Intro

We can now watch films on laptops, TVs and even ipods, but cinema has since its inception in 1895 been defined as the projection of films onto a screen for a (usually paying) audience. This is of course why a projection screen is essential for those of us who want to enjoy “home cinema” – and why projection screens have throughout cinema’s history been crucial to people’s enjoyment of films.

But screens and projected images have a far longer history than cinema does. It might amaze you to find out that projection screens were in use by a number of travelling showmen in the 1600s, for instance – and before that, screens of various types captured the projections of camera obscuras, even as far back as pre-history… Yes, it’s true – even cavemen enjoyed what might be described as “home cinema”!

Natural camera obscuras

As multi-media artist Matt Gatton and others have argued, it’s highly likely that small holes in animal hides used by cavemen to cover cave mouths created – if only sometimes – natural camera obscuras which projected images onto the cave walls of these people’s dwellings. Indeed, Gatton challenges us to ‘Imagine… a Paleolithic person waking in the morning to find the image of animals walking around on the wall, the three-dimensional world reduced to two dimensions on a surface inside the tent’!

If you want to see what that could have looked like – including the projection on the wall – have a look at his site: http://www.paleo-camera.com/reconpage.htm

This idea is really not so incredible. A camera obscura is nothing more than a dark room or other space which has a tiny hole in one side through which light reflecting off an object outside the room projects an upside-down image of that object – and this would clearly have happened in a darkened space cut off from daylight by an animal hide put up to keep in the warmth. It also helps to make sense of early cave paintings since many of them were upside-down, and also seem to suggest movement and a sort of blurriness. Both these elements might well have come from mimicking camera obscura images projected onto cave walls.

While these first projection screens were not man-made, they were in many ways more like the home cinemas we have today than were many intervening inventions, precisely because of their status in darkened living spaces – spaces not so very different from the “man caves” created by many of today’s home movie enthusiasts!

However, those who did not have the luxury of a cave, would have had their first projection screen made of fabric. Though not intentionally, but through a coincindental camera obscura created by a small hole in their tent.

Below, you can see the reconstruction that Matt made and how the an image is projected onto the tent’s interior. Keep in mind that the image would have been upside down in the tent. The image is rotated 180 degrees to make it easier to understand what was projected inside.

Images used with the kind permission of Matt Gatton. See http://paleo-camera.com for more camera obscuras

While camera obscuras occur in nature, photography was developed as a result of observing the phenomenon and experimenting with it throughout history. And long before the development of lenses and cameras, philosophers puzzled over the peculiar qualities of projected images – associating them, as Plato does in The Republic in 360 BC, with an imaginary and mystical realm of experience, or as Aristotle does some decades later, with more “scientific” problems about light, shadow and images.

In these very early writings, the projection screen at issue seemed to be natural rather than man-made phenomenon – usually a cave wall or something of that ilk. However, Plato’s Republic does in most translations mention a “screen” similar to those used by “conjurers,” so it’s not impossible to imagine that shadow puppets might have been projected onto a screen as early as 360 BC.

Shadow plays

What is certain, is that around a thousand years before cinema was invented, in the eleventh century, the Chinese were projecting images of cut-out figures onto screens made from thin cloth and lit from behind. As Kao Ch’eng of the S’ung dynasty wrote:
In the time of Emperor Jen-tsung [r. 1023-63] of the Sung dynasty there were townsmen who excelled in telling tales of the Three Kingdoms, and someone adapted their stories, linking them up, and made shadow-men [ying-jen], the first of these being representations of the wars of Tripartite Division …of Wei, Shu, and Wu” (cited by Keith Rawlings, “Observations on the historical development of puppetry,” at http://www.sagecraft.com/puppetry/definitions/historical/index.html).

In fact, shadow plays – and so the screens on which they were projected – were widely used not only in China but across India, Indonesia, Turkey, Greece and other countries from at least as early as the eleventh century. This means that projection screens were a familiar site for many people long before the birth of cinema or even its technological precursors. There is, however, one key difference between shadow plays and cinematic projection: For shadow plays light is projected from behind the screen – from the opposite side of the screen to the audience – while for films, at least since the early 1900s, projection takes place from the same side of the screen as the audience. Another difference is that while the first man-made screens in Europe and the Americas seem to have been fashioned from bed-sheets and canvas, projectionists in India and China apparently favoured saris and lengths of silk!

Camera Obscuras

While man-made camera obscuras were in regular use in the 1500s and 1600s, the first written mention of a camera obscura was made by Chinese philosopher Mo-Tzu in the fifth century BC, who ‘formally recorded the creation of an inverted image formed by light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened room’ which he called ‘a “collecting place” or the “locked treasure room”’ (cited from Jack and Beverly Wilgus’s website, “The magic mirror of life,” at http://brightbytes.com/cosite/what.html).

Much later, and in far more detail, Basrah-born scholar and scientist Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, c.965–1039 BC) provided a full account of how the camera obscura works, and developed his observations to produce a scientific explanation for the process of vision. His works were translated into Hebrew, Latin and European languages at least until the fifteenth century, so it’s likely that some of the other scientists I mention read his early work on optics. Perhaps the most widely acknowledged early written description of a camera obscura, though, is by none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, who clearly described them in his notebooks from 1490.

Spectators of camera obscura shows would sit in a darkened room, while the bright sunshine outside was provided only one tiny point of entry through a small hole behind them. To their amazement, they would see not just light on the white sheet hung at the front of the room, but a clear reproduction of the scene outside the room – and then, very often, actors performing a play with a musical accompaniment. All of this would be in colour, with moving figures, just as in real life – the only difference being that it would all be projected onto the screen upside-down.

While this wasn’t the projection of films onto a screen, it was the projection of moving images, and so surprisingly close to our contemporary experience of watching a film. This is truly remarkable when you realise we’re talking about events that took place nearly 500 years ago, and some 300 years before the invention of cinema – even if the images were upside-down!

Problems with projecting images upside-down in the sixteenth century, it turned out, were at least two-fold: First, it reportedly often resulted in causing spectators to run away screaming, which was hardly good for business. And second – far worse – some showmen were charged with sorcery and ‘hauled into court’ for it by Pope Paul V (Clee 3). There’s doubtless nothing like the threat of the Inquisition to get one experimenting with mirrors and lenses!

If not for religious reasons, Da Vinci was also frustrated and concerned that the camera obscura projected images upside-down, grappling with what this meant for the human eye and its mechanics. He ultimately proposed that the eye has multiple lenses to reverse the inversion of the image, and this idea was picked up on by the physicist Girolama Cordono in 1550, when he suggested the addition of a lens to the camera obscura to correct its projection. But it was scientist and showman Giovanni Battista della Porta (c.1535–1615) who suggested the use of a mirror to correct the image projected by camera obscuras.

However, while in 1570 a scholar named Daniel Barbaro improved the camera obscura still further by adding an adjustable diaphragm to its aperture, it’s unclear from the sources whether anyone actually implemented ideas to combat the upside-down projection before 1609: At that time, though, astronomer Johannes Kepler added lenses that rectified the image and projected it the right way up on a screen. Finally, then, from 1609 images projected by camera obscuras really were true-to-life when they hit the screen, right way up!

Magic lanterns

Important as camera obscuras are to the history of screen projection, the invention known as the magic lantern was associated far more closely with projection screens – because it is, in effect, a slide projector by another name, as well as ‘the forerunner of all film screens’ (Kittler 70). Lit by a variety of sources from candles and kerosene lamps to limelight and electricity, magic lanterns work like a camera in reverse – they shine light out through a lens and project it onto a screen, with a static or moving slide or slides inside them, between the light and the lens. The results can be incredible – as is evident if you’re lucky enough to see a lantern show today, where beautifully hand-painted glass slides are still used, usually accompanied by narration and music as would have been the norm in the seventeenth century.

Magic lanterns were an apparatus beloved of itinerant showmen from the 1660s on, offering as they did a freedom from the more elaborate set-up required for camera obscura shows. In their reliance upon a projection screen, too, it is easy to see why cultural theorists hold that the magic lantern show rather than other forms of pre-cinematic technology ‘prefigured the conventions of the projection and screen practice associated with the cinema’ (Popple and Kember 25). Nor is it surprising, if you put yourself in the position of someone in the seventeenth century, that magic lantern shows were so popular: As Paul Clee writes, ‘In a world with so few images, it’s no wonder that lantern shows, with their enlarged, luminous colored pictures, were such a marvel’ (12).

Although there’s evidence of earlier versions of the magic lantern, most historians credit the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens with its invention in 1659. This is despite the fact that a Jesuit priest named Althanius Kircher wrote in his 1646 book, Ars magnus lucis e umbae (The great art of light and shadow), about a “catoptric lamp” he used to project images onto a wall in a darkened room. Huygens is credited because of his major innovation in lantern technology, which was the replacement of images etched on mirrors from earlier lanterns such as Kircher’s with images painted on glass. This is what paved the way for the use of colour and for double-layered slide projections (generally used to simulate movement) that typified the most spectacular, detailed and entertaining magic lantern shows.

Again, though, it seems that the “invention” of this new projection technology cannot be attributed to just one individual but was very much the result of several minds applied to new and different, ever-evolving ways of creating images to project on screens.

Kircher, despite not making the leap from using mirrors to glass-etched slides, did contribute much to the field of optics. And, according to gossip and folklore, he also came up with a very inventive use for the lantern:
While visiting his unfaithful believers in the evening, he hid a simple magic lantern under his cowl. When talking did not help anymore, he switched to other, tougher measures. On the glass of his lantern he had painted a realistic image of the death, which he projected from the outside on the parchment windows of the simple farmhouses. That was really successful and had a marked effect. The next Sunday morning his church was packed to the very roof again. (Cited from “The miracle of the magic lantern,” at http://www.luikerwaal.com/).

It was neither Huygens nor Kircher who first used the magic lantern to its full commercial and narrative potential, however, but Thomas Walgenstein, a Danish scientist and entertainer who took it on tour across Europe in 1664.

Screens for magic lantern shows were often ‘made of calico and soaked in starch and gum arabic in order [to]… become translucent, and stretched out to approximately twenty feet wide’ (Hanson 9). The increased importance of the screen to projection technology is clear here, as previously the tendency had been to use either a plain sheet of cotton or canvas, or even just a wall. But the emergence of luminous painted glass slides – with their bright colours and detailed images – seemingly spurred on developments in screen technology, even when back projection was sometimes still used for shows. Again, these early developments in projection screen technology were built on in later years – not only when cinema was born in the 1890s, but also in the 1930s when plastics started to replace cloth screens, and later when various coatings were used that gave rise to terming the cinema “the silver screen”.

Image used with kind permission from www.luikerwaal.com

The magic lantern developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and remained popular into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. And while Kircher might be chastised for pretending to invent the technology when he did not (it seems that he updated a drawing in the 1671 edition of his book without acknowledging that this was inspired by Huygens!), he can and should be credited with one important aspect of advancing people’s understanding of and relationship to projection technology. Kircher – presumably having learned from his own experience with his errant parishioners – took the lead in demystifying the projected image by explaining how it operated, and by encouraging exhibitors ‘to explain the actual process to audiences so that these spectators would clearly understand that the show was a catoptric art (involving reflection and optics), not a magical one’ (Musser 17). Given the fact that earlier showmen-scientists such as della Porta were charged with sorcery for their use of projected images, this seems a sensible and inspired approach for Kircher to have taken, as he was clearly concerned having ‘read of this art in many histories in which the common multitudes look on this catoptric art to be the workings of the devil’ (Ars magna, cited in Musser 18).

Multiple projectors and projection screens to scare the audience: phantasmagorie

Ever more spectacular magic lantern shows were projected – and while all used a screen for at least part of the act, projections were also created that seemed to float in mid-air, ghost-like, especially by mediums and those who wished to scare their audiences! Etienne Gaspar Robert (“Robertson”) purportedly created such mixed shows to great affect in France from the late 1790s, and the “Phantasmagorie” was born. These shows often used multiple projectors, with one static projector providing a backdrop and a number of smaller, mobile projectors operated individually and moved around behind the screen to create the illusion of movement. This is especially interesting as it seems almost to reverse the production methods of films – as Charles Musser observes – where it is production that requires multiple skilled individuals, while projection can be carried out by one comparatively unskilled person, including those of us who today project onto screens in our living rooms!

In the eighteenth century, many types of slides were fashioned by craftsmen, including sets of slides that used together created an illusion of movement on the projection screen. Some of these used several overlapping sheets of glass, while others were circular and needed to be rotated to create the impression of movement. Higher quality lenses were also developed to improve the clarity of the projected images on screens that were often still just whitewashed walls or sheets of cotton. While creativity and showmanship continued to impress audiences with the assistance of magic lantern projections, the new technologies did prove to have some dangers other than frightening spectators. In the early 1800s, one Mr Martin from the USA ‘experienced what may have been the first projector-related fire in American screen history, destroying both his projector and the museum’ in which he was exhibiting – and also cost the lives of six members of the audience (Musser 27).

http://www.projectionscreen.net/history/