Science in Context 24(3), 443–464 (2011).

Copyright 
C Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0269889711000184

The Hands of the Projectionist

Lisa Cartwright
University of California at San Diego

Argument

This essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important
components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century
and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the
place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into
a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we can interpret as evidence
of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media
archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the
work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well
as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity
as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its
operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn
of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the
look, the camera, and the screen.

In her early film scholarship, the film historian and theorist Anne Friedberg wrote
about the filmwork of the American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), a figure
known for her association with psychoanalysis (she was analyzed by Freud), her work
in independent film (she wrote film criticism and was featured with Paul Robeson in
Borderline [1930], a film she also co-edited), and her writerly association with the Imagist
emphasis on thingness: objects and materiality. H.D.’s statement about her experience
with film projection reflects this focus on projection: “I myself have learned to use the
small projector . . . and spend literally hours here in my own apartment making the
mountains and village streets and my own acquaintances reel past me in light and light
and light” (Friedberg 1982 and 1983; Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus 1998, 98). In her
two poems that take as their title the projector (H.D. 1927a and 1927b), H.D. expressed
a vitalist fascination with electricity and the instrumentation of life, understanding her
own work with film as, importantly, an engagement of the hands with and from behind
the projector machine, and not simply a matter of embodied performance in front of
the camera or as spectator of the image on the screen.1 Giuliana Bruno picks up the

1
Charlotte Mandel, in her treatment of the poem “Projector II (Chang),” notes that the inspiration for the work
was a life sciences movie that featured the use of an apparatus that facilitated the viewer’s sensory and experiential
444 Lisa Cartwright

thread of projection in an analysis of aesthetics and science in the laboratory of the

Harvard psychologist and film theorist Hugo Münsterberg. “Imagine a room,” she
suggests: “a laboratory, a mental space” in which Münsterberg displays his films and
conducts his laboratory work (Bruno 2009). I interpret the question that prompted
this topical issue – was there a cinematographic turn in the life sciences around
1900? – as an investigation into the turn to chronophotographic and cinematic motion
study in the life sciences as a related modernist epistemology that foregrounds life,
light, and their instrumentation. Against a historical background of works emphasizing
filmstrips, images, and recording devices and in the spirit of media archaeology
(Huhtamo and Parikka 2011), I bring forward a particular component of the apparatus
in the space Bruno asks us to imagine: the projector, and a particular instrument in
the constitution of indexicality in the cinematic apparatus: the hand. In the spirit
of Friedberg and Bruno, I suggest that we imagine a space – a laboratory, a mental
space, or a broader space where the action of projection unfolds, a space that is both
psychological and material at once. Rather than considering the production of the
film image in that space and our perceptions there, I ask that we consider the work of
projection inscribed in the physical artifacts of that space, as well as the interaction of
the technician’s body with these artifacts as they circulate in the world.
The cinematic turn entailed a shift in sensory methods in which practices of touching
and looking at the body were augmented by instruments for experimentation designed
to discern not only static form but also systemic function and motility (a term that
increased in use along with techniques such as microscopy and photography throughout
the nineteenth century). I have previously argued that the taking up of the practice
of photographic motion study in experimental physiology and more generally in the
life sciences and medical research in the nineteenth century entailed a turn away from
the anatomical gaze that characterized, for example, dissection practices during which
the dead body paradoxically becomes a source of knowledge about the living body as
a set of static structures (Cartwright 1992 and 1995). By the end of the nineteenth
century, physiological instrumentation offered a range of techniques and disciplines
designed to study and represent the body as an entity characterized most significantly
by its dynamic living processes and functions, from interior systems to the invisible
temporal processes of cellular change and growth of living tissue. Photographic and
proto-cinematic devices were among instruments such as the kymograph that were
introduced to laboratory practice during the same period that the photographic camera
was adapted to the laboratory task of tracking life in terms that foreground movement

immersion in space, light, and a field of animal bodies. Chang, a Paramount wildlife film nominated for the
Academy Award in 1927 was, in Mandel’s account, “the first to combine wildlife documentary footage with a
script of melodramatic human interest, and to astound viewers by use of a new invention, the magnascope.” To
audiences in theaters equipped with the magnascope, she explains, “the action of a stampeding herd of elephants
(the number varies in reports from 90 to 300), filmed from a pit underneath the animals by Schoedsack with
a hand-held camera, suddenly flooded the theater by means of a screen thrice-enlarged, as though by magic”
(Mandel 1987, 42).
 The Hands of the Projectionist 445

and growth over time. Anatomy’s focus on interior structures within the cadaver and
their representation in static form shifted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, to include attention to interior processes, living systems newly accessible
to the senses through techniques and instruments for studying living bodies as forms
increasingly characterized in terms of motility, a shift especially evident in newer
fields such as cellular physiology and microbiology. Likewise, the medical examination,
with its focus on palpation and what could be observed by eye, expanded to include
observation of interior living systems and processes using instruments designed to
record movement and change in graphic form: kymography, photomicrography, X-
ray, and early experiments with tomography. Just as anatomists incorporated the
methods and paradigms of physiology to study organs and structures in and as living
process, so clinicians expanded their repertoire of examination techniques to include
instruments designed to reveal and track system function and motility. Movement
(understood in terms of perceived incremental differences over time) became a more
prominent signifier of the normal and the pathological. Laboratory and clinical
recording processes such as microcinematography, kymography, cinecardiography, and
cineradiology did not simply uncover but also produced the body as animate, as process
incarnate.2
In the study of cinema and its intersection with the life sciences and medicine,
much of the focus has remained primarily with the body of the research subject and
its visualization, representation, or the process of graphic tracking on film, screen,
or stage (I am referring here not only to the cinematic but also to the fluoroscopic
screen and the microscopic stage), with attention to scientific or medical perception
and laboratory instruments of visualization and recording such as the microscope,
the camera, and the kymograph.3 I turn in a different direction now to consider
an instrument and a perceptual technique that have tended to be put to the side in
these discussions: the projector and the projection process. In the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century life sciences, absence of the projector proper did not necessarily
mean that projection was not a factor in the work of the lab. Photographic and
cinematic serial images were often scrutinized under projected magnification, without
a camera or projector. Serial motion study preceded cinematic projection and did not
always involve photography but sometimes entailed graphic recording of incremental
change over time. Even with serial motion devices like the phenakistoscope, visual
inspection of serial images and (later) motion picture film frames viewed without a
motion projection device offered the study of temporality apart from the standards

2
On the relationship of physiology to the cinema, see Cartwright 1992 and 1995; Landecker 2005 and 2007.
On the relationship of cinema to tomography, see Cartwright and Goldfarb 1992; and Saunders 2008.
3
On the history of medical and scientific film and motion study, see for example Marey 1902; Cole 1912;
Thévenard and Tassel 1948; Nichtenhauser ca. 1950; Michaelis 1955; Braun 1992; Martinet 1994; Cartwright
1992 and 1995; Kevles 1997; Ostherr 2005; Landecker 2005 and 2007; Gayken 2005; Canales 2009; Curtis
2005 and 2009.
446 Lisa Cartwright

of reproduction of real time offered in conventional projection, with serial frames

offering discernment and close inspection and analysis of incremental differences lost
in projection. We standardly understand projection to entail the attempt to reproduce
a perceptual experience indexically, as an event “that has been,” in alignment with
Roland Barthes’ concept of the that-has-been of the static photographic image (Barthes
1981).4 As Jimena Canales notes, the matter of projection speed and the relationship
of still-image, standard, and variable-speed projection to the knowledge project was a
subject of major concern and debate in the cinematic knowledge project within the
life sciences (Canales 2009).5 Researchers associated their choices about the temporal
conditions of image viewing with particular epistemic conditions. However, inspection
almost always entailed aspects of projection, if only to enlarge the static image held in the
photographic negative, and to expose and print it as a positive. In cellular microscopy,
motility is rendered visible through a process of magnification and light projection,
even in the absence of a photographic or cinematic apparatus (dispositif). Projectors,
from the precinematic lantern-slide apparatus to the analytic device that offers a variety
of film projection speeds as well as the ability to register and hold a frame for a length of
time under the light of projection without burning it, offered considerable control over
the pattern and duration of image flow outside the standard projection speed; analytic
projectors continued to be used in experimental settings even after the decline in
laboratory cinematic motion study noted by Canales (2009). But the projector was not
simply a motion device; it offered articulation of and control over object and image
magnification and illumination. Limelight, introduced by the chemist and physicist
Michael Faraday over roughly the same period as kymography and photography, is an
aspect of the instrumentation of physiologic vision and the tracking of movement and
distance that may be considered both in its role within the lantern-slide projection
apparatus and in the broader spaces of the laboratory and in popular and surgical
theaters, as well as across broad expanses of landscape (in the technique of surveying, for
example).
The projector, I suggest, is a lesser-noted black box among the instruments that
comprise the laboratory apparatus of the photographic and cinematic motion study – a

4
On the concept of the photograph as index, see Barthes 1981. “What I intentionalize in the photograph,”
Barthes explains, is “neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of
Photography” (77). He characterizes this quality of photography as “the Intractable”: “interfuit: what I see
has been here” (77).
5
In her account of Bergsonian cinematic time, Jimena Canales (2009) discusses the linking of camera and
projector in early cinematic devices, and the predilection of Étienne-Jules Marey for an apparatus that performed
both recording and projection, a connection elaborated in Trutat 1899. She notes Trutat’s identification of the
filmstrip as the essential characteristic of cinema (Trutat 1899, 35-42). Marey required consistency of speed in
both recording and projection of the photographic series. However, projection in the form of the public display
of physiological images was suspect for its potential exploitation as seductive, sensationalizing spectacle. She
observes that cinematic motion study fell out of favor in the scientific laboratory by the 1910s, suggesting this
was in part due to its inability to offer temporal precision. For an earlier account of Bergsonian cinematic time
that does not take the scientific film as its focus, see Doane 2003.
 The Hands of the Projectionist 447

box that has for the most part remained in the corner of our research field, ignored in
favor of the image, the filmstrip, and the body imagined under its projection. Rather
than opening this box and describing how technicians and tinkerers gave shape to it
in the past, we might note how it circulated and was used from space to space, moved
about from laboratory to laboratory and from theater to theater. We could begin with
its exterior: affixed to most projection devices is a handle. It is a device that wears the
conditions of its portability on the outside.6 A curious feature of the mid-twentieth
century cinematic projectors used in laboratories – typically those that project 16-mm
film, is its case design: the machine itself is built integrally with the means for its
enclosure and transport.
Attention to earlier forms of the projector allows us to consider the device not only
as an instrument that facilitates the relationship between film and spectator or observer,
bringing the film to light and projecting it outward as a source of knowledge, but also as
an instrument that animated the hands of the projectionist, extending the instrumental
capacities of the hand in a manner invisible to us except in the impression left on
photographic records of laboratory activity – and in the projectors themselves, artifacts
that we may inspect for indexical signs of their circulation and use. In the physiological
laboratory where serial images were used, then, these film images became paradigmatic
of life in two senses: they vivified the body under study, and they animated the bodies of
the researcher and clinician, bringing the hands to life as components of the apparatus
for projection as concerted acting into the world. It is to the projector that we can
look for evidence of the invisible work of the technician’s hands in certain in-between
stages of the photographic and cinematic process, stages that anticipate the sharing of
the image.
To consider the nature of the hand as a component of the technology of projection
in the motion study recalls a familiar story about the place of the hand in the history of
the photographic camera apparatus. Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 concept of photographic
light as the new “pencil of nature” is generally interpreted to mark the perception of a
shift from subjective modes of knowledge represented by the hand-rendered drawing
to the more objective instrumental knowledge offered by photography (Talbot [1844-
46] 2010).7 Whereas the subjective human hand wields the pencil or brush in the
process of drawing or painting, nature is the objective apparatus that determines the

6
Callon and Latour explain that the spatialized concept of the black box refers to objects that are not always
literally boxed. The “boxed” entity may be as compact and without spatial interiority-exteriority as a coin. In
the projector, though, is an example where the apparatus apparently signifies, but also allows us to reconsider, the
idea of engineered hiddenness that is at the center of the spatialized concept. Especially useful is the early notion
of the black box facilitating an impression of forces that move by themselves, hiding the exercise of will and
producing a chain of arguments. This is the quintessential critique of cinematic projection as non-transparent.
On the matter of the black box as a conceptual container for that process, see Callon and Latour 1981, especially
284-5. On the process of opening the black box to analyze the work of science in the making, see Latour 1987.
7
On the concept of the camera and the pencil of nature, see Talbot [1844-1846] 2010; Root 1864; and
Trachtenberg 1990, 14, 37, and 96.
448 Lisa Cartwright

movements of the graphic marking tool that is light. Alan Trachtenberg recounts the
wonder of a photographer who wrote under the pen name “Shade” on the occasion of
his first success with the daguerreotype process in 1842. Shade suggests a special place
for the hand in the work of seeing the image: “For hours I have held it,” wrote Shade,
“carefully noting all the soft minutiae of light and shade” (quoted in Trachtenberg
1990, 14). What Shade holds in his hands is not exactly an image, but an object:
the plate on which the image does and does not appear. A daguerreotype, as is well
known, is a difficult surface from which to discern an image. To hang a daguerreotype
for exhibition requires careful adjustment of lighting so that the viewer might find a
position in which its image comes into view. The hands, in Shade’s account, make
possible and are also the receptacle of the photographer’s look. Shade no doubt held the
plate, but also turned it to make it catch light in just the right way, to bring the image
into view from the otherwise indistinct surface of the object. The “new pleasures” he
found in this object were released only through the discerning and selective work of his
hands in concert with the plate and his eyes in a compound relationship of projection,
a process that was not simply in the service of making visible but which also entailed
the pleasure of holding and manipulating the object at hand.
The scientific daguerreotype likewise required a similar sort of manipulation to
bring its image into view, a fact obscured by its reproduction in printed articles from
which we take out knowledge of past laboratory process. In anatomy, opening up the
body to the gaze required a similar using of tools of revelation held, like the pencil,
in the hand. Physiological instrumentation, in one way of telling this story, relieves
the hand of the burden of making the body apparent, shifting the labor of visibility
to the recording apparatus and light’s inscription on film within it. Closer inspection
of the broader apparatus and the work of projection in particular, however, suggest
that the hands have played a more intimate and discerning role in this perceptual
experience. The idea of the hands as entities removed from the work of instrumental
registration – the activity of releasing the shutter, for instance, which is resolutely digital
(involving the fingers) even when remotely effected through cables, as in Muybridge’s
classic recording of the horse’s gait – takes our attention away from the broader status
of indexicality as it leaves its traces in and through the apparatus: not just on the
surface of the film, but also in the body of the camera/projector, the editing device,
the screen. All these are repositories of physical traces, parts of the knowledge work
attached to the image. This is a proposition that builds on the classic apparatus theory
of film of the 1970s, which includes Jean Baudry’s idea that the I/eye merges with and
transforms into the projector in a primary identification with the machine, a condition
of the viewing situation that, for Baudry, makes possible identification with bodies
on screen (Baudry [1970] 1986a and [1975] 1986b).8 I am suggesting a different sort

8
Apparatus theory is a body of work long overdue to be put into dialog with the simultaneous development of
laboratory studies techniques in science studies, especially those works emphasizing the role of representation and
 The Hands of the Projectionist 449

of engagement in which the projectionist enters into a working relationship with the
apparatus centered on the hand. This relationship offers up the projector as a different
place to look for signs of cinematic life. The work of the hand in projection is a
primary condition of spectatorship, I propose, if an overlooked one. I am suggesting a
physical, semiotic role is played by the hands in implementing not only the take (the
digital act of releasing the shutter) but also the taking away of meaning and feeling
from the image that is literally always at hand, cradled close, and manipulated for view,
from the work of the lantern-slide projectionist to that of the technician working with
hands and eyes inches from the contemporary digital screen where the body looms and
fades in numbers, charts, graphs, scans, and pictures. This idea is, I believe, captured
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his observation that one’s body is not so much in space
like things. Rather, the body “haunts” space, applying itself in the world “like a hand
to an instrument.” More than an instrument or a means, he continues, the body is our
expression in the world (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 5). In this sense, our body can be said to
matter or to materially organize or compose space as one might play an instrument –
the significance being not in inhabiting the empirical ground of space in which one
acts, but in permeating a given enclosure, as with sound vibration – a room, or the
hollow valley of a landscape – much as a film inhabits the space of projection with the
potential for intersubjective meaning and experience.9
Unlike the cinema image, the body that haunts space does not come forward; it stays
in the background registers, doing the signifying and the emotive work of the hand as
instrument. My intention here is to suggest a potential for reading the early and pre-
cinematic device of the projector (and by extension laboratory equipment that entails
projection in the sense of viewing) as indexical register of the work of the scientist,
the technician, and the projectionist that applies itself to the world like a hand to an
instrument. I will be shifting focus from the filmstrip to the projection device as in
itself source of the index, reading the trace across this relationship of instrumentation.
My second aim is to introduce the idea of reading the shape of instruments – not their
design per se, but the subtle formal deviations and permutations of original design that
occur over time in the tool through its repeated use – for what these elements can tell
us about the performance of the technician in the production of cinematic life. What
I am proposing is speculative, based on physically substantive but weak traces found in
objects. I propose that we look back and imagine the engagement of the body of the
technician with and through the apparatus in a way that foregrounds the everyday and
routine empirical contact.

instrumentation in knowledge work, a sample of which is collected in Lynch and Woolgar 1990. On apparatus
theory in film studies, see also Kuntzel 1976; Metz [1977] 1982; Comolli [1971] 1986a and [1971] 1986b.
9
Doane describes the index as a form evacuated of content; a hollowed-out sign. My references to the hollow
of the box and the hollow of the landscape form are intended to suggest this aspect of the sign (Doane 2007,
133).
450 Lisa Cartwright

Interpreting the Closed Box

In the collection of early photographic and filmic projection devices artifacts owned
by the media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo there is a simple oblong wooden box
dating from the mid 1800s. This is an early lantern slide projector used by an itinerant
projectionist. If we were to open it, we might find evidence of its production and
use during projection. I prefer to keep it closed in order to discuss it as a form of
evidence about the work of carrying projection forward in space at moments not
characterized by display. No bigger than a tiny coffin, the box is large enough to hold
the projectionist’s personal items (such as clothing) as well as his images. The paneled
surfaces of the box are rubbed smooth with use, and a slight oblong indentation runs
along the length of one panel, to the edges of which are attached two halves of a
worn leather belt. The stretched edges and worn surface of the leather suggest that
the projectionist wore the box strapped on his back in his travels from town to town,
freeing his hands to grasp a walking stick. Merleau-Ponty describes the stick as an
extension of the body that is incorporated over time with habitual use: If I want to
get used to a stick, I try it by touching a few things with it, and eventually I have it
“well in hand,” I can see what things are “within reach or out of reach of my stick”
(Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002, 166). The original coat of green paint has sunk into the
grain of the wood like a stain, pressed into the surface of the box by time and touch,
suggesting that the box too may have been incorporated as an extension of the body
through its habitual wearing and carrying.
I begin with the stain that has sunk into the grain of the wood. Mary Ann Doane
reminds us that, in the writing of André Bazin, photography shares the indexical
function of the stain. In his well-known discussion of the shroud of Turin, Bazin refers
to the imprint of the body upon this iconic piece of fabric as evidence of a truth that
is both revived and substantiated in its photographic imprint, the negative held to have
been produced through direct contact with the flesh (Doane 2007, 128). Doane recalls
Georges Didi-Huberman’s account of the reaffirmation of the aura of the shroud as
a laying of a trace over a story it in no way represents. The general account is that
in 1898 when Secondo Pia, the Italian lawyer and amateur photographer, produced
a photographic negative of the shroud, he saw revealed in the glass plate something
previously unseen there: the impression of a face, held to be produced through contact
of the cloth with Christ’s blood, making the impression an index of the absent iconic
wound (Didi-Huberman 1984, 67; Doane 2007, 128-9). It is important to note that
the public means of representation of the shroud during this event of 1898 was at first
to have taken the form neither of the shroud itself nor its photograph, but of paintings.
Display of the shroud itself entailed securing permission from King Umberto I, and in
1898 it was not certain this would be secured, though the shroud had been exhibited
before (first in France in 1356). With this possibility that the shroud would not be
shown, two painters were commissioned to produce works that were intended to stand
in for it in a public display celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Cathedral of Turin.
 The Hands of the Projectionist 451

However, the King did authorize the display, precluding the need for the paintings as
stand-ins, and he furthermore granted permission for the shroud to be photographed
while on display. The work of the hand (the paintings), situated between the real of
the cloth and its indexical image (the photograph), was thus eliminated from the scene.
However, so were the photographs. Seconda Pia took his photographs not before but
during the period of the shroud’s public exhibition, and they were not exhibited in
this context. His successful photographic session occurred in the dark, during the late-
night hours when the public was not in the cathedral. He used electric lamps powered
by a generator to illuminate the dark space. News of the print he produced from his
glass negatives was published in the Corriere Nazationale after the exhibition was over.
For the public, reference between the image and the shroud was possible only through
memory of the experience of viewing the object at an earlier date. Interpreting the
newspaper report of the glass negative’s registration of a positive image of a face required
the public to understand the shroud as a negative – a form the shroud held in common
with photography. In 1979 the forensic microscopist Walter McCrone deemed the
shroud a fake based on his claim of finding paint particles on its fibers, echoing the
charge of a medieval bishop that an artist had cunningly painted it. But to understand
the shroud as a painted surface would require also an understanding of the concept of
the negative as an operative indexical form in the painterly repertoire of the medieval
period during which it was purportedly found.10
At the heart of the shroud debate over verification is not only techniques of carbon
dating, which in 2005 confirmed findings that the parts of the shroud are over 2000
years old (Rogers 2005), but also slippage between notions of indexicality (which are
tied to the face in this case, and not the hand) and symbolic marking (linked to the
work of the hand). This slippage is woven into the artifact. The shroud, as is well
known, was burned in a fire in 1532. It was then worked over and repaired by hand by
nuns, who re-stitched small bits of damaged fibers in a technique known as invisible
tapestry. Carbon dating of fibers for authentication of age proceeds by lifting fibers from
the cloth with adhesive in a kind of negative process that entails magnified viewing
of fibers. In the shroud’s radiation-based age estimation, which researchers admit is
highly subjective, the crystalline structure of the flax fabric acts like a dosimeter in that
the fibers have over many years absorbed radiation and collected radiation defects from
various natural sources (Rogers 2005). But this means of authentication that relies on
the object itself as recording device is confused by the creative work of the hands of
the nuns, which introduced not simply patches – divisible parts – of newer fabric, but
interwoven bits of re-working of the fibers, making the separating out of the indexical
from the symbolic or representational – the fibers used to invisibly reproduce the
original cloth – extremely difficult for the already subjective process of radiation-based
age estimation. The task of dating the shroud thus entails separating out minute bits of

10
On the story of the shroud, see Didi-Huberman 1984; Barnes 2003; and Scott 2003.
452 Lisa Cartwright

fiber, sorting the older indexically marked pieces from the newer fibers that make up
the interstitial creative reproduction imperceptibly woven into that original. Thus there
are two “original” dates, but these are indivisibly interwoven. As well two kinds of
recordings or markings, the indexical and the symbolic, are woven into one fabric. For
the photograph to exist as index required a separation of photography (understood as a
form of indexical marking) from the interpretive techniques of marking by hand. That
distinction is not managed easily, as we can see when we consider the integral work
of the mending hand in this object that is the very icon of indexicality. Rather than
being tied to the photographic film (or the shroud) alone, the concept of indexicality
similarly requires the creative work of the apparatus, with all of its involvement of the
work of the hand, to shore up its authenticity.
The physiological, unlike the anatomical, does not lend itself easily to the register
of the iconic image. The anatomical icon is relatively timeless, more prone to be
fixed in its ontological status of that which has been. The closed box of the itinerant
projectionist is like the indexical photograph in that it holds an ontological stain, but
this stain bears witness to a process of long duration over which it was carried and
touched, not a being or moment that has been. The stain was worn in over time
and not, like the stain on the shroud of Turin understood in its indexical purity, in a
supposed moment of contact. Like the shroud understood as a weave of the index and
its symbolic restoration, the painted box is not exactly an indexical sign of its use in
the sense that there is no one moment or one body to which its worn surface points.
The box refers, as I will try to explain, not to the truth of the existence of a body it
remembers (that of the projectionist for example), but to the truth of a process of work
in between the display of the image – the work of handling the box in a range of ways
in the course of mattering space.
Merleau-Ponty suggested that, if perception is the common act of all of our
motor and affective functions, we should discover its structure by digging down to
the perceived world buried under the sedimentation of knowledge in the manner
of an archaeologist (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 5). His idea is resonant in the work of
media archaeologists, in which we consider the interplay of bodies and instruments as
negotiators and composers of organized space (Huhtamo and Parrika 2011).
But it is also resonant with work in psychology on identification and projection. I
have noted that the box is an instrument of projection, however, it is also subject
to projection: it is carried from town to town so the projectionist can share his
views with others. Merleau-Ponty wrote of the psychological transitivism through
which what happens to each of us does not happen only to us but to our entire
world. This transitivism, he explains “is the same notion that psychoanalysts are using
when they speak of projection.” Citing Henri Wallon (whose work on the mirror
phase was foundational for this Lacanian concept), he describes a case of negative
projection in which a child is ensconced in a state of anxiety and impulsively slaps
the child beside her, projecting the blame by accusing the other girl of slapping her,
failing to understand the distinction of self and other, and projecting responsibility
 The Hands of the Projectionist 453

for our own actions onto the other (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 148). In the classic works
in which the term projection is introduced to psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud uses
projection to describe the ego’s techniques of defense. Projection occurs when the
subject attributes its own unconscious feelings and motivations to others and to objects
outside of itself. Projection entails unwitting disavowal and casting off onto others
of one’s own feelings (Freud [1915] 1957, [1911] 1959, [1920] 1961, [1894] 1962a,
[1896] 1962b). Melanie Klein and her followers developed the concept to describe
aspects of projective behavior evident in every kind of setting, from play and fantasy
to religious beliefs to political life. Typically the concept of projection has been used
to describe the incarnation of one’s unconscious negative feelings in another person,
turning them into objects of anger and contempt. However, projection need not
be limited to the negative affects. Projection is a useful means through which to
interpret spectatorial experience – a point that Metz explicitly noted in his work on
the cinematic apparatus. Equipment, Metz explained in The Imaginary Signifier, is both
a metaphor and a component of mental processes (Metz 1982, 51). Two of that book’s
most notorious statements about the spectator are “I take no part in the perceived, on
the contrary, I am all perceiving”; and “it is I who make [sic] the film” (Metz [1977]
1982, 48). These statements are directly followed by an explanation of this concept that
features a piece of equipment: the projector. “I know that I am really perceiving” in
the cinema, he explains, because “there is a projector” facing the screen. In this model,
the projector is the other on whom I depend for my sense of all-perceiving unity.
Metz makes this point clear in his statement that “it is not I who am [sic] projecting,
or at least not [I] all alone.” What is projected is “deposited in me as if on a second
screen”; “I am the place where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic”
(ibid.).
My aim here is to shift the focus from the experience of projection in front of
the apparatus, turned toward the screen, to the hand of the projectionist who is
instrumental in the process of projection, understood as both a technique of the material
apparatus of bodies, instruments, and objects in the world, and as a psychic relationship
key to identification and intersubjective experience. Merleau-Ponty disparages the
impoverishment of perception as merely a matter of knowledge, “a progressive noting
down of qualities and of their most habitual distribution,” in which the perceiving
subject approaches the world “as the scientist approaches his experiments.” He counters
this model with a concept of projection as lived intersubjective experience: “If on
the other hand we admit that all these ‘projections’, all these ‘associations’, all these
‘transferences’ are based on some intrinsic characteristic of the object, the ‘human
world’ ceases to be a metaphor and becomes once more what it really is, the seat
and as it were the homeland of our thoughts” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002, 28). In
the pages that follow I do not propose this same splitting of scientific and projective
models, but rather propose that projection, experienced with and through instruments
in the everyday work of both the laboratory and the theater, always entails this kind of
interstitial engagement with objects and the world.
454 Lisa Cartwright

Consider projection in the literal sense of connoting the relationship of carrying

the box from town to town that makes projection possible in any given location. I
mean to suggest this act of carrying is a productive part of an affective relationship
that we can understand by considering the closed box. I noted that attached to the
sides of the box are worn leather straps, between which is a shallow indentation that
is barely perceptible. Like the paint that has over time sunk in to give the appearance
of a stain, the shallow hollowed-out space gives slight evidence of a process that has
been embedded in the box over a very long time of repeated movement. The hollow
negative space is a historical repository, an almost imperceptible material trace of an
experience of its carrying and moving from place to place repeated many times over a
long period. What is indexically referenced by the worn spot in the wood, the physical
imprint of the back of the man, is not simply an anatomical body that has been, but the
backbone and the hard muscle of the back as tools that carved this faint imprint into
the box over long and repeated contact during movement, bone and muscle against
wood having the equivalent grinding or carving effect of a slow drip of water on stone.
The grain of the wooden box, like the grain of the photographic film, is a negative
of the ontological weight of a process that has been, a process of carrying that made
projection possible in different places at different times. What is evoked, as that which
has been, is not the man, the traveling showman in all of his iconic stature, but the
anticipation of projection that is the man strapped to the box as one.
On the status of one’s own body in motion, Merleau-Ponty writes that in the case
of “my body itself I move directly, I do not find it at one point of objective space and
transfer it to another, I have no need to look for it, it is already with me – I do not
need to lead it towards the movement’s completion, it is in contact with it from the
start and propels itself towards that end. The relationships between my decision and my
body are, in movement, magic ones (ibid., 107-108). In this account, he is describing
the kinesthetic sensations that make up aspects of the spatiality and mobility of one’s
own body. Kinesthetic sensations are notably without a sense of the externalized body
image as such; they are performed as if with a magical spontaneity that comes with the
habit of repetition captured in the walking and carrying of the itinerant projectionist.
The Turin shroud tells us a story of the cultural value of the face as a register of
identity. It is significant that it is not the back of Christ’s head but the negative of his
face that rivets viewers. Contact between the projectionist and the projection box is
back to back, not face to face like the face of Christ meeting the fabric of the shroud,
or the fabric turning its negative face to the electric lighting (a novelty then) and to
the lens of the camera that captures it. Imagine the shape, the reciprocal curves in
two surfaces: The projectionist, with his back to his instrument, is bent, his profile
bowed under the task, and the soft pine box slowly takes on the indexical hollow.
Projection, in this case, is from behind, just like in the lantern slide show, in which
the projectionist is seated out of view of his audience. The back projects into the box;
the box is projected forward but always out of the projectionist’s sight, hoisted as it is
up into the air behind his back. It follows him. Perhaps the spine of the projectionist
 The Hands of the Projectionist 455

takes on a reciprocal curve or some degeneration of structure as well. The projector

serves as a protective shell even as it holds its kernel, the photographic images that
are the anticipated destination of this labor of walking. Together the man and the box
are an extraordinary unit, practiced in their task over time and indivisible, each the
other’s prop in the reciprocal tasks of carrying and projection. Rather than tracing the
movement of the projectionist and his box from town to town, I emphasize the unity
of their projective process in which there is always an anticipation of showing film, an
anticipation of meeting others in the light of projection.
Bergson similarly invites consideration of an imaginary hand sifting through iron
filings, the final arrangement of which he interprets as a kind of index, an order
created in concert with the hand in a relationship that is “expressed negatively” in the
impression left in the bed of shavings. He likens the concerted, undivided movement
of the hand and the filings to the relationship of vision to the visual apparatus: they
leave a trace that is reciprocal – that is co-produced, rather than simply indexical of the
hand. This trace is similarly canalized. Like the indexical surface of the box, which is
evacuated of content and presence, a hollowed out sign (Doane 2007, 133), this is a
hollowed-out shape, an impression that registers the limitation the field of filings (like
the field of vision) places on the instrumental movement of the hand, which Bergson,
in this example, likens to the work of the eye (Bergson [1911] 2008, 95). I suggest that
this relational impression is indexical of that reciprocal, mutually constituted movement
of projection and the instrumental work of the body that like a hand haunts space. It
is not an index of absent body or part.
Doane reminds us that indices are characterized by singularity; they are dependent
upon contingencies. Her examples are the wind blowing at the moment in a certain
direction, a foot having landed in the mud at precisely this place, the camera’s shutter
opening at a given time (Doane 2007, 133). The indexical mark of the footprint of
the itinerant projectionist is something we should take into account. In the footprint,
we see an impression not of the body in full, but of the underside of the foot, the sole
that bears the full weight of the body and the projector. This part of the body, the sole,
remains mostly out of sight, making repeated contact with the ground in walking, a
serial process. The footprint never exists apart from the other potential footprints it
suggests. The bottom of the foot is a surface of the skin that is furthest from the face of
the walker, the part of the body typically identified with identity and the soul. The sole
of the foot turns and even pushes itself repeatedly away from the direction of both its
own body’s face and the light (the sun) in a process intended to propel the body forward
in the direction that is anticipated by the direction of the face, its scanning forward
gaze. Balanced against the pressure of the hand with its walking stick that is also sunk
into and lifted from the earth repeatedly, the foot propels the torso forward but also
in the moments of pressing forward momentarily squeezes out the barely visible space
below the base of the foot in which we might momentarily glimpse the downturned
sole. The sole sinks fleetingly and repeatedly into the ground’s surface, revealing that
inscriptive surface to be in fact a space of shallow malleable depth, accommodating an
456 Lisa Cartwright

impression that, like the impression of the movement of the hand in a pool of iron
filings, is a sculptural negative: a canalization (a channel), a frieze in negative form, a
mold with no intention to be cast. The footprint is not so much like a stain, which
implied surface inscription, as a spatial record of the combined pressure of body and
projector, a dimensional impression of weight, a displacement of space that becomes
visible only after the duration of the journey that produced it.
The unique circumstance of the foot in the labor of the body is hinted at in
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where reference to the foot is tied to
pain. It is in reference to the foot that he speaks of the “voluminousness of pain,”
with the experience of the hurt foot as inhabiting a “pain-infested space” and not an
object that the body can contemplate in its injury through an externalized impression
(Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002, 107).
The footprint, like a motion picture film frame, rarely exists on its own. It exists
in a series, or at least it implies a series of steps that have been taken, even if not all
the steps taken found soft ground in which to produce a record. With the footprint,
Barthes’ “that which has been” (Barthes 1981) of the photograph becomes a matter of
“that which has unfolded over time” in a continuous series. In the surface marks of the
journey of the projectionist is embedded not an appearance or trace of a moment in
time, but a serial displacement of the material conditions of appearance. The footprint
as indexical register differs from the photograph in its implication of indivisible seriality:
the print cannot exist outside of the temporality of its steps from here to there. We
might say that the foot in the mud is a cast, an inverted form of resemblance from
which we might constitute a sense of the form of the foot but also the body’s force, its
indexical pressure not into the space of light toward which the face would be directed
(in watching a film, for example) but down into the earth. Whereas the pressure of the
cloth upon the body is light and the body’s impression there shallow, the pressure of
the projector upon the body of the projectionist is more substantial, and is potentially
transformative of the body as well as of the depth and nature of the imprint left in the
ground over the course of the projectionist’s journey. The projector is not so much
an instrumental extension then, like the walking stick. It provides a kind of ballast, a
stabilizing weight that brings substance through mutual resistance to the work of the
body as the hand that instrumentally inhabits space.
More typically we think of carrying as a task of the two hands and not of the back.
Imagine the projectionist at work projecting slides from inside his box. He is shrouded
in darkness in a theater or outdoors with assembled spectators facing a blank wall.
Coming out from under the box to stand behind it, he arranges the slides, loads the
carrier, ignites the projection lamp to further carry forward the task of projection.
Another instrument in Huhtamo’s collection of proto-cinematic objects is a box
manufactured by the company operated by J. B. Dancer, the Manchester optician
who pioneered the making of microphotographs and manufactured a variety of
photomicroscopic viewers and projectors. This particular Dancer box is a dual
lantern slide projector for dissolving views, a twentieth-century device the source of
 The Hands of the Projectionist 457

illumination for which is gas jets. There is not one but two gas sources and lamps, one
for each projection, housed in the single unit. The housing of projection mechanisms
for two images in one box allowed for the tighter manipulation of dissolves and other
transitional effects in serial projection, effects that could not be achieved by a single
projectionist working with just his two hands across two machines.
Two hands, two gas jets, two flames, two turns of the nozzle to control the flow of
gas over and over, all in the space of one projection box: The projector is outfitted with
a dual set of tubes that were coupled to a gas source, each set outfitted with a nozzle
and a lever to control the delivery of the combustible substance to the interior of the
box. The projectionist must work fast and carefully, generating interest in the audience
while manipulating the flow of gas, limiting the potential for fire and explosion. The
gas couplings are visible to my eye, dangling from the ends of hoses that lead into the
box. In an earlier iteration of the technology during the limelight period (the 1850s
through the early 1900s), projectionists and lighting technicians sometimes sat atop
bladders holding oxygen and hydrogen, using their weight to control the pressure of
the flow to the lime, setting it aglow with always the potential for a burst sac and
ensuing explosion and fire in the theater (IATSE n.d.; Malkames 1967). Life is at stake
in the tension between the technician and the instrument as they co-produce light. In
the later system that illuminates the serial slides projected from this Dancer box, the
pressure of the flow of gas into the box is manipulated by the projectionist by hand. At
the back of the box where the tubes snake in, and where the projectionist uses his hands
to manage the show, is something like a proscenium, a little stage set. Hanging from
a copper rod shaped into a convex arc is an elegant little velvet drape hanging like a
puppet-theater curtain. This is the sort of miniature curtain on the scale one might find
inside the window of a Victorian dollhouse, but inverted – a decorative exoskeleton of
concealment and display here positioned around the back of the apparatus, out of view
of the audience. Lifting the curtain reveals a complex set of levers, pipes, and tubing.
This is the area of the box in which the projectionist uses his hands to control the gas
input that powers the illumination of the two slides.
What is this curtain meant to mask, and from whose view? The drape extends not
across the dual lenses at the projector’s front side, to mask the projection of light, but
across the back of the box, where an opening large enough to fit the hands of the
projectionist is also the point of entry for gas lines and housings and the various other
mechanisms for holding and illuminating the lantern slides. The drape at the back of
the box, when drawn, conceals these inner mechanisms of projection, including the
complex gas paraphernalia. We could speculate that the curtain conceals the work of
the projectionist’s hands from members of the audience whose eyes might be drawn
by the quick movements of the projectionist’s two hands as they turn off and on the
two gas jets in rapid succession, orchestrating the projection from inside the back of
the box like the hands of a puppeteer. But more likely it stops light from passing
out of the box and into the room, limiting any contribution to ambient light from
the back of the box and concentrating light in the projection cones beamed toward
458 Lisa Cartwright

the wall or screen. The curtain also conceals the sight of the working hands from
the projectionist himself, who works doubly in the dark. Already in a dark room,
his hands are further concealed by the drape, even as he faces the opening with its
interior radiant with the heat and sparks of the gas jets. He must keep the curtains
drawn while projecting in order to conceal not only the light but also the sight of
his two hands moving, the mechanisms and activities inside the box. Line Describing
a Cone (1973), a film installation by Anthony McCall, is a particularly good example
of this effect, as well as of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body’s “haunting” of space
as a weak but pervasive and articulate material inhabitance. The 30-minute structural
and minimalist film gradually traces a circle onto the screen – this is the circumference
of the projection beam, the light from which gradually fills the space of the theater
with a palpable spatialized cone. A haze appears like a dimensional smoke-screen in the
air, a glittering field of suspended dust particles like fine snow catching the changing
light and gradually articulating the body of a dimensional cone in light, drawing the
spectator’s attention from the flat space of the screen and the graphic circle being
sketched there to the dimensional cone taking shape in the space of the room like a
ghostly body we may inhabit (inside the cone, we can sit or move about the theater).
The situation I bring forward here, then, is the relationship of the hand and the
body of the technician with its projection apparatus as this unit actively matters (makes
materially meaningful) the world in the subtle or weak but nonetheless materially
pervasive action suggested by projection or haunting. The operation of the dual
projector, with its two flames needing to be turned on and off in rapid succession
to achieve the semblance of sequence and flow, is in itself dangerous enough. The
volatility of gas jet projection is well known. One might think that it would have been
prudent to allow the projectionist the tool of his eyes as an added safeguard in the
manipulation of not one but two jets. The little proscenium at the back of the box
becomes a macabre sight, one that, like the coffin-like green wooden box, invokes
the hidden labor of the body, the black-boxing of the labor of projection, which I am
reading here not by opening the box, but by interpreting its shuttered surface. The
box literally wears the hands out, both in the sense that it keeps the hand back at its
perimeter where the heat is not so intense, and in that it works the hands vigorously in
their joint projections of images. Imagine the projectionist manipulating two gas jets
on and off to achieve the semblance of lightning-fast sequence and continuity between
two slides, mastering a light touch without the aid of his eyes, guarding against the
potentially fatal slip of the hand. The work of the hands must be careful and exact even
as it is creative and intuitive.
The experience of the co-presence of one’s two hands touching one another,
belonging to the same body, is, for Emmanuel Levinas, the prototype for the experience
of intersubjectivity in the touching of another person. Intersubjectivity is constituted
through the mutual experience of the other person and I as “elements of one
incorporeity.” I am constituted through a “borrowing of myself from the other”
(Levinas [1987] 1993, 100, citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The projectionist’s two
 The Hands of the Projectionist 459

hands touch not one another but the valves that control two flames, two sources of
light and projection which work in sequence not simultaneity like a conversation, but
which merge to appear as one sequential flow to the spectator of the show.
The light in the Dancer box produces sparks, cinders, soot, and smoke – materials
that require a path out of the box and into the room. A chimney channels these elements
that, in their erratic projection into the room, diminish in intensity but continue to
pose the threat of igniting things (the hair, skin, and clothing of projectionist and
spectators, the surfaces of furniture and floors, the screen). Midway up its length, the
chimney bends its path, forcing the sparks to hit a surface and expire, leaving the smoke
and the soot that does not fall back down to take a detour sideways along the deviated
diagonal slope of the remaining portion of the chute. Some of the snuffed sparks fall
back down into the box, a sooty residue both of the projection process and of the
averted disaster. Do the hands of the projectionist become black with this sediment?
Do his slides bear sooty fingerprints that he must carefully remove before each show?
Henri Bergson likens the attempt to reconstitute movement from distinct successive
states with the failed attempts of the child who “tries by clapping his hands together
to crush the smoke” (Bergson [1911] 2008, 308), an image that suggests a scene such
as this one in which smoke is the unstable artifact of projection that fills the room,
anticipating McCall’s recollection of just this sort of spatialized image-world in Line
Describing a Cone. But the materials are volatile. Were there small holes burned into the
wool of the projectionist’s coat and cuffs, artifacts of his engagement with the machine?
Was there the smell of singed hair and wool in the room? The specificity of the film
medium, its being, as Doane has noted, was incarnated by the mid-century Structural
filmmakers in the materiality of the celluloid strip, the grain of the film, the emulsion
(Doane 2007, 129). My concern is not the apparatus in its hard materiality, though,
but the material relationship of action in space among bodies and objects, and the
potential for volatility through which the body and the hardware are co-constituted,
and in their co-constitution effect a projection of something other than image or
knowledge, something more like a spark between the projectionist and his audience,
between whom the excitement of the spectacle resonates for reasons that have to do
with much more than the image.
That the material image in itself is not timeless (iconic) but ephemeral has been
widely noted, and Bill Morrison’s found-footage film Decasia (2002) graphically
demonstrates this point. Thin white cotton gloves worn while editing film, neoprene
gloves for added protection in working with old stock: These protect the hands from
irritation, but they also protect the film’s emulsion from contact with the oils secreted in
the shallow crevices of the fingers even after they are washed clean. The projectionist,
like the editor, is careful to leave no indexical stain, no trace of fingers that point to
use, on the film stock. Like light and heat, fingers expose the stock to deterioration. To
touch photographic film is always to leave a print behind, and the print is never inert
or static. Like the footprint, the fingerprint tells us not only of that which has been, but
of that which will be. With touch, a physical and chemical process of deformation is
460 Lisa Cartwright

launched. Compression and staining, as indexical processes, initiate durational responses

that unfold slowly over time. These states of becoming are nearly imperceptible.
Decasia includes close-up footage documenting the burning and melting of a film
frame trapped in the registration plate, a location it is meant to pass through, so that
the projection beam can in turn pass through it for a fraction of a second and project
its image to the screen. It is well known that the cellulose nitrate filmstock that became
popular in photography in the late 1880s and was used for X-ray and motion picture
film into the early 1950s is a highly unstable medium with a rate of combustion around
15 times that of wood. Dry cellulose nitrate is prone to explode when subject to heat,
sparks, or shock. Stories of the self-combustion of cellulose nitrate motion-picture
films are well known. Fatalities in film studios and movie houses due to contact with
fire as well as through inhalation of the highly toxic gaseous smoke emitted by burning
cellulose nitrate stock led to the establishment internationally of city fire codes and
regulations to manage the problem that began with the introduction of gas as a means
of stage illumination early in the nineteenth century (Select Committee 1892; Booth
1991). Early in the twentieth century, the London City Council’s regulations for film
exhibition included detailed requirements for architectural and technological safeguards
against fire in the cinema hall. Instability and volatility were qualities that went beyond
the film stock alone to include various conditions of film projection. The projector’s
arc lamp and gas jets were the most pressing sources of potential calamity. Electrical
cables introduced to the theater projection booth posed further problems. This change
was met with new language mandating that cables, including leads to lamps, should be
housed in fire-resisting insulation. Smoking was not permitted inside the enclosure.
The threat of a stray spark loomed in the imagination of the magistrates, who noted
that even when non-flammable film was introduced, it could not be demonstrated that
this new safety stock would under no circumstances catch fire. The movement of the
film was subject to strict regulation. All films were to be kept inside closed metal boxes
when not in use. The construction of the housing for the films inside the projector
itself was also subject to guidelines. Mandated at 14-mm interior diameter, the film
box of each projector was required to have a slot for entry and exit of the filmstrip
constructed so as to prevent the passage of flame into the box. The projectionist’s
job became one of controlling for potential combustion, and not just ensuring the
regular flow of the film. Michael Booth describes gas leaking from perishing tubing
and ill-fitting joints, and the tinder-dry conditions of wood, cloth, canvas muslin –
the materials exposed to the gas jets burning above ands around the theatrical stage
(Booth 1991). Moviehouse codes introduced later in the century specified not only
architecture and equipment standards of manufacture and use, but also the behavior
and movement of production and exhibition personnel as well as the flow of movie
house patrons in and through the theater space. Although production of this film stock
type had largely ceased by 1951, the problem of the continued circulation and need for
conservation of remaining prints, as well as the continued use of the stock in radiology
and other branches of medical clinical practice and research, remained (Babin 1991).
 The Hands of the Projectionist 461

The projectionist performs an important task in the process of identification that

is much more than mediation of the image (Cartwright 2008). Scientific cinematic
techniques and bodies working with films in laboratories are not exempt from this
process. By focusing on the projectionist as a figure in a broader process whose body
is implicated in ways that we have not yet fully considered, I have tried to identify a
small aspect of a cinematographic turn with respect to the apparatus, shifting the focus
of study from image to the work of the body as the hand as instrumental element
mattering space, making meaning of the material world. Recall that apparatus theory
was not only about the film image, the instrument, and scientific knowledge, but also
about capturing the nature of psychic life in processes as they are enmeshed, like the
fabric of the shroud, in the work of the camera, the projector, and the screen. This
essay has not gone far enough in tying the implications of projection and the reading of
the closed box to laboratory studies where it intersects with apparatus theory, however
it has suggested a starting point for that project.

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