• Korean Association for Visual Culture
• /
• v.17
• /
• pp.65-92
• /
• 2011

This thesis investigates the complex functions of the magic lantern in illusionism and enlightment which was the most popular visual media and the direct ancestor of cinema. Especially, the thesis focuses on the characteristics of magic lantern's images which had been varied with the scientific and technological development. During the early period of the magic lantern, from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, it frightened viewers by showing magic images with ghosts and spectres, 'phantasmagoria', and wondered with images of natural catastropes and interesting stories like fables and fairy tales, which fulfilled the entertainment function. Since the mid 19th century the magic lantern began to show not only pictures of the 'scientific themes' on the earth, nature and human, but also them of the ethnological on the far, exotic worlds like Africa, Amazon and Syberia etc. from the European perspective. These contents conducted the educative function and contributed to the process of Enlightment to the peoples in the pre-modern age. The two functions of the magic lantern such as entertainment and education had been neither historically followed, nor clearly divided, but the one was predominant according to the development of lantern techniques as well as the changes of the world view and the culture of the time. The entertainment function of the magic lantern based on the visual fantacy did exist in the late 19th century further, and also in the late industrial society, even in the age of highly developed science and technology, viewers want rather 're-enchantment' by illusionism than facts and truths on the reality. This is an essential characteristic of the moving image media, as it had already been presented in the images of the magic lantern.

• Korean journal of communication and information
• /
• v.77
• /
• pp.137-163
• /
• 2016

In the early 1900, photography, magic lantern and cinema were simultaneously introduced and experienced until the mid-1910s as mysterious and magical symbol of modern science and technology. The technology of vision, cinema in particular demonstrated its commercially expandable potentials through serial films in the mid-1910s, silent cinema in the 1920s and talkies in 1930s. I argue that a metaphor 'like a movie' which was would be spoken out by peoples as a cliche ever since the late 1910s whenever they encountered something uncanny, mysterious, and looking wholly new phenomena informs how cinematic technology worked in colonial society at the turning point to the early 20th century. Mass in colonial society accepted cinema and other visual technologies not only as an advanced science of the times but as texts of modernity that is the reason why cinema had so quickly taken cultural hegemony over the colony. Until the mid-1920s, discourse on cinema focused not on cinema itself, rather more on the theatre matters such as hygiene, facilities for public use, disturbance, quarrels and fights, theft, and etc. Since the mid-1920s and especially in wartime 1930s, discourses about negative influences and effects of cinema on behavior, mind and spirit of masses, bodily health, morality and crime were articulated and delivered by Japanese authorities and agencies like as police, newspapers and magazines, and collaborate Korean intellectuals. Theories and research reports stemming from disciplines of psychology, sociology, and mass-psychology that emphasized vulnerability and susceptibility of the crowd and mass consumers who would be exposed to visual images, spectacles and strong toxic stimulus in everyday lives. Those negative discourse on influences and effects of cinema was intimately associated with fear of the crowd and mass as well as new technology which does not allow clear understanding about how it works in future. The fact that cinema as a technology of vision could be used as an apparatus of ideology and propaganda stirred up doubts and pessimistic perspectives on cinema influence. Discourse on visual technology cinema constructed under colonial governance is doomed to be technology of mass control for empire's own sake.