see, more heterogeneous cultural factors were no less significant. Before and after

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 the widespread adoption of gas lighting, the vast majority of respected directors and respectable spectators rejected theater in the dark. Instead, as Gösta Bergman asserts, “it was the dioramas, les spectacles fantasmago- riques, the shadow-plays,” that pointed the way forward in the 1820s and ’30s— though propriety demanded as least a demi- jour in the auditorium.12 In nineteenth- century northern Europe, there was no shortage of darkened theaters; they simply belonged to another class of leisure— spectacle rather than art. This second trajectory, optical spectacle, also has a history— albeit neither as extensive nor as illustrious as its proper theatrical older sibling. In 1738 Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni opened his famous spectacle d’optique in the Salle des machines in Paris. Pantomimes, with subjects drawn from mythology and epics, were viewed from a darkened auditorium. These optical spectacles, and their requisite darkness, would not proliferate until the end of the eighteenth century—with attractions including Rob- ert Barker’s Panorama (patented in England in 1787)13— and the early nineteenth century, with L. J. M. Daguerre and Charles-Marie Bouton’s Diorama (opened in Paris, 1822; patented in England in 1824; fig. 2.1).14 As evident to the first observers, the Panorama and Diorama shared a common basis in controlled darkness. Richard Altick expounded succinctly the twofold rationale behind the exclusion of light. First, a darkened auditorium made the available natural light appear that much brighter, as a contrast phenomenon. (Panoramas and Dioramas were lit almost exclusively by directed sunlight.15 As with Marey’s Physiological Station, these artificial darknesses were coupled with natural light.) Second, darkness “eliminated from the spectator’s consciousness all the extraneous objects by which size and distance could be measured and the illusion thereby destroyed.”16 Radical spatial dislocation and separation constituted one of the core qualities of nineteenth- century attractions. As Crary contends: “Forms as seemingly different as Daguerre’s Diorama, Wagner’s theater at Bayreuth, the Kaiserpanorama, the Kinetoscope and, of course, cinema as it took shape in the late 1890s are [alongside the Panorama] other key nineteenth-century examples of the image as an autonomous luminous screen of attraction, whose apparitional appeal is an effect of both its -un certain spatial location and its detachment from a broader visual field.”17 Histories of art and media have tended to focus on the autonomous luminous screen. No less crucial were the spatial dislocations effected by dispositifs of artificial darkness. Wagner’s theater at Bayreuth was unique on two separate counts. First, the Festspielhaus was erected for the exclusive production of Wagner’s operas or, in Wagner’s neologism, music-dramas. It was patronized by emperors, kings, and the haute bourgeoisie. It exuded the pretensions of high art—here understood as a social rather than ontological or aesthetic category. The darkness of the Diorama, by contrast, was justified in terms of its spectacular logic: “Few of our readers, we apprehend, require to be

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told that the spectators are admitted into a small apartment into which no light is admitted: this of course is necessary, and of this therefore we do not complain.”18 But the leveling of audience through darkness was not enthusiastically received by the upper strata of society at their own sites of ritualistic assembly. Only the (social) force of Wagner’s art authorized the promulgation of darkness across Europe’s “best” theaters and eased its espousal by parvenu cinemas. Second, the primary trajectories plotted here— the darkening of traditional theaters and the erection of purpose- built attractions— were first unified and consolidated at Bayreuth. The Panorama, Diorama, Phantasmagoria, Kaiserpanorama, and Kinetoscope

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 were proprietary structures built for the exhibition of specific image types. (Note the frequent proper nouns and patents.) The Kaiserpanorama, a late nineteenth-century device that enabled up to twenty- five individuals to view a series of stereoscopic images, could not display panoramic paintings, which measured thousands of square feet, any more than a Di- orama could exhibit the 35mm filmstrips that ran through the Kinetoscope, Edison’s early cinematic peepshow device. Each exhibition structure required a specific technical image, and each type of image required a specific technical exhibition structure. Wagner’s Festspielhaus, by contrast, was a model theater that could accommodate countless types of performances and images. Indeed, its most significant legacy was its adoption by cinemas, that is, as part of a dispositif whose medium— celluloid film— had not yet been invented in 1876. Wagner did not discover theatrical darkness, nor was he its principal evangelist. Instead, he assembled its elements properly—technically, a dispositif is nothing else—and proselytized his artistic vision successfully enough to make that technical necessity pal- atable to bourgeois and aristocratic audiences across Europe. Above all, Wagner set the technical and discursive parameters for artificial darkness in theatrical settings, parameters that would come to define not only cinema architecture but also the cinematic subject. After years of preparation and construction, Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth was consecrated on August 13, 1876 for the exclusive presentation of his music-dramas. Otto Brückwald drew up the final plans, but the structure was deeply influenced by Wagner, the architect Gottfried Semper, and their failed collaboration on a Munich opera house, itself influenced by a range of mid- nineteenth- century sites of immersive illusion from the Panorama to the Diorama.19 Decades before he broke ground in Bayreuth, Wagner left little doubt as to the intended subject effect to be produced by his future theater. In the fourth section of his essay “The Art- Work of the Future,” Wagner specified the goal of his theater design:

In the arrangement of the space for the spectators [Raum der Zuschauer] the need for optical and acoustic understanding of the artwork will give the necessary law [. . .] Thus the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties; while the performer becomes an artist only by complete absorption into the public. [. . .] The public, that representative of daily life, disappears from the auditorium [Zuschauerraum] completely, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World.20

Wagner’s turn- of- the- century English translator, William Ashton Ellis, could not equal the master’s temerity and wrote that the public “forgets the confines of the auditorium” rather than “disappears” from the auditorium.21 But viewed retrospectively from the rise of cinemas, disappears was not too strong a word. Beat Wyss channels Wagner’s ambitions from the perspective of film palaces. “The public exists exclusively for the work

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 of art, and in the auditorium, as a corpus it is literally extinguished. Here, it is pitch black so that the stage light can shine all the more brightly. [. . .] In the strictest sense, the tiered theater was succeeded by the cinema auditorium rather than the modern theater. So that the appearance of the projected image can reign, the empirical being of the spectator must be extinguished.”22 The Wagner- cinema axis appears to have been anticipated by Wagner’s inner circle. In 1890 John Stewart Chamberlain (the eventual husband of Wagner’s daughter) wrote a letter to Cosima (Wagner’s wife) in regard to the Dante symphony by Franz Liszt (Wagner’s father- in- law): “Perform this symphony in a darkened room with a sunken orchestra and show pictures moving past in the background—and you will see how all the Levis and all the cold neighbors of today, whose unfeeling natures give such pain to a poor heart, will all fall into ecstasy.”23 Yet darkness is no- where to be found in Wagner’s writing or his architects’ plans. The earliest designs, modeled by Semper after ancient Greek theaters, presumed an amphitheater open to the sky and illuminated by the sun.24 The intense darkness experienced at the inaugural performance at Bayreuth may very well have been an accident.25 Rather than merely extinguishing the lights, Wagner inaugurated a dispositif of artificial darkness through the proper combination of recent technical innovations, none of which he invented: invisible orchestra, double proscenium, mystical abyss, luminous special effects, fan- shaped amphitheater seating (stripped of tiers and boxes), all in addition to the unnamed darkness (fig. 2.2). These technical elements are familiar to Wagner scholars and contemporary moviegoers, but they warrant brief recapitulations. In 1873, with the Bayreuth theater under construction, Wagner delineated the central innovations of the Festspielhaus:

The success of this arrangement would alone suffice to give an idea of the spectator’s completely changed relation to the scenic picture. His seat once taken, he finds himself in an actual “theatron,” i.e. a room made ready for no other purpose than his looking in, and that for looking straight in front of him. Between him and the picture to be looked at there is nothing plainly visible, merely a floating atmosphere of distance, resulting from the architectural adjustment of the two proscenia.26

Theatron was the Greek word for theater. For Gottfried Semper, the preeminent German architect of his generation, it signified a theater reformation indebted to antiquity. But in Wagner’s hands, historical allusions were trumped by physiological impact. For Wagner, theatron was a technical— not historical or stylistic—designation. Its nearest kin lay not in antiquity but in the lecture halls, spectatoriums, and sites of attraction in which contemporaries assembled to be enlightened and entertained.27 According to Wagner, the radical recalibration of the European theater began with a now- famous concealment. “To explain the plan of the

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festival-theatre now in course of erection at Bayreuth I believe I cannot do better than to begin with the need I felt at first, that of rendering invisible the mechanical source of its music, to wit the orchestra; for this one requirement led step by step to a total transformation of our neo- European theater”28 (fig. 2.3). (Note the thick line, originally in red, around the “invisible orchestra” and the handwritten indication, initialed C. R. (Carl Runckwitz)—who took over the supervision of the construction in 1872—that the orchestra pit must be enlarged during the construction.) To ensure its invisibility, the orchestra pit was hooded, steeply raked, and extended beneath the stage (fig. 2.4). The Festspielhaus’s unique acoustics were a by-product of its controlled darkness: in order to contain the orchestra’s light, Wagner was willing to limit its sound. Wagner was not the first to theorize an invisible or sunken orchestra.29 But he alone made it the catalyst for the renewal of theater. The suppression of one technical apparatus, the orchestra, enabled the intensification of another: “With a dramatic representation [. . .] it is a matter of focusing the eye itself upon a picture; and that can only be done by leading it away from any sight of bodies lying in between, as with the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 2.3. Wagner’s Festival Theater at Bayreuth, longitudinal section, Wilhelm Neu- mann, early 1870s. 21½ × 31½ (54 × 80 cm).

technical apparatus for projecting the picture.”30 To enhance the clarity and size of the picture, Wagner took advantage of Semper’s sole technical innovation for his theater: the double proscenium (fig. 2.5). The first proscenium, more proximate to the audience, was larger but otherwise identical to the second, distant proscenium. The intended result was “the singular illusion of an apparent throwing-back of the scene itself, making the spectator imagine it quite far away, though he still beholds it in all the clearness of its actual proximity; while this in turn gives rise to the illusion that the persons figuring upon the stage are of larger, superhuman stature.”31 The double proscenium transformed the bodies of actors and the vision of spectators. Not unlike Marey’s subjects before the black screen, the singers’ bodies situated behind Bayreuth’s double proscenium began to acquire the attributes of images— at least in the eyes of the spectators kept at an exaggerated distance. As Joachim Paech has argued, the media dispositif that reigned for much of the twentieth century—and which was codified at Wagner’s Festival Theater— was grounded in the experience of proximity effected through distance.32 This illusion of proximity, counter- intuitively achieved through distance, would later find its perfect inversion in Walter Benjamin’s definition of aura as “the unique appearance or

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 2.4. (a) Wag- ner’s Festival Theater at Bayreuth. View from the “invisible orchestra.” Photo- graph of the original configuration of the “hood.” FIg. 2.4. (b) Sche- matic diagram of the “invisible orchestra,” 2014, by Emily Shaw, Media Center for Art History, Columbia University.

semblance of a distance, no matter how close it may be.”33 If aura was that which withered in the age of technological reproducibility, as Benjamin later argued, that age can be defined, in part, as the technological production of the illusion of proximity, an illusion perfected at Bayreuth and later popularized through cinematic closeups.34 The space above the invisible orchestra and between the proscenia, that space which separated “reality” from “ideality,” Wagner and Semper

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dubbed “the mystical abyss.”35 The ponderous nomenclature— perhaps introduced sarcastically by Semper only to be adopted earnestly by Wagner— obscured the radicality of the theater technology, whose closest precedents were attractions like the Panorama, where “in order to give the proper effect of distance, a dark cloth generally extends from the place where the spectator stands to the bottom of the painting.”36 Semper and Wagner understood that the concealment of both the orchestra and the edge of the stage deprived the viewer of a comparative sense of scale and divorced the scene from the surrounding space. At Bayreuth, the reality of the auditorium was separated from the ideality of the luminous image through media technologies with artistic ambitions. The music critic and Wagner nemesis Eduard Hanslick captured the dis- junctions best. In his extensive analysis of Wagner’s festival in Bayreuth,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Hanslick singled out the “Wagner-Theater” as a type: “The ‘Wagner- Theater’ is among the most interesting and instructive sights. Not the exterior, which is architectonically exiguous and impresses only through its location, but rather through the sensual innovation of its interior disposition. [. . .] At the start of the performance, the auditorium is entirely darkened; the luminous stage, on which neither side nor foot lamps are visible, appears like a radiant colored picture in a dark frame. Some scenes emerge nearly like transparencies or views in a Diorama.”37 The conver- sion of live bodies into radiant images was the necessary law at Bayreuth. The proper disposition of artificial light and artificial darkness facilitated the transposition of the actors’ onstage bodies and of the spectators’ bodies, which would, as Wagner prophesied, “disappear from the auditorium” only to reappear on the stage-cum- world. Hanslick praised the theater for its visual efficacy but damned the composer’s desire to turn music into a series of magic apparatuses. He cited Karl Lemcke, a self-declared Wagner devotee, whose largely positive review of the Ring des Nibelungen condemned “the damaging influence of ‘these artworks that smell of Bosco’s Magic Hall’ and simply lead directly to a cult of the extravaganza.”38 Hav- ing named Dioramas and magic halls, Hanslick settled on yet another genre of popular optical entertainment as the most proximate analogue to the Bayreuth presentation of Wagner’s Ring: electrified fairy plays.39 “Wagner’s Nibelungen are as inconceivable before the discovery of electricity as they would be in the absence of harps and bass tubas.”40 The amphitheater seating, invisible orchestra, double proscenium, mystical abyss, and electric lighting effects would not have formed a theatron, in Wagner’s technical sense, were it not for a comparatively simple reorganization of the seating from the circular format proposed by Semper to the fan- shaped seating instituted at Bayreuth41 (fig. 2.6). But Semper was unable or unwilling to undertake such a reorganization.42 He never deviated from his devotion to antiquity. As a result, in Semper’s plans only the central seats were imbued with the direct sightlines demanded by Wagner. The rest of the audience would have suffered not only from strained necks but also from partial views and constant distractions. (It was for good reason that the xenophobic Greeks reserved the peripheral seats for foreigners and latecomers.) Semper had successfully imitated the traditional Greek theatron, but he was unable to reconcile that design to the needs of “a room made ready for no other purpose than his looking in, and that for looking straight in front,” at least not the highly mediated looking required at nineteenth-century sites of spectacle. As media historian Jörg Brauns contends, the Festspielhaus was “not a space of collective action, but of collective experience focused on something outside this space.”43 Already in the 1930s Werner Gäbler similarly recognized Wagner’s theater— with its absolute separation between performance and public and its total negation of spectatorial space— as a reversal rather than a renewal of the ancient amphitheater.44 Gäbler echoed countless

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interwar architects and architectural historians when he arrived at the following seemingly self-evident conclusion: “Should the auditorium ultimately be perceived as disruptive—for it does not belong to the ‘image’— the natural action is to darken it.”45 Perceived at first as a threat, darkness became the signal accomplishment of Bayreuth. “Without detracting from the merit which belongs to him for having put the theory to the proof,” music critic Georges Servières wrote at the end of the century, “one may be permitted to assume that the ideas of his precursors suggested the innovations which Wagner introduced into the construction of the Bayreuth theater. In one respect only, the absolute darkness in the theater, he had not been forestalled.”46 That Servières erred in his historical evaluation— Bayreuth was hardly the first darkened theater—only strengthens the discursive potency of Wagner’s supposed invention of darkness. By the turn of the century, opera houses across Europe adopted— or were forced to resist— the “Bayreuth dictum that all but the stage should remain in darkness.”47 The “Wagner- Theater” thus influenced generations of “proper” theater architects.48 But its most radical implications were realized in cinemas. As recognized by Italian essayist Giovanni Papini in the first years of the twentieth century:

The cinema satisfies all these tendencies toward savings at the same time. It is a brief phantasmagoria, only twenty minutes, in which everyone can take part for only 20 or 30 cents. It does not demand a great culture, too much attention,

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Architects soon took note of Wagnerian darkness and its artificial depri- vation of distraction. But they did not like what they could not see.

Spaceless Darkness

At the start of the twentieth century— so began Moritz Ernst Lesser’s 1926 science- fiction account “The Cinema of the Future”— uninspired cinema architects were unable to overcome the limitations of urban theaters, which they largely imitated.50 Lesser wrote knowingly. He was among the earliest cinema architects in Berlin, responsible for the design of the Bava- riahaus and its windowless movie theater just prior to the start of World War I. With his Bavariahaus cinema, Lesser advanced steel and concrete cinema construction in the German capital but clad that construction in marble. He knew the potential and limitations of cinema architecture. So he resumed his 1926 science- fiction tale in the anterior future, after the rise and near extinction of cinemas (due to the advent of television). In a last- gasp effort to save theatrical film, world leaders congregate in a new “cinema arena,” which appears empty even as the film is ready to commence. Just as the story’s protagonists near exasperation with the unpeopled stadium, the air above the depths of the arena hovers, flickers, congeals, and rushes forward until the protagonists find themselves amidst some hundred thousand spectators, all equally flabbergasted, before disappear- ing once again. The assembled crowd breaks into spontaneous applause. “Tarnhelm”—the mythical cap of invisibility famously featured in Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen—“had become a reality.”51 The public, that representative of daily life, disappears from the auditorium completely. The renewal of cinema is achieved through a Wagnerian vanishing act. Like much science fiction, Lesser’s futuristic cinema addressed his more immediate present and past. The magical power of Tarnhelm was none other than Bayreuth’s more prosaic and technologically precise control of darkness. The American film critic Seymour Stern understood as much, even as he vehemently denied his sources. Writing in the National Board of Review Magazine in 1927, Stern delineated the principles that constituted the philosophy and the format of the ideal film theater, namely, “a house constructed, architecturally and psychologically, for and by the proper unit, the screen.”52 The initial requisite was “darkness. Darkness: complete, solid, unbroken.” Additionally, the orchestra was to be hidden, the seating steeply sloped, and, to separate the screen from the audience, a “chasm of darkness.” Thus Stern enumerated the features of the “film- house of the future,” which he hoped would attain the conditions of the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 liturgical drama of ancient Greek tragedy. A better approximation of the ambitions and conditions that prevailed in Wagner’s Festival Theater could hardly be envisioned. That Stern fervently toiled to differentiate his “chasm of darkness” from Wagner’s celebrated “mystical abyss” made his plagiarism all the more preposterous. What Friedrich Nietzsche failed to detect—due not to his youthful enthusiasm, as Theodor Adorno maintained, nor even to his aged madness, but rather because of his physical blindness, namely, “the birth of film out of the spirit of music”53—was a commonplace of the interbellum. By the 1920s one could hardly construct a “chasm of darkness” without falling into a “mystical abyss.” As countless interwar cinema architects and theorists surmised, the “cinema of the future” and “film- house of the future” were prefigured by Richard Wagner in 1849 as the “artwork of the future.” Stern’s denial of Bayreuth and Lesser’s latent evocation of contemporary cinemas speak to the Wagnerian inheritance carried uncomfortably by cinema builders. The development of European cinema architecture— that is, the construction of buildings principally for the projection of film— began in the early 1910s, was largely retarded by the Great War, and resumed in earnest only in the 1920s. Lesser was one of many architects and theorists to grapple with the cinema as a dominant site for the reception of images in the 1920s. The conclusions at which he arrived— the mutual imbrication of architecture, technological media, spectatorship, and invisibility— were echoed by peers past and future. The architect- theorist Paul Virilio constructed an aesthetics of disappearance around the flight of cinematic images: “From the esthetics of the appearance of a stable image—present as an aspect of its static nature— to the esthetics of the disappearance of an unstable image—present in its cinematic and cinematographic flight of escape— we have witnessed a transmutation of representations.”54 As Virilio and others note, this transmutation has always been hostile to architecture. But the level of hostility has received scant attention. The writer and architect Hans Schliepmann was among the first to address cinema architecture systematically.55 In a 1914 anthology of Greater Berlin cinemas— Lichtspieltheater and Kinohäuser were his preferred terms— Schliepmann reserved his highest praise for the windowless, austere, stone “Cines” on Nollendorfplatz (1913; fig. 2.7). Designed by Os- kar Kaufmann, the theater was enhanced with an extensive decorative program in glass painting and sculpture rife with film- related symbolism. The Cines, among the first major free- standing cinema structures built as such, fulfilled nineteenth- century demands for monumental architecture and set the standard for a generation of film palaces.56 Kaufmann would go on to build some of the most important traditional theater structures in Berlin, not least the Theater am Kurfürstendamm (1921) and the Kroll Opera (1920–29). The architect and critic P. Morton Shand, who considered German cinemas the world’s most illustrious, designated the modernist

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 2.7. Oskar Kaufmann, architect. “Cines” on Nollendorfplatz, Berlin, 1912–13. (a) Exterior. (b) Interior.

style as neo-baroque and dedicated his important 1930 survey of modern theater and cinema architecture to Kaufmann, its finest practitioner.57 If Oskar Kaufmann and his monumental stone Cines exemplified all that was recognizably architectural in theater and cinema design, Lucian Bernhard and his Prinzestheater on Kantstrasse embodied all that exceeded the discipline of architecture (fig. 2.8). By 1911, when he constructed the cinema as part of a larger commercial structure, Bernhard was already

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 2.8. Lucian Bernhard, designer. Interior of Prinzestheater on Kantstrasse, Ber- lin, 1911.

an influential designer, widely recognized as an initiator of the Plakatstil (poster style) and Sachplakat (object poster), which advanced simplified imagery, flat colors, and bold brand names. The interior of his Prinzesthe- ater cinema proved unassimilable into extant architectural discourse. Ac- cording to Schliepmann: “The hall’s color scheme is reminiscent of the bizarre Bernhardian art principle of spatial negation [Raumverneinung]. The dark violet walls, completely black in the rear, the deep dark gray ceiling, that, like the curtains of the loges, is decorated with bright splashes that provide color but no clear delineation of space [. . .] All attention is directed solely at the image.”58 The poster designer designed the cinema interior as a spaceless poster. But only an architecture critic could fail to recognize the architectural importance of spatial negation and its lineage in the Wagner- type theater. For Schliepmann, the negation of space was nothing less than “the ‘architecture of nonarchitecture.’”59 The progressive architecture critic Adolf Behne was just as implacable. He identified in the Prinzestheater interior “a certain coarseness of space (which was hardly composed ar-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 chitecture).”60 Unwilling or unable to recognize “Architecture” in this new building type, Schliepmann and his cohort foreclosed the possibility of an animating architectural vision. “It is indicative that, for the solution to this task, not an architect, but rather a poster artist, was consulted.”61 The same could have been said about Wagner the music- drama artist. Wagner’s priorities were expressed with merciless acuity in a letter to Friedrich Feustel, chairman of the executive board of the Festspiel. In terms of the allocation of funds:

1. The theater building should be considered entirely provisional; it would suit me fine were it built entirely out of wood. [. . .] 2. Stage technology and sets: everything related to the ideal, inner artwork— utter perfection. Here spare nothing: everything must be calculated for the long duration, nothing provisional.62

Little surprise that after the removal of Semper, it was not the architect Otto Brückwald but rather the stage technician Carl Brandt who took the reins alongside Wagner in the construction of a theater around invisibility.63 The reign of the projected image in artificial darkness was inaugurated with the sacrifice of the empirical spectator (“the public disappears”), phenomenological space (“the art principle of spatial negation”), and the institution of architecture (“the architecture of nonarchitecture”). What was patently beyond the pale of architectural discourse at the start of the Great War was constitutive of a nascent media theory in the 1920s. In his Philosophy of Film (1926), Rudolf Harms described— or, perhaps, idealized— the dominant conditions that prevailed in interwar cinemas. For Harms, the “cinema of the future” and “film- house of the future” had arrived. Like many critics, philosophers, and art historians (Philosophy of Film began as a 1922 art history dissertation), Harms advanced a modified Cartesian subject— all eye, no body— as the ideal subject of cinema. But unlike later film theorists who construed a transhistorical, transcen- dental subject from Plato’s cave to modern cinemas, Harms understood that the radical abstraction of body and space required theaters that could “guarantee the highest degree of bodily detachedness and seek to alleviate the shortcomings of the individual’s fixed and local bondedness.”64 His metaphysical reflections thus quickly delved into banausic operational details. Ventilation, comfortable seating, and suitable background noise were requisite. But the primary vehicle for bodily and spatial negation, according to Harms, was “spaceless darkness.”65 Only the darkness that presided over contemporary cinemas could secure the spectator’s undi- vided attention to the image. What was unnamable for Wagner and inas- similable for Schliepmann was elementary for Harms. Harms’s inspired watchword— raumlose Dunkelheit— conjured a darkness calibrated to erad- icate spectatorial space and bodies with enough technical precision and artistic pretensions to satisfy Wagner’s idealist vision. Where architects

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 saw nothing but negation—that is, nothing at all—Harms’s opening salvo affirmed film “as its own art form, composed of moving light in spaceless darkness.”66

Contested Spacelessness

In a sweeping 2008 survey of film spectatorship, Gabriele Pedullà asserts that twentieth-century film theory failed to address the movie theater.67 Film and film theory, he claimed, were born of willful ignorance of actual cinemas. The statement is precisely half right. In fact, the movie theater was central to at least two moments of film theory: just before and just after the reign of classical cinema. The more famous moment arrived on the wings of the owl of Minerva during cinema’s 1970s decline. Its signal achievements included apparatus theory, in its French and Anglo- American variants;68 the Expanded Cinema movements that crisscrossed America, Europe, and the globe in the late 1960s and ’70s, nearly all of which attacked the institution and space of movie theaters;69 and art projects like Robert Smithson’s 1971 quixotic plan to build a movie theater in a cave, which would be, in his words, a “truly ‘underground’ cinema.”70 Roland Barthes refined and nuanced the coarse film theoretical reflections on cinema that predominated in the 1970s. Famously, Barthes began with the spell conjured by the cinematic apparatus, here extended beyond the walls of the theater: “There exists a ‘cinematic condition’ and this condition is prehypnotic. Like a metonymy become real, the darkness of the theater is foreshadowed by a ‘crepuscular reverie’ [. . .] which precedes this darkness and draws the subject, from street to street, from poster to poster, to abandon himself into an anonymous, indifferent cube of darkness where the festival of affects which is called a film will take place.”71 However much Barthes was drawn to the eroticism of the darkness, he identified within the cinematographic hypnosis all the characteristics of ideology and attempted to break free from its constraints. He immediately turned to the discourse of counterideology but abandoned this tactic for one more intimate and idiosyncratic:

But there is another way of going to the cinema (other than going armed with the discourse of counterideology); it is by letting myself be twice fascinated by the image and by its surroundings, as if I had two bodies at once: a narcissistic body which is looking, lost in gazing into the nearby mirror [i.e., the screen], and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image, but precisely that which exceeds it: the sound’s grain, the theater, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit: in short, in order to distance myself, to “take off,” I complicate a “relationship” with a “situation.”72

Barthes short-circuited the abstracted spectator– screen relationship and situated himself at a distance to the “cinematic condition” and its enabling darkness.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 We still occupy the moment of cinema’s demise, only we have replaced the erstwhile contrarians, critics, and Expanded Cinema artists with historians, preservationists, and gallery artists—not to mention a constant stream of films about last picture shows. Apparatus theory and Expanded Cinema—both of which have recently garnered renewed interest—belong to the second wave of movie theater inquiry. We will return briefly to this second wave; but the primary interest of this chapter resides in its first groundswell, during the 1910s and 1920s, when cinemas emerged but had not yet consolidated their power over the movies. It was a moment when cinematic energies enchanted and disoriented, cinematic darkness disciplined and liberated; when the conflicts and contradictions of the cinematic dispositif were already palpable but not yet normalized. These new spectatorial conditions were recognized and contested throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century by filmmakers and theorists, cinema operators and lighting designers, critics and artists. To say that early theorists ignored the movie theater is simply a failure to see in the dark.

* * *

“The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms.”73 With two words— “salles obscures”—issued in his epoch-making Surrealist Manifesto (1924), André Breton identified the keystone in the Surrealist cinematic imagina- tion.74 “For us and us alone,” Robert Desnos echoed, “the Lumière brothers invented the cinema. There we were at home. Its darkness was like that of our bedrooms before going to sleep.”75 The contested nature of this darkness was rarely addressed directly in the manifestos, reviews, and poems penned in the name of Surrealism. But its presence could be felt at the margins of avant- garde cinematic discourse; indeed, contested darkness was its condition of possibility. The late 1910s and early 1920s marked a watershed in the history of film. The embourgeoisement of cinema retarded by the First World War commenced with renewed vigor in its aftermath. Loosely regulated sites that gathered heterogeneous publics for cinematic exhibitions became objects of moral, technological, and medical scrutiny. The unfolding embourgeoisement of cinema harbored a series of related objectives: the neutral- ization of site; the fabrication of a classless, sexless, abstract— in a word, bourgeois—public; and the generation of objects of acceptable commercial and aesthetic value, that is, commodities and artworks.76 A central agent and impediment in the embourgeoisement of cinema— and the subject of endless debate in the 1910s and early 1920s—was darkness. Where Breton cheered, others looked to discipline. The first police ordinances directed at cinemas rarely made mention of darkness. Their primary concerns were basic hygiene and the prevention of catastrophic fires. Lighting— more specifically, emergency lighting—

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 was discussed only in the eventuality of power outages.77 The overwhelm- ing concern with fire and the relative disregard for darkness remained the norm throughout the 1910s.78 But where police ordinances failed to intervene directly, a host of technicians, moralizers, corporations, doctors, cinema operators, and sociologists eagerly weighed in. Frank Richardson dedicated a section of his Motion Picture Handbook (1916) to the question “how much light”:

The amount of light to be used in the auditorium is a matter concerning which there has been a great deal of pretty hot debate. The self- appointed guardians of the morals of moving picture theatres [. . .] generally demand an utterly un- reasonable amount of illumination in the auditorium of the moving picture theatre, notwithstanding the fact that this excessive illumination serves absolutely no good purpose and operates to very largely detract from the excellence of the show. It is freely conceded that a dark theatre is not an ideal condition, particularly in our larger cities, but The writer emphatically insists that any illumination other than an amount sufficient to enable on standing in the darkest portion of the house to distinguish the features of those around him from a distance of say six or at the most eight feet is unnecessary, and therefore undesirable.79

Richardson’s argument was polemical; and yet his hedges disclosed the potentially explosive terrain occupied by darkened rooms. Two dominant positions emerged over the course of the 1910s: moral (sometimes couched as medical) and technical. The most frequent and high- pitched objections came from the self-appointed- cum- state- appointed guardians of morals. In the American heartland, the Reverend J. J. Phelan cited, with shared horror, a recent news story titled “Dark Movie Houses A Menace to Morals of Young, Court Officer Says”: “‘Immorality among young boys and girls in Toledo can almost always be traced to the dark movie house. And it is getting worse,’ said Miss Sara Kaufmann, Juvenile Court Officer. [. . .] ‘Girls whose mothers pay no attention to their where- abouts go alone into the dark house. Boys go in and sit beside them in the darkness. They come out together.’”80 The impulse behind the anecdote told by a court officer and cited by a reverend was captured by the earlier sociological analysis of Emilie Altenloh. As part of her dissertation at the University of Heidelberg, Altenloh completed the most significant sociological study of German cinema audiences in the pre– World War I period. Based on a questionnaire and interview survey of some twenty- four hundred filmgoers in Mannheim during 1912– 13, Altenloh concluded that the primary draw for young workers was obvious. “Eroticism is, of course, the reason many of them go to the cinema. [. . .] The movie theater that is ‘quiet and dark’ and ‘where the most dramas are shown’ is usually most popular. [. . .] For all lovers, the darkened cinemas are a popular place to spend time. ‘Come inside, our cinema is the darkest in town,’ is how one entrepreneur extols the virtues of his establishment.”81 If the anecdotal account by the police differed only in tone from the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 sociological analysis of Altenloh, we must remember that tone was everything. The British National Council of Public Morals, for example, established a Cinema Commission, whose 1917 report included a section omi- nously titled “The Moral Danger of Darkness.”82 Incendiary and unproven claims abounded: “Darkness may be used for evil purposes” and “Darkness encourages indecency.”83 Almost a decade later, hysterical authors continued to cite Altenloh to link utterly reasonable claims— “In regard to the cinema as space, its darkening is the most interesting moment for a historical consideration of mores; for many spectators, [darkness] is the cinema’s primary attraction”— to a series of ever- more alarmist pronouncements: cinemas produce an erotic attraction even for strangers who meet there; thus the presence of prostitutes; as a matter of course [selbstverständlich], homosexuals also try to profit from the darkness of the auditorium [Kinoraum]; thus the presence of male prostitutes.84 The Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland was one of many or- ganizations that attempted to rebuff spurious moralizing claims.85 But the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as the Edison Trust after its eponymous prime mover, worked to assuage its critics and woo “the better class of the community”— namely, the middle class— through “light theaters” that would eliminate the earlier “absolute darkness [tied to] ter- rible complaints of all kinds of immoral practices.”86 The light theaters— also incongruously called “daylight- theaters,” but which called for electric light, often amber and green, as in photographic darkrooms— promised to “eliminate the possibility of panic and the offensive conduct of degenerates who sometimes take advantage of the darkness.”87 The entire moralizing assault was often but a thinly veiled screed against the lower classes. Class problems begot technical solutions. Lighting engineers were summoned to remedy the moral and medical—meaning class—failings of moving- picture theaters. In the Transactions of the Illuminating Engi- neering Society, L. A. Jones defended calls for increased illumination: “I understand that it has been stated that the motion picture public prefer[s] a dimly lighted theater, this being based on the fact that the attendance of a certain theater decreased subsequent to a considerable increase in the interior illumination. Personally, I have considerable doubt that any such consequence would follow in the case of our better class of motion picture theaters.”88 Class objections were often couched in medical lan- guage: eye strain and fatigue (ostensibly) caused by excessive light- dark contrasts.89 But because high contrast created a brighter, more powerful image, many cinema operators maintained maximum contrast or even plunged the house in darkness for several minutes before the show began so as to “make the picture appear brighter.”90 The darkness they were after was “absolute” in Ewald Hering’s sense of “an illusion produced by contrast effects.” In theory, lighting engineers should have been torn between the demands of cinema exhibitors and spectators for maximum contrast and those of medical and moral professionals, who railed against it. But

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 so great were their class bias and professional myopia that illumination engineers and architects often refused to comprehend the persistence of darkened cinemas. In an address to the Illuminating Engineering Soci- ety, E. L. Bragson, technical editor of Motion Picture News, referenced the pitch- dark rooms of early storefront theaters and added: “This method of handling illumination of the auditorium should have disappeared early. But it did not.”91 “How to Light a Movie Theater,” an article in The American Architect, opened with the following pronouncement: “The old idea that a completely darkened room is required to show lantern slides clearly was disproved before the advent of the moving picture. [. . .] Yet moving picture house managers have been slow to realize this.”92 The obvious retort to such “enlightened” incredulity was Upton Sinclair’s famous gibe: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Lighting engineers were paid to engineer lighting. Darkness was a residue of the past. Or rather, it was a residue of the disciplinary system imposed by 1910s cinemas. As defined by Michel Foucault, “Discipline is that technique of power by which the subject-function is exactly superimposed and fas- tened on the somatic singularity.”93 The individual is thus the product of a specific disciplinary regime rather than the raw material from which the regime is constructed: the student is produced by the school system, the soldier by the military, the prisoner by the penitentiary, the worker by the factory, and, most relevant here, the spectator by the cinema. “Disci- pline,” Foucault argues further, “works in an empty, artificial space that is to be completely constructed.”94 Like schools, barracks, prisons, and factories, darkened theaters since Bayreuth relied on specific architectures to discipline the bodies therein. In order to construct the ideal theater and the individuated spectator, “the initial requisite,” to recall Seymour Stern’s formula, “is darkness. Darkness: complete, solid, unbroken. What- ever lights are found legally necessary should be properly diffused and softened, [for they prove an impediment to] the spectatorial focus on the screen.”95 Despite the best efforts of moralizers and corporate monopolies, “light theaters” were little more than a dream or marketing campaign; cinemas remained, of necessity, relatively or “absolutely” dark. The evils of darkness were not a condition that could be overcome but a residue of a system that marshaled darkness in the name of discipline. Disciplinary systems, according to Foucault, inevitably come up against those who defy classification, escape supervision, or refuse entrance into systems of distribution; they are “the stumbling block in the physics of disciplinary power. That is to say, disciplinary power has its margins.”96 No army without deserters; no schools without the feeble-minded or men- tally defective; no police or prisons without delinquents.97 No cinemas, we might add, without “degenerates who sometimes take advantage of the darkness.” These “residues” first come into being in relation to the isotopy of discipline, its asymptotic approach toward homogeneity. Disciplinary

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 regimes work tirelessly to recuperate the residues they produce: schools for the feeble-minded and schools for those who fail the schools for the feeble-minded, and so forth. Illumination was a core technology for the isotopic recuperation of darkness into the disciplinary regime of cinema. Lighting engineers quickly understood that the screen alone required absolute darkness. For light theaters, they adopted the regime of photographic darkrooms—red, amber, and green lights directed away from the photosensitive surface or projection screen—to preserve the image and maintain an illuminated order among spectators. Eventually technicians developed screens that functioned under any lighting conditions. In an article on film propaganda for the socialist journal Erkenntnis und Befrei- ung, Francis Onderdonk described the Petra- Daylight- Film- Screen, which “frees [cinema] from the bondage of the darkened room; it absorbs all the natural or artificial light that falls on it from the front and lets pass only the rays that are projected onto the Petra- screen from the rear.”98 But illumination engineers were hardly content with indirect illumination. Rather, they perceived cinema exteriors and interiors as blank canvases, framed by natural and artificial darkness, on which to display their immaterial wares. Initially conceived as an ameliorative measure, lighting design soon became a fixture of cinema design.99 The dramatic change arrived in the early 1920s. James Cameron’s standard work on film projection said nothing about “effect lighting” in the second edition (1921) but called it indispensable in the third edition, published just one year later: “Expe- rience and popular approval has shown that high class lighting effects on the stage as well as in the auditorium are absolutely necessary.”100 By the end of the decade, the section on effect lighting covered more than twenty pages.101 Advertisements and operating manuals touted countless lighting schemas and systems, such as Du- Phantom lighting equipment, through which “the film picture is made to float in a mist of color possessing -un limited changes.”102 Scores of technologies, attractions, and distractions were amassed to create what Siegfried Kracauer described, with Wagne- rian flair, as the Gesamtkunstwerk of effects.

This total artwork of effects assaults all the senses using every possible means. Spotlights shower their beams into the auditorium, sprinkling across festive drapes or rippling through colorful, organic looking glass fixtures. The orchestra asserts itself as an independent power, its acoustic production buttressed by the responsory of the lighting. Every emotion is accorded its own acoustic expression and its color value in the spectrum— a visual and acoustic kaleidoscope that pro- vides the setting for the physical activity on stage: pantomime and ballet. Until finally the white surface descends and the events of the three- dimensional stage blend imperceptibly into two- dimensional illusions.103

If, as Alfred Polgar quipped in 1911, cinema was “a world with a fourth but not a third dimension,” the spatial dimension lost to the dreamlike events on screen was restored in the equally fantastic auditoriums of the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 1920s.104 As the Gesamtkunstwerk of effects aspired to the realm of art, lighting systems assumed the status of “visual music” or “light symphonies.”105 These temples to petit bourgeois culture declared themselves “film palaces”; “to call them movie theaters [Kinos],” Kracauer lampooned, “would be disrespectful.” 106 Excess lighting was not the only residue produced by the isotopic recuperation of darkness into the disciplinary regime of cinema. Never wholly docile, bodies in dark cinemas were a bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, there were guarantees of bodily detachedness. On the other hand, there were hands—that is, the threat of carnal contact. At times the dark house was a morally compromised space. But just as often it was no space at all. In the evocative, if contorted, words of Konrad Haemmer- ling, “The real has become disembodied and it lives in space and yet not in space.”107 Rather than choose between the sensual carnality of cinema and its dislocated disembodiment, one could establish a certain relation to darkness that could paradoxically enhance both. Disciplinary darkness, in other words, produced residues on both extremes of the embodiment– disembodiment spectrum: too much corporeality could lead to sexual li- aisons; too little encouraged an ecstasy of its own. Surrealists homed in on both residues of the disciplinary system. Robert Desnos, the Surrealist most attentive to cinema, articulated the matter best: “Discipline, which indifferently defines army and prison, the strap and the ideal of the -me diocre rhetoricians who defend tradition, should not be applied to this perfectly new form of cerebral pleasure.”108 Desnos considered cinema to be “the most powerful of all cerebral drugs [. . .] superior to opium.”109 Cerebral pleasures quickly led to carnal ones: “During the intermission we will seek out the man or woman who will sweep us along in an adventure equal to cinema’s twilight dream.”110 Louis Aragon similarly took note of the “discontented married women” and their implied availability: “You can see them in the cinema, quite unhinged in the darkness.”111 Breton, finally, recalled a naked woman wandering about the Electric- Palace, a cinema famous less for its electric lights than for its lascivious darkness and “the most commonplace sort of illicit sexual rendezvous.”112 The potential for real bodily contact, feared by moralizers worldwide, was the first residue of cinematic darkness. Intoxicants, pleasures, carnality, and the denunciation of discipline did not, however, necessitate the rejection of spaceless darkness or the return of spectatorial bodies banished by Wagner and his (cinematic) followers. Quite the contrary. In the “perfect night of cinema,” Desnos averred, “the room and the spectators disappear. The seated dreamer is transported to a new world compared to which reality is but a charmless fiction.”113 After World War II, Breton recalled his cinematic romps during the late 1910s: “What we valued most in [cinema], to the point of taking no interest in anything else, was its power to disorient [dépaysement]. [. . .] The marvel, besides which the merits of a given film count for little, resides in the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 devolved faculty of the first- comer to abstract himself from his own life when he feels like it, at least in the large town, as soon as he passes through one of the muffled doors that give on to the blackness.”114 Dislocating darkness and bodily abstraction—the twin pillars of cinematic discipline— were the marvelous cinematic operations most valued by Breton and his cohort. It was in this spirit that Jean Goudal penned his seminal 1925 essay “Surrealism and Cinema”:

Let’s go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the darkness. On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen where for two hours it will remain fixed. [. . .] Our problems evaporate, our neighbors disappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of temporary depersonalization which takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square meters of white canvas. [. . .] The darkness of the auditorium destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict the ones on the screen.115

Goudal’s Surrealist-inflected account echoed almost verbatim the claims made for cinema by its detractors and champions alike. Ecstatic disembodiment and dislocation— stripped of insipid narrative— marked the second residue of cinematic darkness. The genius of Surrealism was not to oppose disembodiment and dislocation to carnality and specific locales, but rather to unite them through cinematic darkness. The obscure margins of cinemas—fleshly and ecstatic, in space and yet not in space— became the centerpieces of the surrealist cinematic imaginary. Again, Desnos: “We go into the dark cinemas to find artificial dreams and perhaps the stimulus capable of peopling our empty nights.”116 Desnos’s search for artificial dreams led him to the residues of artificial darkness.

Reciprocal Darknesses

The dispositif that conjoined Marey’s Physiological Station, photographic darkrooms, and Wagner’s Festival Theater was forged along two distinct circuits. The first linked human vision to chemical darkness, that is, physiology to media. The dominant standards coalesced around the maintenance of images. Darkrooms, remember, needed to be dark not in a visual but only in a chemical sense. Marey reduced his practice to the “photography of light objects in darkness or in red light.”117 His chambre roulante was camera and darkroom in one. The chamber’s red- glass medium facilitated the scientist’s self- discipline, self- restraint, self- abnegation, and self-annihilation in the name of objectivity.118 In scientific or artisanal photographic darkrooms, humans were subalterns; but at least they could see. At the end of the century, George Eastman and others ushered in the era of industrial photography, where the standardization and maintenance of images took political form. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Soviet author and critic, dedicated a chapter of his 1931 chronicle of film, The Dream Factory, to the political economy of ruby-red light. “Socialists love red, an iridescent red like

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 blood. [. . .] Mister George Eastman prefers the dark red of the workshops in which workers manufacture good raw film.”119 By the mid-1920s, Agfa, the leading German film manufacturer, was a subsidy of the chemical giant IG Farben, where “for five thousand workers, the world is dark and cryp- tic. They do not see ordinary light. Their pupils degenerate year to year. [. . .] Raw film is manufactured by dark red light; panchromatic by dark green.”120 To speak with George Bernard Shaw, these workers were the Nibelungs, the subterranean slaves who fabricated not only the infamous golden ring but also Tarnhelm, the golden cap of invisibility. “Like other people, they go to the movies in the evenings. Coming from the factories, they perceive the dark halls as bright.”121 Ehrenburg failed to see that the factory and the cinema were allied by a technology of artificial darkness. In the regime of projected images, dark-red light reigned equally over sites of industrialized production and sites of industrialized reception. As noted by the early 1910s: “The picture palace of today, instead of being entirely dark during projection, is suffused with the subdued glow of ruby lamps, which do not affect projection or the brilliancy of the pictures to any material degree.”122 Dark-red light was the law in the production of raw film and the reception of processed film. In the land of industrial production and consumption of images, humans were once again subalterns; but at least they could see. The picture palaces of the early twentieth century were hotly contested sites. To keep a watchful eye over worker-spectators, the state—in this instance, the State of New York—issued the following ordinance on No- vember 4, 1911 (sub- section F):

I.— Lighting— Every portion of a motion picture theater, including exists, courts and corridors, devoted to the uses of accommodation of the public, shall be so lighted during all exhibitions and until the entire audience has left the premises, that a person with normal eyesight should be able to read the Snellen standard test type 40 at a distance of twenty feet and type 30 at a distance of ten feet; normal eyesight meaning ability to read type 20 at a distance of twenty feet in daylight. Cards showing types 20, 30 and 40 shall be displayed on all four walls, together with a copy of this paragraph of the ordinance.123

Photographic manuals cautioned against excessively dark darkrooms— remember: “once the eyes have adjusted to the darkness, one should be able to read printed matter like this [book] at a distance of 50 cm from the lamp”124—lest the eyes of producers be unnecessarily strained. Cinema reformers cautioned against excessively dark cinemas, lest the bodies of consumers be unnecessarily distracted from the distractions on screen. If self-imposed selflessness was expected of the citizen soldiers Marey photographed and of the spectators assembled at Bayreuth, discipline would have to be more rigorously imposed on worker-spectators. Where human self-discipline flagged, the dark- red light would take over. In the ruby- red darkness of the cinema, humans were rowdy subalterns, but at least they

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 could be overseen. Aristocratic and bourgeois theaters— where “society” gathered to see and be seen—were abolished with a flick of the switch. And yet the confusion of darkrooms, factories, and cinemas was not only a disciplinary series, be it self- discipline, industry discipline, or state discipline. If 1970s theorists likened cinematic spectators to the shackled captives of Plato’s cave,125 Paul Valéry’s allegory of Plato’s allegory transformed the cavern from a site of reception to one of production: “What is Plato’s famous cave if not a camera obscura, the largest ever conceived, I suppose? If Plato had reduced the mouth of his grotto to a tiny hole and applied a sensitized coat to the wall that served as his screen, by developing the rear of the cave he could have obtained a gigantic film.”126 A generation prior, Schliepmann saw as much in the antiarchitectural spacelessness instituted in Bernhard’s cinema interior:

For the [traditional] architect begins with the creation of spatial impressions; Bernhard seeks only light— or rather shadow— and color effects. The architec- tonic hardly extends beyond the walls. [. . .] The [poster] artist attempted to replace spatial impressions through mystical light and shadow impressions. Walls and ceiling are of a matte, nearly black color tone; the few architectural parti- tions are dark slate gray. [. . .] The main attraction is furnished by light fixtures that hang from the ceiling along the walls. [. . .] They manage only sparsely to illuminate the space— which is kept in such deep darkness that at first glance it appears like the inside of an outstretched camera.127

The cinema- as- accordion- camera was a motif that pervaded the entire twentieth century, not least in Kino, a 1987 photograph by Jakob Mattner in which the rear of the turn-of- the- century camera mutates into a film screen and the bellows morph into rows of seats and upholstered walls128 (fig. 2.9). The sparse, often ruby illumination inscribed the darkroom within the same dispositif. Cameras, darkrooms, cinemas—they were all but camera obscuras or, more precisely, cameras obscuras artificialis. Arti- ficial darkness established a media circuit between Marey’s site of production, darkrooms for photographic reproduction, and Wagner’s site of reception. A second, more profound circuit abolished the difference between human space and image space. By the mid-1920s, the spaceless darkness named by Harms no longer frightened a new breed of architects, many of whom had come of age alongside cinema and even designed film sets before they built a building.129 Among the designers for whom “architecture became a supreme screen of sets,”130 the most successful was Robert Mallet-Stevens. 131 In 1924 Mallet- Stevens designed sets for Marcel L’Her- bier’s modernist-futuristic film fantasy L’Inhumaine and constructed the Villa Noailles, a chateau that was modeled after film sets and was quickly set in films by Jacques Manuel (1928) and Man Ray (1929).132 That same year, he articulated the basic condition of the cinema, in opposition to traditional theater, and closed a media circuit opened by Marey and Wagner:

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 2.9. Jakob Mattner, Kino, 1987. Silver gelatin photograph of a Polaroid photograph. Courtesy the artist.

“In the cinema, nothing resembles [theater]. [. . .] A wall with a rectangle painted white and a little iron box from which shines an electric arc lamp. [. . .] A cinema is a judiciously disposed black shed [hangar noir judicieuse- ment disposé] in which a new spectacle is offered. A cinema is necessarily modern.”133 Years before the so- called invention of cinema, Marey described his attempts to obtain Chevreul’s absolute black in almost identical terms: “The nearest approach we have been able to make to these ideal conditions of Chevreul was by constructing a dark and capacious shed [hangar profond et large] (fig. 49) at the Physiological Station, the interior of which has been painted black, and by hanging a black velvet curtain

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 at the back.”134 In Marey’s text, figure 49 depicted the black screen opposite the camera- on- wheels. The caption reads: “Arrangement [Disposition] of the dark background at the Physiological Station.”135 (Compare fig. 1.3 above.) Cinema architecture and “cinematic analysis” were thus conjoined by properly disposed dark and capacious sheds. At its core, however, the relationship between black screens and cinemas was one of dialectical inversion rather than continuity. Their respective darknesses were not contiguous but reversed. An early caricature of Wagner’s Festspielhaus interior established the basic terms. A white rectangle placed just above the center of a larger black rectangle carried the caption “Orchestral rehearsal in Bayreuth.”136 The joke pointed primarily to the invisible orchestra but also, of necessity, to the immersive darkness and luminous stage for which Bayreuth had become infamous. One can hardly imagine an autonomous luminous screen of attraction represented more economically. And yet the real joke—its underlying structure and animating impulse— was that the dispositif of artificial darkness exceeded representation: a luminous screen in spaceless darkness was little more than a white rectangle on a black rectangle. Bayreuth’s (and cinemas’) autonomous luminous screen was a precise dialectical inversion of Marey’s Physiological Station. Whereas the cinema screen was a luminous rectangle in an artificially darkened space, the black screen was a perfectly dark rectangle in a naturally luminous space. Whereas the cinema screen produced the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, the black screen produced the illusion of a two-dimensional surface from an impenetrably deep three- dimensional space. Finally, whereas the cinematic spectator was extinguished so that the luminous image could reign, the object of “cinematic analysis” vanished before the black screen only to reemerge as a graphic image. The dispositif of artificial darkness comprised black screens and white screens whose constituent components could be reversed so long as they remained strictly separated. Absolute black— in its physiological or technological manifestations—was incommensurable with total darkness. Whether an illusion produced by contrast effects or an instrument of astonishing precision to overcome deceptive appearances, absolute black required the emphatic presence and strict delineation of both light and darkness. But in the decades of its discursive and technical emergence, absolute black was always doubled. The dispositif of artificial darkness was constituted in complementary and inverted dispositions of absolute black: as an autonomous screen and as an immersive environment. Marey and Wagner, black screen and invisible orchestra, cinematic analysis and cinema architecture— the dispositif of artificial darkness comprised two halves that attained totality only through separation.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Copyright © 2016. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: s8492430 AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, NoamMilgrom.; Artificial Darkness :AnObscure History of ModernArt and Media EBSCO Publishing :eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) -printedon 6/12/202010:03 PMviaHARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 3 BLACK SCREENS

Black screens were the invisible technology— and technology of invisibility— behind innumerable nineteenth- century optical attractions. Coupled with dark theaters and other dark chambers (“cameras”), black screens were adopted in science, amateur and professional photography, cinema, magic, theater, and their many hybrid operations. But even as their applications varied, their material supports, qualities, subject effects, and gender relations remained remarkably stable over the course of the long nineteenth century. The complex ensemble that constituted the black screen repeatedly and consistently effected a singular revolution: before black screens, human bodies vanished into image apparatuses. Black screens conjoined physical bodies and virtual images and created model subjects in an era of artificial darkness. The physiologist Étienne- Jules Marey understood cinema as a heightened form of vision that offered astonishing precision where human organs suffered deceptive appearances. Entertainers throughout the long nineteenth century, however, eagerly traded in deceptive appearances. Black screens proved an invaluable asset. By the turn of the century, black screens proliferated across theater, magic, photography, and cinema. So- called Black Art, a theatrical exploitation of the black screen, became a staple of the magic circuit by the late 1880s, at which point parallel techniques and motifs began to pervade the world of amateur trick photography. Earlier in the century, black screens stood invisibly behind apparitions, superimpo- sitions, and myriad other spectacular effects, from phantasmagoric slides to the illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost. Obscure patents were filed away in administrative offices. Precise instructions were published in countless manuals and trade journals. In the first decades of the twentieth century, black screens were so well established among showmen, magicians, slide manufacturers, photographers, and cinematographers that they ceased to be objects of fascination. But for nearly a century, the black screen helped define the parameters of modern visual culture and, with it, the modern mediated subject. The black screen plots a counterhistory to traditional archaeologies

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 of cinema and its subject. In broad strokes, this chapter aims to effect a shift from visibility to invisibility; from montage in time to superimposition in space; from projected moving images to bodies integrated within systems of images (dispositifs); and from spectacularized female bodies to disciplined male bodies. Last, rather than mark the epochal rupture at the ostensible birth of cinema in the mid-1890s or excavate a long history of projection screen practices,1 this chapter posits a dispositif of artificial darkness that predates Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers and that persisted as a significant cinematic mode well into the twentieth century— a dispositif that emerged from and extended far beyond registers we traditionally define as cinematic, but that shaped mainstream cinema and was shaped by it. The black screen was a technology of darkness comprising materials and devices, on the one hand, and a set of body techniques, on the other.2 It was secured neither in the technical or aesthetic medium nor in the human subject, but rather in their mutual and fluid imbrications. At once a technology and technique of darkness, black screens effected the fusion of physical bodies and virtual images through three material supports: black grounds, media, and screens; four qualities of darkness: human scale, circumscription, division from nature, and invisibility; and four subject effects: bodily self- discipline, spatial dislocation, ecstatic duplication, and virtual dismemberment. These are the materials, qualities, and subject effects that defined the black screen as a nineteenth- century media dispositif. But its origins lie even earlier, and its impact extended well into the twentieth century. This is a genealogy of the black screen and its subjects.

Phantasmagoric Slides

The most significant forerunner to the black screen was the black- ground lantern slide— also known as the phantasmagoric slide— which differed from traditional lantern slides in that the painted figures were surrounded by an opaque black pigment, often lamp black or another carbon black. Unlike traditional slides, whose transparent glass substrate circumscribed figures within clearly demarcated circles of light, black grounds unmoored figures from their material supports and suspended them in the darkness. The repercussions of this suspension were patent. Yet the origins of black- ground lantern slides remain obscure. Étienne- Gaspard Robertson, the self-anointed inventor of the Phantasmagoria, claimed paternity. Jean- Frédéric-Maximilien Waldeck later averred to have taught the technique to Robertson. Neither figure could assert a convincing case. Black- ground slides had been made and exhibited at least since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The question was one of use and effect, not invention or design.3 In the eighteenth century, treatises that addressed magic lanterns often proffered a few words on the painting of lantern slides: the care

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 required to render miniature drawings for monstrous enlargement, the qualities of translucent and opaque colors, and even the subjects deemed appropriate for lantern performances.4 The few authors to discuss black grounds failed to appreciate the structural or performative advantages they offered.5 Such was the dominant pattern until the rise of phantasmagorias at the end of the eighteenth century. Black-ground slides were made, used, and discussed, but their potency for a dispositif of darkness went largely untapped.6 Like the introduction of phantasmagoric slides, the origins of the phantasmagoria are enshrouded in darkness— figurative and literal.7 Shadowy showmen including Johann Schröpfer, who organized necromancy performances in Leipzig around 1774, and Paul Philidor, who likely introduced mobile back- projection in 1792, perfected the necessary techniques that Étienne-Gaspard Robert, known as Robertson, later popularized and claimed for himself. Robertson staged his first phantasmagoric performances to great acclaim in January 1798 (fig. 3.1). By the end of the year, Robertson relocated his Phantasmagoria to a larger, more atmospheric location— a depopulated Capuchin convent. At its most elaborate, Rob- ertson’s Phantasmagoria comprised a variety of temptations, including scientific curiosities, anamorphoses, portraits, peep shows, an optical panorama, and, beginning in 1800, the “Gallery of the Invisible Woman.” At its core was always a darkened room from whose seemingly vast expanses

FIg. 3.1. The Phantasmagoria. Frontispiece to volume 1 of Étienne- Gaspard Robert- son, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, 1831–33.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 appeared phantoms and specters: mythical, historical, even familial. As an Enlightenment scientist, Robertson claimed no supernatural powers. As an entrepreneurial showman, he divulged none of his technical wizardry.8 In name and deed, the Phantasmagoria announced itself as an assembly place of ghosts.9 Robertson stole the name, technique, and program directly from Philidor, whose identity remains a mystery. Technically, the Phantasmagoria consisted of black-ground slides projected from behind a translucent screen situated in a darkened space (fig. 3.2). The size of the image— which, in the darkness, was experienced as a proxy for distance— was regulated by the proximity of the mobile magic lantern to the screen. The Fantoscope, to adopt Robertson’s neologism, included a lens tube, to focus the image, and an adjustable multiwick oil lamp, to compensate for what would otherwise be an incongruous increase in brightness as the lantern approached the screen and the image diminished in size and appeared to retreat. Programmatically, the repertoire of images encompassed commonplace ghosts and skeletons, mythological subjects (including the head of Medusa and the Witch of Endor), Gothic gore (like the Bleeding Nun), and contemporary public figures, frequently victims of violence (Marat, Robespierre, and Danton were favorites). Beginning in 1799— and continu- ing for three decades— many of these motifs were developed into elaborate and enchanting dramas. No motif was as structurally important, however, as the skeleton—and hardly for its grisly associations. As Friedrich Kittler has observed in a

FIg. 3.2. Phantasmagoric back projection. Frontispiece to volume 2 of M. Breton, Les savants de quinze ans, ou, Entretiens d’une jeune famille, 1811. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 3.3. Christiaan Huygens, Dance of Death drawings for animated projection, 1659. Leiden University Library, ms. HUG 10, fol. 76v.

related context: “On this worldly scene of all religions and dances of the dead, the skeleton appears on the stage of knowledge and points no longer to allegories of death, but rather to nothing more than its own animation.”10 The skeleton was the ur- motif of the projected moving image.11 The scientist and polymath Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the magic lantern, adapted Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death for animated projection in 1659 (fig. 3.3). A facile figure to animate, the skeleton became the most enduring motif in projected moving image performances well into the twentieth century. Abel Gance resurrected the “Dance of Death” cinemat- ically in J’accuse (1919; fig. 3.4). In one extended dissolve, Gance replaces Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482), masked to look like Gothic stained- glass

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 3.5. “Skeleton Dance,” a Silly Symphony (Walt Disney Productions, 1929). Frame enlargement.

windows, with a dance of death animated by actors in skeleton costumes against a black backdrop. Elsewhere in the film, the same black- clad skeleton dancers are superimposed on scenes of carnage from the Great War. A decade later, Walt Disney made his commercial breakthrough with the famous “Skeleton Dance” (1928; fig. 3.5). Étienne- Jules Marey, the scientist, required artificial darkness to trans- form humans into graphic “human skeletons.” The task was much easier when entertainers dealt directly in graphic images. In either case, the skeleton had particular purchase on black screens. Nearly every attraction related to the black screen— including phantasmagorias, dissolving views, Pepper’s Ghost, Black Art, trick photography, and early cinema— prominently and regularly featured skeletons. The reason was twofold. On a formal level, black was the expedient ground on which to depict white bones. (Compare the interpolation of black in the intercostal regions of Huygens’s and Disney’s skeletons—too pronounced to be justified as shadow.) On a technical level— as evinced in Marey’s laboratory— the combination of black screen and black costume facilitated the disappearance of bodies and space, leaving only an animated skeleton. The difference between Robertson’s Phantasmagoria and Huygens’s magic lantern— similar to the distinction between Gance’s and Disney’s skeletons— is literally black and white. Most projectors— from seventeenth- century magic lanterns to their twenty-first- century digital descendants— projected images in clearly delineated luminous circles or rectangles. In the case of magic lanterns, this luminous surround corresponded to the transparent

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 FIg. 3.6. Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 2nd ed., 1671. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

glass that provided the material support for nearly all lantern subjects. In Athanasius Kircher’s epoch- making illustration from 1671, Death, a scythe- and hourglass-wielding skeleton, is enclosed in a luminous halo neither divine nor infernal, but rather technical (fig. 3.6). The salient feature of phantasmagoric slides was precisely their opaque grounds, from which an elaborate dispositif of darkness was constructed. David Brewster described the black ground of phantasmagoric slides shortly after the attraction was introduced to London by Paul de Philip- stahl at the turn of the nineteenth century: “The glass sliders on which the figures were drawn, had been first covered with opaque varnish, or some black pigment, and the figures had been scratched out on this dark ground by the point of a needle. By this means the figures were luminous.”12 Brew- ster emphasized the luminosity of the image. Much more important was the groundless darkness achieved by the black ground. Rather than appear as an image in a luminous circle or rectangle— as was commonplace for the majority of magic lantern slides up to that point— a black-ground image hovered in space, unmoored from the screen. (As a rule, backgrounds were projected with a second lantern.)13 The result did not resemble an image on a screen so much as a phantom suspended in space. Black- ground slides

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 quickly became the defining feature of phantasmagorias: “The Phantasma- goria produces its effects by the same optical arrangement as the Magic Lantern, but the pictures differ in having their background painted black, and instead of their being exhibited on a white opaque screen, they are seen through a transparent screen of calico oiled or wetted.”14 In the Phantasmagoria, both the magic lantern and the screen were rendered invisible. The lantern hid behind the screen onto which it projected macabre images. The invisibility of the screen was a more complex affair, one we could rightly call an optical arrangement or nascent dispositif. That the screen was canvas covered in clear wax, in Robertson’s account, or made of gauze or thin silk, as reported by Brewster, was not enough to guarantee its invisibility.15 Similarly, that it was unfurled only after audiences were plunged into total darkness or, alternatively, that it was covered by black velvet curtains, like the surrounding walls, until darkness descended, was a necessary but insufficient condition. The Phan- tasmagoria’s invisible screen relied upon a redoubled darkness. The Phantasmagoria was among the first major attractions to unfold in total darkness. This darkness was understood to be highly choreographed. From the first reviews of the Phantasmagoria through Robertson’s early 1830s memoirs and beyond, “draped in black” was the most common description of the space.16 Deep and complete darkness provided both atmospherics and technical support. “The site in which the phantasmagoria takes place requires the greatest possible darkness; it should even be draped in black; otherwise, the reflection of light rays from the walls will illuminate the spectator and allow him to perceive the transparent [screen]; this must be avoided.”17 The Phantasmagoria required an invisible screen. The invisible screen, in turn, was dependent on not one but two darknesses. The immersive darkness of the hall was completed only by the black ground of the lantern slide. And of the two darknesses, the latter was decisive. In the absence of a black ground, a telltale circle of light would automatically unveil an otherwise invisible screen. Robertson allegorized this arrangement of phantasmagoric elements as the worldly passage from birth to death. “The two great epochs of man are his entrance into life and his departure. All that happens to him can be considered as placed between two black and impenetrable veils that swathe these two epochs and which no one has yet raised.”18 In the Phan- tasmagoria, the two veils were the black curtains that draped the room and the black ground that masked the lantern slide and its light. The re doubled black veils did not lend themselves, however, to simple unveiling. As should now be clear, the power of the Phantasmagoria hardly derived from the concealment of the projection equipment, as is often asserted.19 The insistence on simple concealment fails on two related counts. On a technical level, it assumes a set of stable apparatuses—magic lantern, projection screen, lantern slides— that are merely occluded by the screen- cum- veil. Should an enlightened critical subject peer behind the veil and reveal the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2020 10:03 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Elcott, Noam Milgrom.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 hidden apparatus, the entire fraud would be exposed. Such an approach mischaracterizes the operation of the phantasmagoric dispositif. As we have seen, the entire arrangement hinged not on the concealment of a lantern behind a screen but rather on the invisibility of that very screen. The trick of the Phantasmagoria was to hide a projector behind a transparent screen—whereby the light of the projector becomes a blinder rather than a beacon. With a noted shift in emphasis from the beauty to the spectrality of the semblance (the German Schein can entertain both), Walter Benjamin captured perfectly the precarious deception of the Phantasmagoria: “For the beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil. Unveiled, however, it would prove to be infinitely inconspicuous [unscheinbar]. [. . .] Thus, in the face of everything beautiful, the idea of unveiling becomes that of the impossibility of unveiling.”20 This task— which defined, for Benjamin, the role of art criticism21— begins to address the second, philosophical failure of the concealment model. At least since Karl Marx identified the commodity as the “phantasmagoric form” that oc- cludes human labor and relations, the adjective phantasmagoric has stood in for the false consciousness of otherwise stable social relations.22 But as Stefan Andriopoulos has shown, Marx’s optical metaphor was at least twice removed from mere concealment. Hegel’s philosophy, according to Marx, inverted reality like images in a camera obscura; the commodity, however, produced wholly new images, mistaken for reality, like lantern projections in a Phantasmagoria. “Idealist philosophy gives a distorted picture of reality, but as with a camera obscura, its falsification can be cor- rected by a simple inversion. Economic structures of capitalist exchange, by contrast, produce the mirage of a physical object, a simulacrum that has no referent in the material world.”23 As an epistemological metaphor and optical technology, the black- ground lantern slide thus lies at the end of a chain that runs from concealment to distortion and, finally, to production. As Tom Gunning stresses, “The concealment inherent in the commodity fetish and the phantasmagoria does more than simply conceal a process; it also produces something— it does work.”24 Our question, then, is not what or even how the Phantasmagoria concealed, but rather what it produced. On a narrowly technical level, phantasmagorias popularized the spatially unmoored images produced by immersive darkness and black- ground slides. Over the course of the nineteenth century, these lantern slides underwent two crucial transformations. First, black- ground lantern slides were repurposed away from phantasmagoric installations and toward technically complex representation of movement in more traditional slide presentations, such as at the Royal Polytechnic. Multipane glass- lantern slides pioneered by figures including Henry Langdon Childe and W. R. Hill choreographed the slides’ black grounds to make Cupid shoot arrows, skeletons walk, or, in more grotesque fashion common to such slides, exchange the head of a man with a giant meatball25 (fig. 3.7a). The illusion whereby an acrobat appears to kick a ball up in the air and balance

FIg. 3.7. (b) Black-ground lantern slip-slide, c. 1870s. Top: separate components of slide (recto). Middle: two states of slide (verso). Bottom: two states of slide (recto), similar to the images seen in projection.

it on his nose, for example, revolves around the proper choreography of blacks and darkness, as visible in the individual components of a black- ground lantern slide from about the 1870s (fig. 3.7b). Projected moving images were thus anchored in a technology of darkness long before the invention of the cinematograph. Second and less directly, these blackened

Introduction

1. Genesis 1:2, King James Bible. 2. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht (Mu- nich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008), 37. 3. Alois Riegl, “Excerpts from ‘The Dutch Group Portrait,’” October 74 (1995): 11. See also The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Ange- les: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 260. The original German reads “Dieses Raumdunkel ist kein absolutes Dunkel, denn dann wäre es eben nichts und somit auch nicht Raum.” Das holländische Gruppenporträt (orig. 1902; Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1997), 249. Instructively, Sean Cubitt’s genealogy of light-based technological media begins with blackness and Rembrandt. See Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 21– 44. 4. Absolute darkness remains a limit for anything that goes by the name art history but is in fact just the history of painting. Exemplary is T. J. Clark’s 2013 study of Picasso, which foregrounds painting’s struggle to create space out of darkness. As he writes of Picasso’s Three Dancers (1925): “Death is everywhere in the picture. The black head is maybe an attempt to tie it down; but I would say that spatially— and space is what the blackness is there to create—it is precisely the shadow head’s placelessness that is most uncanny [. . .] the nowhereness of the death’s head.” Clark concludes on a triumphant note with Picasso’s capacity to resist “a spatial nothing.” T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 117, 281. Emphasis in original. The present text emphasizes artists who, rather than resist spatial nothingness, marshal “spaceless darkness” to confront modernity’s emergent media conditions. 5. See Luce Abélès and Catherine Charpin, Arts incoherénts, académie du dérisoire (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992). 6. On Alphonse Allais, see John C. Welchman, Invisible Colors (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1997), 106– 12. Less famous but equally comical stories and cartoons of monochromatic photographs—including a similarly racist black monochrome—are chronicled in Clément Chéroux, Fautographie: Petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (Paris: Yellow Now, 2003), 170– 77. 7. For details on the film, see Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 146– 47, 291–95, 355. On Méliès and the In- cohérents, see Matthew Solomon, “Georges Méliès: Anti- Boulangist Caricature and the Incohérent Movement,” Framework 53, no. 2 (2012): 305– 27. 8. The racism of Bilhaud’s original prank is all the more pronounced given similarly

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 captioned but earnest depictions of the nineteenth- century slave trade, for example, Johann Moritz Rugendas’s watercolor lithograph Negroes in the Cellar in his monumental book Voyage Pittoresque dans le Brésil (1827–35). 9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, orig. 1807, trans. J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 9. See also Friedrich Kittler, Die Nacht der Substanz (Bern: Benteli, 1989). The joke on idealism (now labeled neo- idealism) persisted into the twentieth century, when a “pragmatic Humanist” named Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller published a mock issue of the journal Mind with a monochromatic white frontispiece, veiled by a pale- pink semitransparent tissue, and titled “A portrait of the Absolute in the pink of condition.” See H. S. Harris, “The Cows in the Dark Night,” Dialogue 26 (1987): 627– 29. Harris traces Hegel’s famous quip back to Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schelling himself. 10. See Jennifer Mundy, ed., Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia (London: Tate, 2008), 103. Mundy’s designation of the image as cameraless is in keeping with Man Ray’s practice and sense of humor. 11. Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882), act 1. 12. Friedrich Kittler, “World- Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 216. 13. Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926), iii. 14. Robert Desnos, untitled essay originally published in Journal Littéraire, April 25, 1925, anthologized in Cinéma, ed. André Tchernia (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 139. 15. On the specificity of mediated sitelessness in relation to more traditional art- historical discourses on site specificity, see Noam M. Elcott, “Anthony McCall and the Media- tion of Immediacy,” in Anthony McCall: Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture (Berlin: Walther König, 2012), 20– 53. 16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 330. Minkowski addressed the positive value of darkness: “Certainly, the dark night is not taken here in the sense of absence of light or the impossibility of seeing; it is taken in its positive value—in its materiality, we would almost like to say— and as such it is much more material, much more tangible, and even more penetrating than the limpid clarity of visual space. The night no longer is something dead; it has its own life.” Eugène Minkowski, Lived Time, orig. 1933, trans. Nancy Met- zel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 405. See also Edward Eigen, “Dark Space and the Early Days of Photography as a Medium,” Grey Room 3 (2001): 90–111. 17. The classic account is Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 100– 110. Far more sophisticated is T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 9–10. See also Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 18. Maurice Denis, Definition of Neotraditionism, originally published in Art et Critique in Paris, August 23 and 30, 1890; translated by Peter Collier in Art in Theory: 1815– 1900, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 1998), 863. 19. László Moholy-Nagy, “Unprecedented Photography,” orig. 1927, trans. Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art / Aperture, 1989), 85. 20. Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907– 1933 (Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 107. An American English equivalent— from “moving picture” to “motion picture”—has been charted in William Paul, “Uncanny Theater: The Twin Inheritances of the Movies,” Paradoxa 3, nos. 3– 4 (1997): 321– 22.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 21. Gabriele Pedullà, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema, trans. Pa- tricia Gaborik (London: Verso, 2012), 5. 22. See Eva Horn, “Editor’s Introduction: ‘There Are No Media,’” Grey Room 29 (2008): 6– 13. See also Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in Electronic Culture, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), 331– 37; Bernhard Siegert, “There Are No Mass Media,” orig. 1996, trans. Peter Gilgen, in Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 2003), 30– 38; W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 395– 406. 23. Joseph Vogl, “Taming Time: Media of Financialization,” Grey Room 46 (2012): 73. 24. Ibid., 72. 25. But see the compelling account in Lisa Gotto, “Schwarz Sehen: Zur Medialität des Dunkel vor, im und Nach dem Kino,” Figurationen, no. 2 (2007): 25– 46. 26. Michel Foucault, “The Confessions of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194. Translation slightly modified. 27. Foucault understood certain dispositifs— particularly, the Panopticon— in terms of visibility and invisibility. (See chapter 1.) Others, including Gilles Deleuze, have observed the importance of the visible and the invisible in Foucault’s thought, even if visibility and light are ultimately privileged in their accounts: “Visibility cannot be traced back to a general source of light which could be said to fall upon pre- existing objects: it is made of lines of light which form variable shapes inseparable from the apparatus in question. Each apparatus [dispositif ] has its way of structuring light [. . .] distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear.” Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif ?,” trans. Timothy J. Armstrong, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 160. See also Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 32; John Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October 44 (1988): 91– 93. 28. See Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1– 24. 29. Benjamin Buchloh praised Michael Asher for creating artwork that is “reduced with an almost barbaric finality and exclusivity to the condition of mere dispositif.” See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher, 1943–2012,” Artforum, April 2013, 60. In the chapters that follow, the artworks are inextricably bound to the dispositif of artificial darkness, but they cannot be reduced exclusively to that condition. At stake, rather, is the recursive interplay between work and dispositif. 30. As Craig Koslofsky argues, however, the separation of darkness from night began centuries earlier. See Craig Koslofsky, Empire’s Evening: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 278. See also William Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht; Brigitte Borchhardt- Birbaumer, Imago Noctis: Die Nacht in der Kunst des Abend- landes vom Alten Orient bis ins Zeitalter des Barock (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Nancy K. Anderson, ed., Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003); Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York: Monthly Review, 2000); Christoph Vitali, Erika Billeter, and Hubertus Gassner, Die Nacht (Wabern-Bern: Benteli, 1998); Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840– 1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhor and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). The

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 genre of night photography reached a certain acme in the 1930s with the publication of Brassaï and Paul Morand, Paris de nuit (Paris: Édition Arts et métiers graphiques, 1933), and Bill Brandt, A Night in London (London: Country Life, 1938). 31. Even as later dioramas were lit by gaslight (and thus freed from the constraints of natural light), artificial lights were used only sparingly in the diorama in the first decades of its existence. See Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: A Media Archaeol- ogy of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 144– 55. 32. See, for example, Roy A. Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Matthias Götz, Bruni Haldner, and Mat- thias Buschle, eds., Schatten, Schatten. Schatten— das älteste Medium der Welt (Basel: Schwabe, 2003); Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club, trans. Abigail Asher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Viktor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne- Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion, 1997); Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlight- enment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, orig. 1933, trans. Thomas Harper and Edward Seidensticker (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977). 33. On the symbolisms of black, see Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); J. R. Harvey, The Story fo Black (Lon- don: Reaktion Books, 2013). On darkness, interiors, and interiority in later nineteenth- century art, see Peter W. Parshall, ed., The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850– 1900 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009). 34. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1. A similar sentiment is articulated sardonically in Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), where the white lover of a black man is chided because he cares only about the body of his black lover, not his mind or spirit: “To you he is only visible in the dark.” See also T. J. Demos, “The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen,” October 114 (2005): 61–89; Noam M. Elcott, “In Search of Lost Space: Stan Douglas’s Archaeology of Mediated Darkness,” October 139 (2012): 151–82. For a more traditional approach to racial blackness and early cinema, see Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 35. See Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, eds., Licht und Leitung (Weimar: Universitätsverlag, 2002); David. E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Dis- enchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880– 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 36. Recent major publications include Nadine Monem, ed. Light Show (London: Koenig, 2013); Ulrike Gärtner, Kai-Uwe Hemken, and Kai Uwe Schierz, eds., Kunst LichtSpiele (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2009); Peter Weibel and Gregor Jansen, eds., Light Art from Artificial Light (Ostfildern- Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006); Marion Acker- man and Dietrich Neumann, eds., Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night (Ostfil- dern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006); Anne Hoormann, Lichtspiele (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003); Dietrich Neumann, ed., Architecture of the Night (Munich: Prestel- Verlag, 2002). The history of theater lighting is addressed in chapter 2 of this book. 37. See Maria Rzepińska, “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Back- ground,” Artibus et Historiae 7, no. 13 (1986): 91– 112. 38. See Anthony Vidler, “Transparency and Utopia,” in The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: Monacelli, 2011), esp. 142– 46. See also the coda to this book.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 39. See Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art (New York: Zone Books, 2009). 40. See Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013). 41. See Robert Slifkin, “James Whistler as the Invisible Man: Anti- aestheticism and Ar- tistic Vision,” Oxford Art Journal 29 (2006): 53– 75. 42. See Tom Gunning, “Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cin- ema,” Fotogenia, no. 1 (1995). 43. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant- Garde, orig. 1974, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneap- olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. 35–54. See the trenchant criticisms and rebuttal in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo- Avantgarde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000), xxiii–xxv; Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant- Garde?,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1–34; Peter Bürger, “Avant- Garde and Neo-Avant- Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant- Garde,” New Literary History 41 (2011): 695– 715. See also Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed., Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2011).

Chapter One

1. Friedrich Kittler, “World- Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 222. 2. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, orig. 1964 (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 3. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Pho- tography, orig. 1897 (New York: Munn, 1901), 469. 4. On Marey generally, see these excellent studies: Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne- Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Francois Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta and Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992). On the graphic method, see also Soraya de Chadare- vian, “Graphical Method and Discipline: Self- Recording Instruments in Nineteenth- Century Physiology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24, no. 2 (1993): 267– 91; John W. Douard, “E.-J. Marey’s Visual Rhetoric and the Graphic Decomposition of the Body,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 2 (1995): 175– 204. 5. For overviews of Muybridge, see Philip Brookman, ed., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2010); Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space, and Ead- weard Muybridge (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 6. See Étienne- Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ, Lettres d’Étienne- Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ, 1880– 1894, ed. Thierry Lefebvre, Jacques Malthête, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 1999), 80, 89. 7. On earlier uses of dark fields in microscopic and astronomic realms, see Simon Henry Gage, “Modern Dark- Field Microscopy and the History of Its Development,” Trans- actions of the American Microscopical Society 39, no. 2 (1920): 95–141. The paradoxical darkness of the nighttime sky— known as Olbers’s paradox— was a subject of much debate in the nineteenth century. See Edward Robert Harrison, Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 8. Jimena Canales, “Exit the Frog, Enter the Human: Physiology and Experimental Psy- chology in Nineteenth-Century Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 173n171. See also Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Omar W. Nasim, “The ‘Landmark’ and ‘Groundwork’ of Stars:

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 John Herschel, Photography and the Drawing of Nebulae,” Studies in History and Phi- losophy of Science 42 (2011): 67– 84. 9. Dagognet, Étienne- Jules Marey, 15. Similarly, even as Paul Virilio focuses on invisibility and disappearance, he foregrounds the conquest of darkness by light at Marey’s Physiological Station. See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, orig. 1980, trans. Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 28, 62; Paul Virilio, War and Cin- ema: The Logistics of Perception, orig. 1984, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 10. 10. See Michel Frizot, La chronophotographie, avant le cinématographe (Beaune: Association des amis de Marey, 1984), 77, 127–28; Braun, Picturing Time, 75– 128; Dagognet, Étienne- Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, 98. 11. Étienne- Jules Marey, “The Physiological Station of Paris,” Science 2, no. 42 (1883): 680. French original: “La station physiologique de Paris,” La Nature, 1883, 229– 30. 12. See “Conditions de la rapidité des images dans la chrono-photographie,” Comptes Ren- dues des séances de l’académie des sciences 103 (1886): 538. The final paragraph— in which Marey addresses the “dispositifs expérimentaux” that enabled him to approach the ideal conditions posited by Chevreul— is curiously absent from the English translation published a year later. See “Upon Conditions Necessary for Taking Rapid Pho- tographs,” Photographer’s World 1, no. 12 (1887): 16– 17. Marey used the term dispositif sparingly, preferring disposition. But his colleague and follower Albert Londe used dispositif extensively. See, for example, Albert Londe, La photographie moderne, 2nd ed. (Paris: G. Masson, 1896). 13. Marey, “Physiological Station of Paris,” 708; “La station physiologique de Paris,” 75. 14. Physiologie du mouvement: Vol des oiseaux (Paris: G. Masson, 1890), 169– 70. 15. “Upon Conditions Necessary for Taking Rapid Photographs,” 16–17; “Conditions de la rapidité des images dans la chronophotographie,” 537–38. 16. Marey also envisioned covering the ground in black velvet. See “Upon Conditions Necessary for Taking Rapid Photographs,” 16– 17. 17. “The Physiological Station of Paris,” 680. On the “chemical” darkness procured by red lights in photographic darkrooms, see chapter 2. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History of Life,” orig. 1874, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1997), 105. 19. Étienne-Jules Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris: G. Masson, 1878), 108. 20. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40 (1992): 81. Marey’s graphic method was also a paradigm of what Daston calls “aper- spectival objectivity,” the elimination of individual or group idiosyncrasies in favor of a larger scientific community and communicability. Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 612. 21. Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Car- oline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379, 384. See also Josh Ellenbogen, “Camera and Mind,” Representations 101, no. 1 (2008). Daston and Galison largely acceded to Snyder’s criticism and limited their later discussion of Marey to an oblique reference to photographic images used “as instruments of scientific discovery.” Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 126. 22. Objectivity, 203. For Daston and Galison, techniques of self-imposed selflessness characterized the scientific quest for objectivity, one that was “diametrically opposed to the artistic self” and its pronounced subjectivity (37). As recognized by reviewers, the opposition between objective science and subjective art is among the weaker ar-

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 guments in this otherwise magisterial work. See, for example, Joel Smith, “Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 1–2 (2010): 109–13. Artificial darkness required self- imposed selflessness from its scientists, artists, entertainers, and spectators alike. 23. Étienne- Jules Marey, “Emploi des photographies partielles pour étudier la locomotion de l’homme et des animaux,” Comptes Rendues des séances de l’Académie des sciences 96 (1883). 24. “Développement de la méthode graphique par la photographie,” appended to Étienne- Jules Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, 2nd ed. (Paris: G. Masson, 1885), 36. 25. As Josh Ellenbogen has emphasized, it was precisely “the disappearance of anteced- ents that stand before the image” that marked the radicality of Marey’s project. Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 170. 26. On “cinematic analysis,” see Marey, “Emploi des photographies partielles pour étudier la locomotion de l’homme et des animaux.” Kinematics was a branch of classical mechanics that described the motion of bodies irrespective of the forces that cause the motion. Franz Reuleaux popularized the term in his important 1875 text, which was almost immediately translated into French and English. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, as Siegfried Zielinski notes, kinematics became the most important scientific discipline in engineering. See Franz Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik: Grundzüge einer Theorie des Maschinenwesens (Braunschweig, Germany: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1875); Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in His- tory, trans. Gloria Custance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 72. 27. Friedrich Kittler, “Man as a Drunken Town- Musician,” MLN 31, no. 3 (2003): 644. 28. See Braun, Picturing Time, 104– 9; Marta Braun, “Marey and Demenÿ: The Problems of Cinematic Collaboration and the Construction of the Male Body at the End of the 19th Century,” in Marey/Muybridge (Ville de Beaune, France: Conseil régional de Bour- gogne, 1996), 72– 81. 29. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). For an overview of medicine’s visual culture, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Albert Londe repeatedly acknowledges his debt to Marey. See, for example, Albert Londe, La photographie moderne (Paris: G. Masson, 1888), 265– 68. 30. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 119. See also Braun, “Marey and Demenÿ,” 72–81; Cartwright, Screening the Body, esp. 33–39. 31. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, orig. 1975, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 32. Ibid., 200; Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 202. See also John Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October 44 (1988): 96– 105. 33. The invisibility of the guard could not be taken for granted. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham consternated at length over the details. See Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Božovič (London: Verso, 1995), esp. 35– 39, 101–6. 34. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 153–54. See also Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), esp. 167– 75. 35. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–1974 , trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 106. 36. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 150.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 37. See Albert B. Costa, Michel Eugène Chevreul, Pioneer of Organic Chemistry (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for Department of History, University of Wis- consin, 1962). 38. See Michel Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and Their Applications to the Arts, orig. 1839, trans. Charles Martel, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855). On Chevreul and impressionism, see Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Nîmes, France: J. Chambon, 1997); Georges Roque, “Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (1996): 27–39; John Gage, “The Technique of Seurat: A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (1987): 448– 54; Meyer Schapiro, “Impressionism and Science,” in Impressionism (New York: George Braziller, 1997), 206– 29; Paul Smith, Seurat and the Avant- Garde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 39. The emphasis on Chevreul’s longevity was especially pronounced around his 1886 centennial and in his obituaries. 40. The first of these was Michel Eugène Chevreul, “Note de M. Chevreul sur ses derniers travaux,” Comptes Rendues des séances de l’Académie des sciences 83, no. 26 (1876): 1265. 41. See, for example, the writings of Edmund Landolt, a Swiss ophthalmologist stationed in Paris, in which he described the 1875 fabrication of “absolute black” through a velvet light trap in order to further the diagnosis of achromatopsia and dyschromatopsia. Edmond Landolt, A Manual of Examination of the Eyes: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the École Pratique, trans. Swan Burnett (Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton, 1879), 198– 99. 42. Presented to the Académie by Chevreul in 1847. Gaston Tissandier, A History and Handbook of Photography, ed. John Thomson (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1876), 85. Niépce de Saint- Victor laid the groundwork for the later realization of albumen prints and the wet- collodion process, neither of which he perfected. 43. See, for example, Abel Niépce de Saint- Victor and Michel Eugène Chevreul, “Re- cherches photographiques” (1855); Abel Niépce de Saint- Victor, “Sur l’obtention des noirs en héliocromie,” Bulletin du Musée de l’industrie 48, no. 6 (1865): 309– 12. 44. “Sixième Mémoire sur l’heliochromie,” Comptes Rendues des séances de l’Académie des sciences 63 (1866): 567. Emphasis in original. 45. See, for example, Auguste Rosenstiehl, “De l’emploi des disques rotatifs pour l’étude des sensations lumineuses colorées,” Séances de la Société française de physique, 1877; Michel Eugène Chevreul, “Observations, à propos des recherches de M. Rosenstiehl sur le noir absolu ou noir idéal,” Les mondes 16, no. 46 (1878): 564. 46. Complément des études sur la vision des couleurs (Paris: Firmin- Didot, 1879). 47. See Adolf Fick, “Ueber den zeitlichen Verlauf der Erregung in der Netzhaut,” Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 1863, 751–55; Lehrbuch der Anatomie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (Lahr, Germany: M. Schauenburg, 1864), 279. 48. Fick, “Ueber den zeitlichen Verlauf der Erregung in der Netzhaut,” 752. 49. Ibid., 755. 50. Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement, trans. Eric Pritchard (London: W. Heinemann, 1895), 72. 51. Joseph Plateau, “Sur la mesure des sensations physiques, et sur la loi qui lie l’intensité de ces sensations à l’intensité de la cause excitante,” Bulletins de l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux- arts de Belgique 33 (1872): 379. 52. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, orig. 1810, trans. Charles East- lake (London: John Murray, 1840); Jan Evangelista Purkyně, Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht, vol. 1, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne (Prague: In Commission bei Johann Gottfried Calve, 1819). On the various appellations, see Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson, The Perception of Brightness and Darkness (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1966), 20.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 53. For an overview of the literature, see Vicki J. Volbrecht and Reinhold Kliegl, “The Perception of Blackness: An Historical and Contemporary Review,” in Color Vision, ed. Werner Backhaus, Reinhold Kliegl, and John Simon Werner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 187– 206. See also W. D. Wright, “The Nature of Blackness in Art and Visual Perception,” Leonardo 14, no. 3 (1981): 236– 37. 54. See Aristotle, De Anima, ed. R. D. Hicks, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 419b413, p. 479; Aristotle’s Psychology: A Treatise on the Principle of Life (De anima and Parva naturalia), ed. and trans. William A. Hammond (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1902), 158–60. See also the pseudo-Aristotelian text “De Coloribus,” trans. T. Loveday and E. S. Forster, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913). On the last, see H. B. Gottschalk, “The de Coloribus and Its Author,” Hermes 92, no. 1 (1964): 59– 85. 55. Authors sometimes identified differences of degree, rather than kind. For example, in Edmund Burke’s reflections on the sublimity of darkness: “the ideas of darkness and blackness are much the same; and they differ only in this, that blackness is a more confined idea.” Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 275. 56. Crary, Techniques of the Observer. This account is much indebted to Crary’s. 57. Goethe, Theory of Colours, §18, pp. 16–17. Goethe included a loose German translation of De Coloribus, based on the edition of S. Portius, in the third (historical) section of his Farbenlehre. See also Bernard Howells, “The Problem with Colour: Three theorists— Goethe, Schopenhauer, Chevreul,” in Artistic Relations, ed. Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 76–93; P. F. H. Lauxterman, “Five Decisive Years: Schopenhauer’s Epistemology as Reflected in his Theory of Color,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 18, no. 3 (1987): 271– 91. 58. Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 59. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 88–96. 60. Johannes Müller, Elements of Physiology, orig. 1833, trans. William Baly, 2 vols. (London: Taylor and Walton, 1842), 2:1103. Translation modified. Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen (Koblenz, Germany: J. Hölscher, 1837), 2:296. 61. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” orig. 1868, in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1995), 157. 62. See Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1867), 280–81. See also Gustav Fechner’s distinction between Nachtdunkel and Augenschwarz in Gustav Fech- ner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1860). 63. Ewald Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, orig. 1905/1920, trans. Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1. Emphasis in original. 64. See R. Steven Turner, “Vision Studies in Germany: Helmholtz versus Hering,” in Re- search Schools: Historical Reappraisals, ed. Gerald L. Geison and Frederic L. Holmes, Osiris 8 (1993): 80– 103. 65. Ewald Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, orig. 1874 (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1878), 65–66. 66. Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, 30. 67. Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, 65; see also 89. 68. See Paul D. Sherman, Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century: The Young- Helmholtz- Maxwell Theory (Bristol, UK: Hilger, 1981). 69. Hering was imprecise on the relation between optical primaries and neural color opponency. The distinction was articulated definitively by G. E. Müller in 1896. See

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 Volbrecht and Kliegl, “Perception of Blackness,” 192. Hurvich and Jameson, who were instrumental in reviving interest in and substantiating the claims made by Hering, further clarified this point. See Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson, “An Opponent- Process Theory of Color Vision,” orig. 1957, in Visual Perception, ed. Steven Yantis (Phil- adelphia: Psychology Press, 2001), 129–44; Perception of Brightness and Darkness. On opponency and television, see, for example C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers (Indi- anapolis: Hackett, 1988), 30. 70. See Gerald Westheimer, “The oN–oFF Dichotomy in Visual Processing: From Receptors to Perception,” Progress in Retinal and Eye Research 27 (2007): 636– 48. See also Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?,” trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 44–45. 71. Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, 62–66. 72. According to certain contemporary neuroscientists, color opponency may be a result of the properties of natural spectra and not solely a consequence of the spectral sen- sitivities of cones. See T. W. Lee, T. Wachtler, and T. J. Sejnowski, “Color Opponency is an Efficient Representation of Spectral Properties in Natural Scenes,” Vision Research 42, no. 17 (2002): 2095– 2103. 73. Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, 65. 74. Chevreul attempted to backdate his discovery of absolute black to 1839. But the passages he cites provide little more than a hint of the material– absolute distinction he would later establish. If anything, these passages reveal a complete lack of interest in the phenomenon of absolute black. See Chevreul, “Observations, à propos des recherches de M. Rosenstiehl,” 129–30; Complément des études sur la vision des couleurs, 31–32; De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839), esp. 3–4. 75. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil fo Nature, orig. 1844– 46 (Chicago: KWS, 2011), plate VIII. Before and after the invention of photography, John Herschel published on subjects like “the refrangibility of the invisible rays of the sun.” See also Corey Keller, ed., Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 76. Désiré van Monckhoven, Traité général de photographie, 6th ed. (Paris: Georges Masson, 1873), 179. 77. Edward L. Wilson, Wilson’s Photographics (Philadelphia: Wilson, 1883), 89. 78. Ernst Vogel and Karl Weiss, Dr. E. Vogels Taschenbuch der Photographie (Berlin: Union deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1925), 118. The first edition of this popular manual was published in 1870, from which time hundreds of thousands of copies were printed in multiple editions. 79. T. Frederick Hardwich, A Manual of Photographic Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical, ed. John Traill Taylor, 9th ed. (New York: Scovill Manufacturing, 1886), 219. 80. Charles Fabre, Traité encyclopédique de photographie (Paris: Gauthier- Villars, 1889), 474. 81. In light of its perceived obsolescence effected through poststudio practices, the traditional artist’s studio has garnered extensive attention in recent years. See Jens Hoffmann, The Studio (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, The Studio Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube, Buell Center / FORuM Proj- ect (New York: Columbia University, 2007); Michael W. Cole and Mary Pardo, eds., Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 82. Josef Maria Eder (and many others) discerned three types of ateliers: lectern-form (with glazed roof and front wall); hut- form (with glazed roof, front, and side walls);

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 and tunnel- form (one of the above two forms augmented by a tunnel-like gangway in which the camera is placed). We will return to the tunnel- form below. See Josef Maria Eder, Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie (Halle, Germany: Wilhelm Knapp, 1884), 465. 83. See H. Baden Pritchard, The Photographic Studios of Europe (London: Piper and Carter, 1882). 84. In Anne McCauley’s astute formulation: “Whereas the exteriors of photographic studios echoed the glass and iron construction of modern buildings like railroad stations, exhibition halls, and greenhouses, their interiors appropriated the decors of fashion- able drawing rooms.” Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 69. 85. Mathew Carey Lea, A Manual of Photography, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Author, 1871), 114. 86. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, Lehrbuch der Photographie (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1878), 238. 87. Eder, Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie, 58– 67. The text went through multiple editions and printings into the 1930s. 88. Vogel, Lehrbuch der Photographie, 251. “Chemisches Licht.” Vogel advised against blue glass in the atelier because it reduced the amount of actinic or chemical light. Even- tually, the practice of blue glass was abandoned. 89. In German and other languages, the term medium was not widely applied to technological media until well into the twentieth century. See Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler, eds., Medientheorie 1888– 1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). 90. On Daguerre as an impresario or entrepreneur equally at home in art and in entertainment, see Stephen Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreo- type (New York: Dover, 1968). 91. See R. Derek Wood, “The Daguerreotype Patent, the British Government, and the Royal Society,” History of Photography 4, no. 1 (1980): 53– 59. 92. On early studio practices, especially those of Beard and Claudet, see John Hannavy, Victorian Photographers at Work (Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, UK: Shire, 1997); McCauley, Industrial Madness, 56– 75; Elizabeth Heyert, The Glass- House Years: Victorian Portrait Photography 1839–1870 (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld and Schram, 1979). 93. See Richard Beard, “Beard’s Patent for Improvements in Photogenic Drawings [Sealed June 13, 1840],” London Journal of Arts and Sciences and Repertory of Patent Inventions 18 (1841): 114. Technically, the glass medium was not part of the patent, presumably because Beard adopted the proposal from Woollcott. 94. Louis- Jacques- Mandé Daguerre, “A New or Improved Method of Obtaining the Spon- taneous Reproduction of All the Images Received in the Focus of the Camera Obscura,” England Patent 8194, 1839. 95. Antoine Claudet, “Certain Improvements in the Process or Means of and Apparatus for Obtaining Images or Representations of Nature or Art,” England Patent 9193, 1841, 3. He adds: “These colors appear to have no photogenic effect in the daguerreotype process” (5). In a photo- manual published decades later, the section on the “darkroom or developing chamber (Fr., Laboratoire; Ger., Dunkelzimmer, Dunkelkammer)” defined the darkroom as follows: “A room or cupboard devoted principally to the operation of development, and from which all white or actinic light is excluded. Until A. J. F. Clau- det patented, in the ’forties, the use of coloured media, preferably red, the developing chamber was really in total darkness; but since then the name of ‘darkroom’ has been

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 somewhat of a misnomer.” Bernard E. Jones, ed. Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Photography (New York: Cassell, 1912), 162. The author then enumerates the best colored media for various photographic techniques, e.g., amber- colored glass for wet collodion plates, one or two thicknesses of yellow fabric for bromide paper, and so forth. See also the frequent and remarkable illustrations of darkrooms with bright windows and starkly delineated shadows— for example, figure 10, following page 90, in Tissandier, History and Handbook of Photography. Tissandier was editor of La Nature. 96. Antoine Claudet, “Researches on the Theory of the Principal Phaenomena of Pho- tography in the Daguerreotype Process,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 35, no. 237 (November 1849): 378. Spelling in the original. Throughout the decade, Claudet continued to work on colored- glass media and their effects on solar radiation and the photographic process. See, for example, the paper communicated by David Brewster: Antoine Claudet, “On Different Properties of Solar Radiation Producing or Preventing a Deposit of Mercury on Silver Plates Coated with Iodine, or Its Compounds with Bromine or Chlorine, Modified by Coloured Glass Media and the Vapours of the Atmosphere,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1847): 253– 66. 97. Scheerbart wrote: “Not more light!— ‘more colored light!’ must be the watchword.” See Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, orig. 1914, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. James Palmes (New York: Praeger, 1972), 72. 98. Blue glass houses and rooms were abandoned relatively quickly. But red safety lights were a staple of the photographic process through the twentieth century and are integral components of the darkrooms that remain. 99. Bernhard Siegert, “Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic,” Grey Room 47 (2012): 10. 100. See Hermann Schnaus, Photographischer Zeitvertrieb, orig. 1890, 4th ed. (Düsseldorf: Ed. Liesegang Verlag, 1893), 53– 54; Walter E. Woodbury, Photographic Amusements, orig. 1896, 3rd ed. (New York: Scovill and Adams, 1898), 48; A. Parzer-Mühlbacher, Photog- raphisches Unterhaltungsbuch, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Schmidt, 1906), 85. The quotation above, republished in Woodbury, was first issued in “Recreations in Photography,” Scientific American 68, no. 12 (1893): 184. Bergeret addressed photography on a black background at length but did not specify how the fond noir was to be constructed. Albert Bergeret and Félix Drouin, Les Récréations photographiques, orig. 1890, 2nd ed. (Paris: Sch. Mendel, 1893). 101. Lea, Manual of Photography, 194–95. 102. See Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 83. 103. See Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 21. 104. “To Correspondents,” Photographic News, October 12, 1860, 288. 105. Antoine Claudet, “Progress of Photography,” Transactions of the Society of Arts, 1847, 208. 106. Ibid. Spelling modernized. 107. See Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 144. The exemplary case of the Babelsberg studio outside Berlin is elaborated in Wolfgang Jacobsen, ed., Babelsberg: ein Filmstudio 1912– 1992 (Berlin: Argon, 1992). For an ex ample of cinematographers’ pretensions, see John Alton, Painting with Light (New York: Mac- millan, 1949). 108. Moholy-Nagy promoted photographic and cinematic expression under the rubric Lichtnerei, which replaced the Mal (mark) of Malerei (painting) with Licht (light). See, for example, László Moholy- Nagy, “Das Problem des Neuen Films: Los von der Malerei!,” Bildwart 8, no. 4 (1930): 151.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 109. See Paul C. Spehr, The Man Who Made Movies: W. K. L. Dickson (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2008), 254–75; Ray Phillips, Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 37–45; Charles Musser, Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 14– 22; George J. Svejda, The Black Maria Site Study: Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey (Wash- ington, DC: Division of History, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1969). 110. Monckhoven, Traité général de photographie, 184. 111. See the annotated illustration made retrospectively by Dickson in 1933, reproduced in Phillips, Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films, 42. As reported in the Orange Chronicle (March 10, 1894), the Black Maria was covered entirely with black tar paper, thus “giving the effect of a dead black tunnel behind the subject to be photographed.” Cited in Svejda, Black Maria Site Study, 23. The darkroom was similarly lined with heavy black felt. 112. W. K. L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto- Phonograph (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1895; repr., 2000), 19. 113. See Braun, Picturing Time, 104–5. 114. See ibid., 150– 98. 115. Marey, Movement, 185. French original: Le mouvement (Paris: G. Masson, 1894), 181. 116. Dickson and Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph , 22. Edison later affirmed that “we covered it with tar- paper outside, and painted it a dead black inside to bring our actors into the sharpest relief.” Thomas A. Edison and Dagobert D. Runes, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 69. Charles Musser has likened this visual isolation to the acoustic isolation required in phonographic recordings, with which Edison was much more familiar. Charles Musser, Emergence of the Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 78– 81. 117. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1946), 1:141– 42. 118. Musser, Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures, 14–15; Phillips, Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films. 119. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 116. 120. In 1894 psychologist Alfred Binet invited magicians—including Raynaly from Méliès’s Théâtre Robert- Houdin— to perform their magic before Demenÿ’s chronophotographic camera. Alas, there is no record of Méliès’s direct involvement. See Jacques Deslandes, Le boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963), 15–16; Braun, Picturing Time, 183–85. 121. Paolo Cherchi Usai, “A Trip to the Movies,” in Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imag- inary, ed. Matthew Solomon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 25. 122. Georges Méliès, “En marge de l’histoire du cinématographe,” Ciné- Journal, no. 888 (September 3, 1926): 9–12. Cited in Jacques Malthête, “Les deux studios de Georges Méliès,” in Méliès: Magie et cinéma, ed. Jacques Malthête and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Paris musées, 2002), 159. See also Brian R. Jacobson, “The ‘Imponderable Fluidity’ of Modernity: Georges Méliès and the Architectural Origins of Cinema,” Early Popu- lar Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (2010): 189–207; Jacques Malthête, “L’appentis sorcier de Montreuil-sous- Bois,” in Méliès: Carrefour des attractions, ed. André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). The best historical account to survive is Maurice Noverre, “L’oeuvre de Georges Méliès,” Le nouvel art cinématographique 3 (1929): 64– 85. 123. John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 45. 124. On early cinematic dispositifs of production and reception, see Jean-Pierre Sirois- Trahan, “Dispositif(s) et réception,” CiNéMAS 14, no. 1 (2003): 149– 76.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 125. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, orig. 1986, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. 126. Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, 27. Emphasis in original. 127. The history of variable frame rates— 18fps, 24fps, 48fps, as well as innumerable non- standardized rates employed in early cinema—testifies to technical expediency and does not negate the basic media ambition whereby human thresholds are identified only to be exceeded. As Kittler argued: “Standards have nothing to do with Man. They are the criteria of media and psychophysics, which they abruptly link together.” Frie- drich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 223.

Chapter Two

1. Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 125. 2. Theater, from the Greek theatron, and the German Zuschauerraum are among the many related terms that retain the primacy of vision. 3. August Klingemann, Kunst und Natur (1823), cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disen- chanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 204. 4. See Bernard Thaon, “L’éclairage au théâtre,” Histoire de l’art, no. 17– 18 (1992): 38. 5. Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 254. 6. Leone Di Somi, “The Dialogues of Leone di Somi,” orig. c. 1556– 65, in The Development of the Theatre, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (London: Harrap, 1927), 275. Di Somi also advocated for the use of transparent or colored glass around the stage lights to mitigate the ir- ritating effects of staring at bright lights for protracted periods. See also Anne- Laure Benharrosh, “Leone de’ Sommi, homme de théâtre juif dans l’Italie de la Renaissance,” Les Cahiers du Judaïsme 14 (2003): 25– 43. 7. See Gösta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), esp. 89– 92. 8. Joseph Furttenbach, Mannhafter Kunstspiegel (Augsburg, Germany: Johann Schultes, 1663), 113. Cited in Johannes Bemmann, Die Bühnenbeleuchtung vom geistlichen Spiel bis zur frühen Oper als mittel Künstlerischer Illusion (Leipzig: Druck von Thomas & Hubert, Weida i. Thür., 1933), 115. 9. Craig Koslofsky, “Princes of Darkness: The Night at Court, 1650– 1750,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 2 (2007): 251. 10. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 208. 11. See Frederick Penzel, Theatre Lighting before Electricity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978); T. A. L. Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978). 12. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre, 298. 13. See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, orig. 1980, trans. Deborah Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Painted Pan- orama, trans. Anne- Marie Glasheen (New York: Harry Abrams, 1999). 14. See Stephen Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Da- guerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover, 1968). John Arrowsmith, Daguerre’s brother- in- law, took out a patent in England: “John Arrowsmith, Diorama, or Method of Exhibiting Pictures,” England

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 1824. See also R. Derek Wood, “Daguerre and His Diorama in the 1830s: Some Financial Announcements,” Photoresearcher, no. 6 (1997): 35– 40. 15. Later dioramas were lit partially with gaslight. See Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: A Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 144– 55. 16. Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978), 163. These sentiments echo Di Somi and were expressed precisely, albeit less succinctly, by the first commentators on the Diorama. See, among numerous examples, A. B. W., “The Diorama, a New Exhibition,” Mirror Monthy Magazine 2, no. 46 (1823): 245– 46. 17. Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room 9 (2002): 19. See also Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 247– 57. 18. “London Exhibitions,” Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 37 (October 1839), 242. 19. On the structures and plans that culminated in the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, see Heinrich Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahnfried: Geplante und ausgeführte Bauten Richard Wagners (Munich: Prestel, 1985); Oswald Georg Bauer, Baugeschichte des Bayreuther Festspielhauses (Munich: Bayerische Vereinsbank, 1994). For overviews of the festival and performance, see Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 20. Richard Wagner, “The Art- Work of the Future,” orig. 1849, trans. William Ashton Ellis, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1895; repr., 1972), 185, and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1850), 188– 89. Translation modified. 21. The original German reads “aus dem Zuschauerraume aber verschwindet das Publi- kum, dieser Repräsant des öffentlichen Lebens, sich selbst.” 22. Beat Wyss, “Ragnarök of Illusion: Richard Wagner’s ‘Mystical Abyss,’” October 54 (1990): 72, 77. 23. Cited in Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, orig. 1937/38, trans. Rodney Living- stone (London: Verso, 1991), 107. 24. As a mnemonic trace of this earlier design, the Festspielhaus’s ceiling was painted by the brothers Gotthold and Max Brückner in imitation of a “velarium,” that is, the fabric cover used to protect ancient Greek audiences from sun and often decorated with a starry sky motif. See Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahnfried, 144– 49, 402. 25. Carl- Friedrich Baumann, Bühnentechnik im Festspielhaus Bayreuth (Munich: Prestel, 1980), 256–60. 26. Richard Wagner, “The Festival- Playhouse at Bayreuth,” orig. 1873, trans. William Ash- ton Ellis, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1896; repr., 1972), 335. 27. See, for example, John Tresch, “The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria around 1848,” Grey Room 43 (2011): 16–41; Henning Schmidgen, “1900—The Spectatorium: On Biology’s Audiovisual Archive,” Grey Room 43 (2011): 42–65; Frederick Bohrer, “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History,” in Art History and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 246– 59. 28. Wagner, “Festival-Playhouse at Bayreuth,” 333. 29. Precedents include Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s theater in Besançon (1778–84), proposals by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (especially his “Senkung des Orchesters,” c. 1817), and others.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/18/2020 7:32 PM via HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 1180804 ; Noam M. Elcott.; Artificial Darkness : An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Account: s8492430 30. Wagner, “Festival-Playhouse at Bayreuth,” 333. 31. Ibid., 334–35. 32. Joachim Paech, “Eine Dame verschwindet: Zur dispositiven Struktur apparativen Erschienens,” in Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener Epis- temologie, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), esp. 777. 33. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” orig. 1931, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927– 1934, ed. Mi- chael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1999), 518. 34. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” orig. 1936, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ- ings, vol. 3, 1935– 1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 103– 4. 35. Wagner, “Festival-Playhouse at Bayreuth,” 334. Translation slightly modified. 36. “Intelligence Relative to the Fine Arts, Foreign and Domestic,” European Magazine, March 1823, 247. 37. Eduard Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur, 1885), esp. 227– 28. 38. Ibid., 248. Giovanni Bartholomew (Bartolomeo) Bosco (1793–1863) was one of the leading magicians of the nineteenth century. So great was his renown that many conjurers adopted the name Bosco. See Henry Ridgely Evans, The Old and the New Magic, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1909), 166– 71. 39. On nineteenth-century and early cinematic féeries, see Kristan Moen, “‘Never Has One Really Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860–1880,” Comparative Critical Studies 6 (2009): 361– 72. 40. Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 249. 41. Lest this seem an exceptionally trivial task, it must be noted that the Greeks never fully resolved the mismatch of a circular seating and the sight lines required by the introduction of staging between the proskenia (proscenium). The obvious solution— namely, fan-shaped seating—was employed in Argos and Pergamon but placed too many spectators too far from the actors, whom they could no longer hear. Eventually, building up the proskenia made the actors visible but required a raised, two-story stage; the skene (scene) was now only very slightly set back between proskenia. See Richard Leacroft and Helen Leacroft,Theatre and Playhouse (London: Methuen, 1984), 20–22. 42. See Semper’s letter to Ludwig’s secretary Pfistermeister, October 20, 1865, cited in Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahnfried, 46. 43. Jörg Brauns, Schauplätze: Zur Architektur visueller Medien (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 220. 44. Werner Gäbler, Der Zuschauerraum des Theaters, vol. 44, Theatergeschichtliche Forschun- gen (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1935), 20, 100. 45. Ibid., 91. 46. Georges Servières, “The Invisible Orchestra,” Musical News, September 12, 1896, 229. 47. W. W. Cobbett, “The Covent Garden Opera,” Musical News, July 8, 1899, 43. 48. See Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 49. Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa (Milan) 41 (May 18, 1907). Cited in Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin and Jennifer Pranolo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 179. 50. Moritz Ernst Lesser, “Das Kinotheater der Zukunft,” in Das Deutsche Lichtspieltheater