Gothic Machine

Textualities, Pre-cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670-1910

David J. Jones

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783161140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Almost everyone loves a good horror film but how did they originate? Audiences thrilled and shuddered at ghosts and monsters projected on screens all over Europe for centuries before film was born. This pioneering book traces the origins and development of the magic lantern shows of fear and reveals their close relation to the great upsurge in Gothic writing, so popular with readers today.

1

Memento Mori, Griendel and the Forerunners, Schröpfer and Schiller: German Popular Visual Culture 1670–1800. Friedrich Schiller’s Der Geisterseher/The Ghost-Seer, Sturm und Drang and Magic-Lantern Shows

Sometime in the early 1670s, with an audience of local scientists, naturalists and other worthies hanging on his words, Johann Franciscus Griendel, maker and supplier of optical instruments, exhibited the great marvel of his magic lantern in the salon in Nuremberg. The audience was entranced. This was a highly literate and literary milieu and Leonard Sturm, one of the witnesses to Griendel’s performance, published an engraving of this wondrous machine soon afterwards.

Nuremberg, formerly the city of Dürer’s triumphs and early centre of humanism, science, printing and mechanical invention, had been in economic decline since the city’s siege fifteen years earlier during the Thirty Years War. Yet it would be a mistake to extrapolate a sense of cultural decline from the relative material shortage that followed the siege just as it would be to characterize this part of Germany as something of a backwater during the period. As power was gradually ceded to regional princedoms, one notes a terrific dynamism in these intellectual circles. Scientific exchange and the sharing of ideas flourished in the settings of small salons like that of Griendel’s host, prominent citizen Johann Georg Volckamer. Volckamer, a prosperous merchant, had inherited a silk factory from his father and became fascinated by the science of fruit husbandry, self-publishing the record of his discoveries in sumptuous volumes.

Griendel had opened his shop in Nuremberg in 1670, and there he exhibited his lantern displays of ‘hell and … wandering spirits and phantoms’.1 These were, of course, well-worn images in the visual life of European citizens and had been familiar for centuries.

Images of mortality

In Western Europe, the theme of death in religious iconography had, of course, been very popular, and, if only for that reason, it is not surprising that early examples of projected images also confront us with mortification and fear of the supernatural. An early drawing by Giovanni da Fontana, circa 1420, reveals a man holding a lantern projecting a looming demonic figure, a miniature template of which is also shown depicted inside the lamp. The accompanying text reads: ‘a nocturnal appearance for terrifying viewers’ (‘Apparentia nocturna ad terrorem videntium’).2

In 1470, Anton Koberger opened Europe’s first print shop in Nurem­berg. ‘Dances of Death’ or Totentanz motifs were all the rage in the new medium and the city became one of the most important centres for art and publishing in the first age of print. In this setting, Michael Wolgemut produced a truly impressive and gruesome Totentanz/Danse macabre to feature in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Wolgemut’s student, Albrecht Dürer, and Dürer’s own pupil Hans Baldung each surpassed other in portraying memento mori, winged skulls, witches and skeletons of extraordinary vigour. One such motif was that of the winged skull (most popular in the period 1600–1750), derived from gravestone depictions and traditionally associated with the departing of the human soul from its body. Accompanying develop­ments in graphic trompe-l’ œil techniques gave these memento an added three-dimensional impact.

Such images of death and deathly encounters in church narrative frescoes had persisted over the centuries; for example, the legend of the three men and the three dead which had been known in manu­script form since the thirteenth century. Galloping forth on a jaunt, three young gentlemen meet the skeletal remains of three of their ancestors who warn them, ‘Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis’ (‘What we were, you are; what we are, you will be’). The longevity of such images and mottos is remarkable.

Centuries later, we might encounter the showman E.-G. Robertson closing his lantern show with these words:

You may have smirked at my experiments, you beautiful ladies who have experienced the feeling of terror for a few moments, here is the only truly terrifying performance really to be feared: you, strong, weak, powerful men … this is the fate awaiting you all, this is what you will look like one day.3

Robertson had kept his biggest visceral jolt for his finale. At this cue, a funerary lamp would suddenly flare up in the darkness to reveal to the audience the skeleton of a young girl raised in their midst.

Of course, the warning, threatening or terrorizing revenant, some­times in skeletal form, was to become a staple motif of Gothic fiction. For example, in The Monk, Lewis heads a chapter with the ballad of ‘Alonzo the Brave And Fair Imogine’:

At midnight four times in each year does her Spright
When Mortals in slumber are bound,
Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white,
Appear in the Hall with the Skeleton-Knight,
And shriek, as He whirls her around …
They drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave,
Dancing round them the Spectres are seen:
Their liquor is blood …4

Already linked by their motifs of death and mortification, with the Gothic revival, print culture, the publication of illustrations and lantern shows became inextricably linked. For Elizabeth Eisenstein, the advent of print imposed a particular set of conditions which Gutenberg’s invention endowed upon those manuscripts selected for reproduction: standardization, dissemination and fixity.5 Adrian Johns, amongst others, has shown the limitations of such a view, drawing our attention instead to human agency: piracy, alterations, censorship and error involved in the processes of transmission.6 The prospect of such alterations and a lack of control over far-flung reading cultures must have engendered a good deal of anxiety, during periods when a sudden clerical shift in definitions of heresy could land a printer in prison or worse.

When Matthias Huss published the earliest known depiction of a print shop in 1499 in Lyons, the print crew were shown transfixed and arrested at their various tasks by the sudden incursion of a group of motley skeletons who obviously wish to drag them off in an inky danse macabre. Thus, at the very outset, this self-reflexive act of en­visioning of print production is haunted by the nightmare of its own destruction, whether through plague and mortality, clerical prosecution or mordant wit. In its early years, printing was mistrusted, a ‘dark art’, and it was clearly important that the traditional danse macabre be seen, however ironically, as the emblem of a supernatural agency capable of breaching the apparently stable borders, the superior speed and durability, of this new visual medium. In our own time, similar threats embodied in new technologies can be seen registered in the films Ringu (1998) and White Noise (2005).

If a visual death-dance had attended the advent of printing, and, most crucially, the first attempt by print-illustrators and printers themselves to depict their art, we can see that memento mori and timor mortis (fear of death) subjects link the slide repertoires of the first amateur magic lanternists and that used by Griendel. A vast range of early sources of projected images depicting mortality and death-related subjects still exist. In Athanasius Kircher’s images (The Great Art of Light and Shadow) we see the projection of a skeleton, and a soul burning in fire. An engraving of s’Gravesande’s magic-lantern show reveals a most impressive demon-faced monster with human shoulders looming from the screen. It was clear that horror was the main aim and effect associated with lantern projection and that clerics were able to advance the lantern’s acceptance by foregrounding its role in moral instruction against the wiles of the devil. In 1671 in his Magia Optica, the Jesuit priest Kaspar Schott wrote: ‘Through this art, godless people can easily be kept from the commitment of too many vices, if one created on that mirror images of the Devil and banished them to a dark place’.7 By 1668, Robert Hooke stated in a report to the Royal Society that the very basis and purpose of magic lanterns was to delight or horrify the gullible with ‘apparitions of Angels and Devils’.8

As we have seen, in the early age of print, memento mori were highly visible and persistent motifs and, three centuries later, they proved to be vital for providing a wide array of thematic and struc­tural effects in Gothic writing. For example, Donna Heiland and Carol Margaret Davison have written revealingly about memento mori in Ann Radcliffe’s novels and, of course, these symbols of mortal decay remained extremely important in later Gothic fiction.9 No less indispensable to the flood of Gothic chapbooks and bluebooks, as Angela Koch has written, were ‘such memento mori as a bleeding nun or a stately knight long-supposed to be dead, recalled to the stage of life by some imminent injury to be done to a maiden orphan or a legitimate heir’.10

Death as a rider was also a common motif in the early engravings and this figure famously recurred in Robertson’s phantasmagoria-slides, in de Berar’s ‘Optikali Illusio’ as ‘Death on a Pale Horse’ but also as a key Gothic subject for the American artist Benjamin West, again as ‘Death on a Pale Horse’ (1817). It will be argued throughout this work that of the art of collection and convenership is one of the main impetuses to drive the Gothic revival. One of the most complex and beautiful examples of late memento mori jewellery is the Darnley or Lennox jewel which for a long period featured in Horace Walpole’s collection in his ‘little Gothic castle’ at Strawberry Hill.

The convention of timor mortis was represented in each of the arts: in music, there were the flagellants’ Geisslerliede (call and response songs warning of the brevity of life). However, there was a paradox bound up inside the vanitas motif derived ultimately from Ecclesiastes 1:2: vanitas vanitatum. If all human arts are regarded as vain, particularly the making of graven images, might not even the ostensibly pietistic practice of depicting skulls and dry bones fall under like condemnation? There were also the Passion or Mystery plays, mounted by guilds and depicting key events from the Bible and life of Christ. In Germany, these plays were infiltrated by Carnival drama (Fastnachtspiele) so that, in time, they were suppressed by the clergy.

If links between this kind of historical source and pre-cinematic technologies might seem fanciful, it is useful to know that nineteenth-century witnesses made exactly these kind of retrospective connec­tions. In 1818, William Hone witnessed a magic-lantern operator showing slides of the Prodigal Son and Noah’s Ark to an audience of children; on receiving the showman’s card, Hone noticed that his name and address was given as ‘The Royal Gallantee-Show … Holborn Hill’, and Hone movingly comments that this was ‘the very spot whereon the last theatrical representation of a Mystery, the play of Christ’s Passion is recorded to have been witnessed in England’.11

Literary and visual interfaces

If Griendel’s display can be placed at a key moment in the evolution of memento and associated dramatic motifs, the literary context of the early seventeenth century is also important in anticipating many of the cultural convergences which were to follow.

The century opened with widespread quasi-rational rejections of barbarous and chivalric elements in the arts, of which perhaps the most sustained, successful and parodic expression were the two parts of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615). From this period also, Jacques Callot’s grotesque drawings and engravings were to prove highly influential with a future generation of Gothic artists, most notably E.T.A. Hoffmann. Yet by the middle of the century and in the decade that followed, the rationalist picaresque novel was turned towards much more fantastical, even monstrous forms in François Rabelais’s The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (1653), Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Sun and Moon (1662) and Johann von Grimmelhausen’s The Adventurous Simlicissimus (1669).

In comparing literary changes in German and British writing of the period, we see the development of transitional works which were to link some of the earliest precursors of Gothic with the Gothic movement in literature. In Germany, the plays of Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, heavily influenced by Andreas Gryphius, manifested an overwrought obsession with violence, torture, rape and suggested suicide; the concentration on dramatic ghosts and incest in particular anticipate the ‘robber roman’ and Schauerroman, and those Teutonic works which later inspired Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Grimmelhausen’s Simlicissimus reveals a wayward hero struggling through a war-torn landscape and adept at using diabolic disguises to fool the superstitious, this latter element looking forward to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher/The Ghost-Seer.

In England, bridging Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s portrayals of demonic energies, Milton’s Comus (1634) proved a creative stepping stone to the full-blown portrayal of the rebellious Satan of Paradi...