@article{THESIS,
      recid = {2542},
      author = {Willis, Artemis},
      title = {Performing Pictures: The Magic Lantern c. 1900},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {214},
      abstract = {This dissertation is about the magic lantern and how it  conveys meaning in a shifting media landscape. It focuses  on the form, language, and style of lantern images and  performances that circulated around 1900, a period of  pronounced technological and cultural change that is  considered a significant turn in media history. By lantern  image, I mean the projected image, performed by live  narration, music, sound effects, and projection itself. By  lantern performance, I mean the concatenation of lantern  images and the transitions between them given by a  lanternist before an audience. Through close readings of a  series of lantern comedies, melodramas, and spectacles that  remain largely unknown, underexamined, or undertheorized,  this dissertation demonstrates that the lantern actively  participated in an aesthetic of media transition typically  reserved for the then-new media, yet pertinent to the  then-old. It argues that it is characterized by actively  superposing layers of practices and its reciprocal  interchanges with neighboring media and art forms. Each  chapter explores this intertwining dynamic of superposition  and reciprocity through the lantern’s interaction with  newer media and popular entertainments, locating their  traces in the lantern’s formal and stylistic features. I  argue that the c. 1900 lantern offers a new way of thinking  with and through the lantern: a frame that reveals and  embraces the lantern’s continuities, ruptures, and  ambivalences while also serving as an invaluable tool for  understanding our established and emerging mediascape.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2542},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2542},
}