A number of magic-lantern performers believed that cinema would be a passing fad, and that their craft would endure beyond it.
Magic lantern performances, where live performers weave narratives around projected images, were a once-popular, now-half-forgotten precursor to modern movies. In Magic Lantern Art: The American Screen’s First Great Narrative Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale, Terry Borton—who also works as a revivalist lantern-show presenter—offers a deeply researched, copiously illustrated study of Beale, one of the 19th century’s most prolific painters of lantern slides.
The earliest lantern presentations date back to the 17th century, yet Beale lived during a moment when technological advances were transforming the craft. Notably, mass production meant slides could be reproduced and sold to lanternists across the country. A single image could be seen simultaneously in countless venues: theaters, churches, Masonic lodges, and even insane asylums.
Not merely proto-cinema, these shows were an art form in their own right. Indeed, some lanternists believed—perhaps wrongly, but not implausibly—that film would prove a passing fancy and that their medium would endure. You never know which technologies will prove to be minor diversions and which will give rise to a dominant art form—a lesson worth keeping in mind in our era of TikToks, video games, and generative AI.
