The Magic Lantern: How Movies Got to Move

by Judith Thurman, Jonathan David

FLIP all the pages of this book at the top and you will see an acrobat move. Why? Because on each right hand page, in the upper right hand corner, there is a picture of an acrobat that is just a little different from the one on the page before and after. When your eye looks at something, it retains the image of what it sees for a second or so after the object has moved or changed. When a group of pictures are moved in the proper sequence and speed, their persistence of vision makes one picture flow into the next. Which is the basis of all motion pictures.

But flipping the pages of a book does not make the kind of motion pictures you think of as the movies. These are created by a long series of pictures that are different from each other in the same way the acrobat pictures differ from each other, but there are many more of them - long reels of them - that are projected by a machine onto a screen.

Movies are made from projected photographs. But before the first movies came into being, there were shows that used movement of pictures and objects in various ways like the acrobat or like shadows created on the wall by moving puppets before a light. And there was a long and gradual development of the art of photography. How pictures that moved and photographs that didn't both developed and then how the two were combined to make movies is told here in an interesting and involving account.

Genres: History

101 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about fashion, books, and culture. Her subjects have included André Malraux, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Thurman is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose,” was published in 2007.

Thurman lives in New York.

Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributo...‎