It’s easy to imagine the history of modern cinema rightfully beginning with the familiar, silently animated face of Charlie Chaplin. But there’s a whole untapped history going back hundreds of years before the first silent films, and the American Magic-Lantern Theater is about to unleash it to the UCLA community.
The magic lantern is an early kind of projector that originated in the mid-17th century, using glass images to tell stories and provide entertainment. Somehow, with the rise of motion pictures, the magic lantern’s immense popularity and deep history seem to have been forgotten by most ““ except the Borton family. Terry Borton, founder of the American Magic-Lantern Theater, recalled how he first became interested in magic lanterns.
“My great-grandfather, who grew up at the turn of the last century, was a neighborhood magic-lantern showman. He gave shows to the neighborhood and entranced my father,” Borton said. “So the lantern got passed down the family. And when I was a kid, one of the most exciting things was when my dad put on these magic-lantern shows.”
After a long career in publishing, Borton decided to return to the lost art that he remembered so fondly from his childhood.
“I debated about what I wanted to do, and I decided to do the one thing that no one else was going to do ““ to try to bring back the magic-lantern shows,” Borton said.
The only theater company of its kind, the American Magic-Lantern Theater faced quite a challenge in finding an audience for a form of entertainment that no one had heard of. But as it reaches its 19th season, it seems to have found a niche.
“Here’s something that has great reviews that you’ve never heard of. Our audiences are intrigued by the fact that they don’t know,” Borton said. “And often there is a link to interest in film or the Victorian era, or they know that the magic lantern has something to do with the birth of modern cinema and they want to see where the movies came from.”
In tonight’s Halloween Magic-Lantern Show at the UCLA Broad Art Center’s EDA Auditorium, Borton will narrate slides of “Little Orphan Annie” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” with piano and song accompaniment.
UCLA Design | Media Arts Professor Erkki Huhtamo, one avid member of the audience, described the show as being spooky in a funny way. Huhtamo first became interested in magic lanterns because of his love for silent films and his wonder over what came before them. This interest is something he finds valuable enough to share with his design students.
“I think it is extremely useful for students to understand that these things have a long history ““ that for hundreds of years people made really fascinating projections using many aspects of design,” Huhtamo said. “I think students can learn a lot about principles of designing visual media by watching a magic-lantern show.”
Since learning of them in the 1980s, Huhtamo has gathered a vast collection of magic lanterns, which is now on display in an exhibition at the UCLA Arts Library.
“I’ve been looking for ways of showing my large collection publicly, and it’s not so easy. I had just been showing it to my students,” Huhtamo said. “I did an exhibit at the Hammer Museum in June during the L.A. Film Festival, and we had about 800 people in one day. And then the Design | Media Arts librarian, Janine Henri, suggested that I do an exhibit at the Arts Library as well.”
In addition to showcasing his large magic-lantern collection, this exhibit achieves another purpose that Huhtamo said he finds very important, especially in light of UC budget cuts.
“This is also a good way to point out that the Arts Library is an extremely important institution that needs to be part of the campus,” Huhtamo said. “There have been some problems with the library cutting their hours and the Arts Library has been threatened, so this is my way of showing what a wonderful resource the Arts Library is and how it can function.”
By the light of his antique projector and with the memory of his great-grandfather, that makes two things that Borton and the American Magic-Lantern Theater have helped to keep from disappearing.