3 November 2020 | Conference Retuning the Screen. Sound Methods and the Aural Dimension of Film & Media History, Gorizia-Udine, IT

Video Presentation:

Nico de Klerk: Lantern Readings. What do they do?

In my brief paper I raise a few questions regarding lantern readings, the printed brochures that were to a greater or lesser extent the basis of the spoken element of photographically illustrated lectures and provided continuity and coherence to a sequence of projected lantern slides.

Based on a selective inventory of c. 3,300 lantern readings, in British and French repositories, roughly half of these were specifically meant for educational public illustrated lectures. However, as one reading is not another, not before and not during performance, one should ask oneself: Do they contain merely basic information for lecturers to elaborate on? Are they more authored than animated? Or the other way around? Specific historical circumstances have been retrieved to partially answer these questions.

And what else did they do besides creating conversational links between the slides? On the assumption that, in performance, the lecture is central in sustaining the social occasion of the illustrated lecture, I take them as being a priori incomplete because of the high probability of impromptu utterances that are commonly unrecorded. Together these utterances address the interactive situation that lecture is, too, rather than the content the lecture was announced to discuss.