Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils (review)

Reviewed by:

• Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils
• Deac Rossell (bio)

Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990
Edited by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. Pp. 267.

The second of three books spawned by the nationally funded B-Magic collaborations between six universities in Belgium, arriving just after Sabine Lenk and Natalija Majsova’s Faith in a Beam of Light (2022; reviewed in the July 2023 issue of this journal) and before Kurt Vanhoutte and Leen Engelen’s The Magic Lantern in Leisure, Entertainment and Popular Culture (forthcoming), this volume with its two companions also announces the new Media Performance Histories series, as part of the Techne collection at Brepols Publishers. Concentrating on the classroom use of projected images in Belgium, this anthology follows its funded mandate with brief excursions to Switzerland, Britain, and Austria, which are academically funded separately. Very little context is given here to magic lantern culture before the founding of Belgium in 1830, and minimal attention is paid to pedagogical concepts used outside the country’s borders, so public lectures are recognized here as a dominant popular educational practice only in the second half of the nineteenth century (p. 51), and most institutional links are to the Belgian phenomena of university extensions and popular universities. True for Belgium, but this leaves aside other histories like that of the Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain, which began in the first half of the century with some 700 active institutes, serving over 120,000 members by 1851. Equally, the focus here on magic lantern slide projection disregards the optical bench used in many classrooms, a kind of disassembled magic lantern that supported projection of a variety of experiments as well as lantern slides, a common instrument in the period under examination, but which only appears in the book after 1919 in the teaching of Robert Pohl at Göttingen University (ch. 7).

Several chapter authors note there is only a sparse literature relevant to the themes of the book, all of which are anthologies that are cited when relevant, including Charles Ackland and Haidee Wasson’s study of nontheatrical but not necessarily educational films, Useful Cinema (2011); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible’s wide-ranging Learning with the Lights Off (2012); Anne Quillien’s splendidly illustrated yet pedagogical Lumineuses Projections! (2016); and Martyn Jolly’s Australia-centric The Magic Lantern at Work (2020). Learning with Light and Shadows has some advantages over these prior works in its more concentrated focus, and it supplies much new specific literature that will be useful to the field as a whole.

The book delivers some well-argued and well-researched material that might have otherwise escaped the notice of historians engaged more broadly on the topic. The technology of the magic lantern is extended here beyond [End Page 1039] installing a projector and some slides or films and includes the necessities for classroom transformation, with blackout curtains, a proper screen, a projection stand, and even electricity. Special attention is also regularly given to the agency of teachers, thereby reinforcing the editors’ mission to “challenge the prevalent top-down approach” to media technology that left both teachers and students as consumers (p. 20). Analysis here deploys the pedagogical debates about imagery in teaching (and the government initiatives that supported or denied it) only as a contextual framework that influenced actual teaching practices in the classroom. The ever-changing tussle between teacher practice and theoretical pedagogy is particularly well explored in the story of the government-imposed standard film projector the Ditmar 1006, produced from 1950 to 1960 in Austria (ch. 8). A note that magic lanterns were provided with a lens of unusually long focal length (16–18 cm) so that they produced the same size image as a 16 mm film projector when operated from the back of the classroom by a teacher (p. 206) is another example of the practical considerations emphasized by the authors here.

The ambitious scholarly goals of the book implicitly push much of its text very close to social construction of technology (SCOT) work, even if...