Murray Leeder

Author	Leeder, Murray John Davis
Title	Early cinema and the supernatural / Murray Leeder.
Publisher	Ottawa, c2011.

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 Méliès 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 early cinema’s novelty. Chapter Three examines the trope of the panicking audience that features in accounts of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin’s 1856 magic shows before Algerian natives, and the “myth of the Grand Café,” 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 siècle and remains so to this day.