Early Cinema and the Supernatural by Murray Leeder B.A. (Honours) English, University of Calgary, M.A. Film Studies, Carleton University A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Mediations © Murray Leeder September 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-83208-0 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-83208-0 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada ii Abstract This dissertation takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a magical or supernatural art and entertainment form through the examination of early cinema's links to contemporaneous practices in stage magic, spiritualism and psychical research. The use of supernatural scenarios by early filmmakers (including Georges Melies and George Albert Smith) and the characterization of cinema as a haunted space in early commentaries (emblematized by but not limited to Maxim Gorky's famous "Kingdom of Shadows" essay) illustrate the extent to which supernatural metaphors made the grey, silent and immaterial medium of cinema legible to its first audiences. The project of this dissertation is to restore early cinema's forgotten supernatural contexts through a series of case studies. Besides exploring the effects on early cinema of contemporaneous understandings of the supernatural, the dissertation also challenges current conceptions of cinema as "ghostly" or "magical" by employing historical evidence to evaluate the theoretical and ontological claims advanced by film and media scholars today. Chapter One examines the place of ghostliness in early and contemporary film theory through a focus on the ontology of cinema associated with the recent spectral turn in contemporary media studies, where a lack of sensitivity to the historical character of discourse on ghosts has led to hyperbolic claims about cinema's novelty. Chapter Two considers cinema within a longer history of the projected image and debates about illusionism and the supernatural, stressing cinema's continuities with prior media going back to the invention of the magic lantern, in order to correct mistaken assumptions about iii early cinema's novelty. Chapter Three examines the trope of the panicking audience that features in accounts of Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin's 1856 magic shows before Algerian natives, and the "myth of the Grand Cafe," which held that cinema's first audiences fled before the appearance of a phantom train. Chapter Four considers how George Albert Smith's films drew on his prior careers as a stage mesmerist and a psychical researcher, and also pioneered cinematic double exposures, a standard technique for the depiction of cinematic ghosts. Chapter Five turns to cinema's close cousin the X-ray, which during the 1890s was seen as exhibiting its own supernatural properties through its apparent ability to collapse surfaces into depths and expose death in life. Chapter Six traces a specific image through multiple media across a relatively long time span: the (typically female) skeleton. It illustrates the extent to which early cinema was one participant in a broader "skeleton vogue" that was at once continuous with centuries old danse macabre traditions and reshaped through the advent of the X-ray. The chapter connects the common scene of women transformed into skeletons in the trick film to the cult of the dead or dying woman that was prominent in the fin de siecle and remains so to this day. iv Acknowledgments First and foremost, I must thank my supervisor, Charles O'Brien, for helping shepherd this project to completion, and for offering his unflagging enthusiasm and support. I would also like to thank my other second and third readers, Marc Furstenau and Franny Nudelman, for their invaluable contributions all through the process. In addition, I would like to give special thanks to various professors from Film Studies and Cultural Mediations, including Andre Loiselle, Mitchell Frank, Barbara Leckie, Barbara Gabriel, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Paul Theberge, Zuzana Pick and Chris Faulkner for their help and support over the years. I would also like to thank those scholars from other institutions with whom I exchanged ideas and who imparted valuable advice over the process, such as Matthew Solomon, Frank Gray and Simone Natale. I would also like to thank my external examiners, Aboubakar Sanogo from Carleton University and Rob King from the University of Toronto, for their spirited engagement with this project. In addition I would like to acknowledge the contributions of both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for their important and substantial contributions. My work has benefitted from the recent explosion in archival material from early cinema on DVD. Special credit must go to the Flicker Alley's wonderful boxed set Georges Melies: First Wizard of the Cinema (1896-1913) (2008) and its subsequent follow-up Georges Melies: Encore (2010) with newer discoveries - may there be many more "encores" to follow. Other films, especially those of George Albert Smith, I viewed at the British Film Institute in London, largely on 35mm with a few on VHS. My research into print documents and rare books and periodicals took me to the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, housed in the Cambridge University library, the Harry Price Collection at the University of London, the reading room of the Magic Circle in London, and the American Society for Psychical Research in Manhattan. Many thanks to the archivists and librarians at these venues for their support and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank Donna Yates, who gave me a place to stay during the Cambridge leg of my research. The intellectual community at Carleton has been immeasurably helpful in keeping me on track, so thanks goes to such fellow students as Steve Rifkin, Jessica Aldred, Marc Raymond, Ben Wright, Dan Sheridan, Margaret Rose, Sylvie and Paul Jasen, Heather Igloliorte, Matt Croombs, Jeremy Maron, Stacey Loyer, Anne de Stecher, Danielle Wiley, Tom Everett and Kyle Devine. I am sure I am forgetting people, and I hope none of those people read this and are appalled by their absence. Finally, to Alana Conway who has helped me through these past years in ways I cannot begin to enumerate with her love and patience. V Table of Contents Introduction 1 1 The Haunting of Film Theory 16 2 Light and Lies: Screen Practice and (Super-) Natural Magic 38 3 The Panicking Audience in Stage Magic and Early Cinema 61 4 The Strange Case of George Albert Smith: Mesmerism, Psychical Research and Cinema 93 5 Aesthetics of Co-Registration: Spirit Photography, X-Rays and Cinema 124 6 Melies's Skeleton: Gender and the Danse Macabre 154 Conclusion 188 Appendix I: "THOUGHT-READING EXTRAORDINARY" 194 Appendix II: A postcard from the Cabaret du Neant 195 Works Cited 196 1 Introduction In the October 1896 issue of his quarterly journal Borderland, W.T. Stead, the well-known British spiritualist and "new journalist" who would later meet his fate aboard the R.M.S. Titanic, offered a dozen pages worth of "Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students: Useful Analogies from Recent Discoveries and Inventions." The Borderland to which the periodical's name referred lay between science and the supernatural, and "Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students" was meant to arm the faithful with analogies that they can use to convince people of the validity of spiritualist concepts about life and death, time and space. Stead's analogies come from electricity, the phonograph, the telephone, the photograph, and the camera obscura, but also from the X-ray and the kinetoscope (spelled "kinetiscope" by Stead), the early motion picture exhibition device that the Edison Manufacturing Company had debuted in 1894. The article begins: The discovery of the Rontgen rays has compelled many a hardened sceptic to admit, when discussing Borderland, that "there may be something in it after all." In like manner many of the latest inventions and scientific discoveries make psychic phenomena thinkable, even by those who have no personal experience of their own to compel conviction. I string together a few of these helpful analogies, claiming only that they at least supply stepping stones that may lead to a rational understanding of much that is now incomprehensible.