Early Popular Visual Culture

Vol. 10, No. 2, May 2012, 125–145

A short history of superimposition: From spirit photography to

early cinema
Simone Natale*

Institut für Medienkultur und Theater, University of Cologne, Germany

As several scholars have noted, the use of superimposition effects in cinema to

conjure such apparitions as ghosts, fairies, devils, and other fantastic creatures
finds a significant precedent in spirit photography, a spiritualist practice by
which the image of one or more spirits was ‘magically’ captured on a photo-
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graphic plate. However, arguing for a relationship of direct filiation between

spirit photography and the tricks employed in film remains problematic, espe-
cially given that spirit pictures were entangled with matters of religious belief.
This article calls for a more solid insertion of spiritualism’s visual culture into
the pre-history of film practice, giving three main cases in support of the rela-
tionship between spirit photography and early cinema. Firstly, the commercial
use of spirit photographs within the spiritualist movement suggests that the cir-
culation of these images was not exclusively informed by matters of belief. Sec-
ondly, the popularization of exposures of spirit photography operated by
numerous stage magicians in the late nineteenth century can contribute towards
explaining the insertion of multiple-exposure techniques in the technical exper-
tise of early filmmakers. Thirdly, a documented case in which spirit photographs
were presented to a paying public in the vein of magic lantern entertainments
demonstrates that the spiritualist visual culture intersected the nineteenth-century
tradition of the projected image, too. Thus, by sketching a history of superimpo-
sition effects in photography, stage magic, magic lantern, and cinema, this arti-
cle claims that visual representations of ghosts in the nineteenth century
constantly wavered between religion and spectacle, fiction and realism, and still
and moving pictures.
Keywords: spirit photography; magic lantern; spiritualism; stage magic; trick
movie; trick photography; early cinema; nineteenth century

In 1946, André Bazin published an essay in the French journal L’Ecran français
titled ‘The Life and Death of Superimposition’. This short critical piece, based on
the analysis of the special effects employed in three American films – Alexander
Hall’s Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), Sam Wood’s Our Town (1940) and Garson
Kanin’s Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) – sketched a history of the use of superimpo-
sition in cinema from Méliès’ trick films to the filmic production of Bazin’s time.
In this chapter, a similar task will be undertaken. Differently from Bazin, however,
this history of superimposition will start before Méliès, and even before the inven-
tion of cinema. The underlying argument is that the visual device that involved the

*Email: simone.natale@uni-koeln.de

ISSN 1746-0654 print/ISSN 1746-0662 online

Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2012.664745
http://www.tandfonline.com
 126 S. Natale

superimposing of ghostly apparitions on a given background cannot be understood

by looking at the history of photography or at cinema alone. In order to be told,
this history demands what Lynda Nead has called ‘an integrated approach to visual
media’ (2007, 2), which moves beyond the use of an interdisciplinary framework to
focus on the connections and spaces across media.
In the 1860s, more than a decade after the emergence of the spiritualist move-
ment, a new genre of spirit manifestations was established: spirit photography. This
phenomenon was not based on the capacity of the photographic medium to docu-
ment what is visible to the human eye. On the contrary, spirit photographs were
presented as the result of photography’s purported unsettling and uncanny faculty to
detect the image of spirits that were among us, but went undetected by the human
senses. Just like trance mediums, the visual medium of photography was able to
access the spirit world, offering to spiritualist believers the possibility to receive a
post-mortem portrait of their beloved.
As it was soon pointed out by expert photographers and other sceptics, however,
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this apparently extraordinary phenomenon could be explained as the product of a

simple photographic trick or accident. Most notably, critics pointed to multiple
exposure and other superimposition techniques that were of common use in photo-
graphic practice. Fake ‘spirit’ photographs were produced to demonstrate the trick-
ery that had been employed in spiritualism. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, photographic images that featured a superimposed element were
at times believed to be real manifestations of the existence of spirits and ghosts, at
times debunked as a photographic trick, at times used for their entertaining and
spectacular effect. Following the emergence of film, multiple-exposure imagery
became a common way to render on screen the apparition of ghosts and the occur-
rence of dreams and visions. This article explores the circulation of a photographic
technique – multiple exposure – and a visual effect – superimposition – in
spiritualism, stage magic, magic lantern projection, photography and cinema.
The trajectory from spirit photography to the motion picture found symbolic
expression at the very beginning of the film era. As Matthew Solomon has noted
(2010), one of the first books ever published on the moving photographic image,
W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson’s History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and
Kineto-phonograph, published in 1895, included a curious illustration, labelled
‘Photography Extraordinary’. It was, in the tradition of mocked-up spirit photo-
graphs, a photographic portrait of Dickson with a spectral double behind him (Fig-
ure 1). Dickson, a photography specialist in Edison’s laboratory, had contributed to
the invention of the first commercial moving-picture technology, the kinetograph
(and its viewing device, the kinetoscope). It was probably to acknowledge cinema’s
debts to photography, which had played the role, as he put it, of ‘the birthplace and
nursery of the kinetoscope’ (1895, 19), that he and his wife inserted this image in
the book. It is intriguing, however, to read it as a dedication to the visual technique
of superimposition. Dickson’s spirit was just a sample of the ghosts that multiple
exposure would eventually conjure through its new dimension, the moving photo-
graphic image.
Several scholars, including François Jost (1998), Matthew Solomon (2003,
2010), Karen Beckman (2003), Lynda Nead (2007), and Tom Gunning (2007), have
recognized the debts of early cinema – and of the trick movie genre in particular –
to the iconography of spirit photography. Effort has not been made, however, to
understand how images that were considered truthful manifestation of spirits by
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Figure 1. A page from William Kennedy Laurie and Antonia Dickson’s History of the
kinetograph, kinetoscope, and kinetophonograph (1895), illustrated with a fake spirit
photograph.
 128 S. Natale

believers could be linked to cinema, a technology that, notwithstanding the apocry-

phal anecdotes regarding early cinematic audiences panicking before the image of
an oncoming train (Bottomore 1999), did not attract the same kind of faith. In this
regard, this article gives three insights supporting the connection between spirit pho-
tography and early film tricks. First, the fact that spirit photographs were a widely
commercialized commodity within the spiritualist movement suggests that its use
was not exclusively concerned with matters of belief. Thus, spirit photography can
also be considered a visual attraction, capable of attracting the curiosity of spiritual-
ists and non-spiritualists alike. Second, multiple-exposure techniques used to pro-
duce these kinds of images were popularized by stage magicians in the second half
of the nineteenth century, with the aim of debunking spirit photography as a mere
photographic trick. The insertion of superimposition techniques in the history of
stage magic, a tradition that was central to the formation of many early filmmakers
(Barnouw 1981), might help explain why such practices were so productively repli-
cated in the trick film genre. Finally, a documented case in which spirit photographs
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were presented to a paying public as a kind of magic lantern show demonstrates

that spirit photography, before the introduction of cinema, interacted with the nine-
teenth-century tradition of the projected image.
The circulation of superimposition in multiple technological and cultural con-
texts contributed to shape it as a body of technologies and knowledge that wavered
between realism and fantasy, stasis and movement, fiction and belief. Since the
1850s, when David Brewster described a trick to produce the photograph of a spec-
tre and the London Stereoscopic Company started to produce a series called ‘The
Ghost in the Stereoscope’, superimposition was displaced through a number of tech-
nologies and cultural environments, including spiritualism, trick photography, magic
lantern, and stage magic. Comparable images, produced through similar means,
were presented in these various contexts as an audacious trick, the demonstration of
the existence of spirits, or a way to visualize dreaming. It was this displacement
into different technological and cultural worlds that ultimately fixed the meaning of
superimposition at the intersection of spiritualism and magic, photography and cin-
ema, realism and fantasy. Following the visual technique of superimposition in the
worlds of photographic and projected images, from Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s
phantasmagoria to William Mumler’s spirit photographs, from photographic amuse-
ments to stage magic and the trick film, I will look at superimposition as a kind of
visual medium in its own right. Despite its being continuously reinvented and
reconstructed, its history reveals the trajectory of a visual culture that was haunted
by ghosts, dreams, visions, and the contradictory status of the photographic image.

A visual commodity
In 1862, the American spiritualist movement was startled by the news that a new
kind of spirit manifestation had been ‘discovered’ by an engraver from Boston,
William Mumler. Mumler, as the readers of the spiritualist journal The Banner of
Light came to discover, had been able for the first time in history to produce the
photograph of a spirit (Child 1862). In the following months, he opened a photo-
graphic studio in Boston, where paying sitters were offered the opportunity to be
photographed in company of the spirit of deceased relatives and friend. Seven years
later, in 1869, as Mumler was brought to trial for fraud in New York and the news
spread in the American press, spirit photography became widely known also beyond
 Early Popular Visual Culture 129

the boundaries of the spiritualist movement. Though Mumler was declared innocent,
the prosecutors having failed to explain with certainty which procedure Mumler
used to perform the trick, the trial succeeded in making spirit photography an issue
for public debate. Spirit photography became a hot item in the New York daily
press and in widely circulating national magazines including Harper’s Weekly
(Kaplan 2008). Probably stimulated by the impressive popularity of Mumler’s case,
others followed his example, producing photographs of spirits in the United States,
Britain, and France in the subsequent decades (Coates 1911, 57). Although repeat-
edly exposed as a mere photographic trick, spirit photography remained a very rele-
vant practice within the spiritualist field for decades, starting to decline in
popularity only in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Literature dealing with spiritualism’s connections to visual media tends to see
photography as an evidentiary medium, through which spiritualists searched for a
tangible confirmation of the trustworthiness of their faith (Harvey 2007; Jolly 2006;
Chéroux et al. 2005).1 Film, by contrast, is usually regarded as working on the level
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of fantasy and narration, conjuring images of ghosts only to embed them in a fic-
tional world that, implicitly or explicitly, denies their reality. As Matthew Solomon
has noted, ‘cinematography was very rarely made into a tool for psychical research’
(2010, 24). However, as contemporary scholarship has highlighted, photography’s
evidentiary status in the nineteenth century was not as unchallenged as we tended
to think. Authors such as Jennifer Tucker (2005), Jennifer L. Mnookin (1998), and
Michael Leja (2004) have demonstrated that the images produced by Mumler and
other spirit photographers stimulated a lively debate on the manipulability of the
photographic image in the nineteenth century. Tucker, in particular, argues that this
controversy ‘made the issues of trust in photographic production visible to a wider
Victorian public and focused attention as never before on the necessary qualifica-
tions to make authentic photographs’ (124). Furthermore, spiritualist sources reveal
that the attitude of believers in spirit communication toward photographic technolo-
gies was ambivalent, too. Photography was considered, also and perhaps especially
within the spiritualist movement, as a problematic evidence form and as a highly
manipulable technology. Spiritualist publications frequently recognized the possibil-
ity of producing images of ‘ghosts’ by purely technical, non-spiritual means (Fritz
1873, 81). Many spiritualist leaders and mediums openly criticized the practice of
spirit photography; this is the case, for instance, of the famous medium Daniel
Dunglas Home, who overtly explained how to produce spirit photographs through
optical tricks (1877, 360–6).
Therefore, if photography was often employed by spiritualists to provide evi-
dence supporting their claims, its use within the spiritualist movement is much more
complex than usually acknowledged. As I have shown elsewhere, nineteenth-cen-
tury spiritualism was a matter not only of religious and superstitious beliefs, but
also of entertainment and spectacle: mediums often performed on the theatrical
stage, before a paying public, and even private séances had a high degree of drama-
tization (Natale 2011). This was also the case with spirit photography. Spirit photo-
graphs were also visual attractions, and could be regarded as a curiosity by
spiritualists and non-spiritualists alike. We should remember that photography –
especially after the positive/negative process became dominant – is a commodity
that can be easily reproduced and commercialized. It is perhaps for this reason that,
as historian of spiritualism Robert S. Cox has noted, while spiritualist séances were
sometimes performed privately without charging a fee, non-commercial instances of
 130 S. Natale

spirit photography are virtually non-existent (2003, 134). As a commercial com-

modity, spirit photography circulated within the channels of spiritualist circles and
communities and was frequently advertised in spiritualist journals. For instance, in
1882 copies of ‘Recognized Spirit-Photographs’ could be acquired at the price of
1s. each by the readers of the London spiritualist magazine Medium and Daybreak
(Anon. 1882a). The commercialization of spirit pictures also concerned, to a certain
extent, those who were not involved in spiritualism: the American showman P.T.
Barnum, for one, had acquired some prints of Mumler’s photographs for his
American Museum, where all genres of visual curiosities were exhibited, a few
years before the photographer’s famous New York trial (Barnum 1866, 117).
In this sense, the representation of ghosts in visual media can be followed
through the still and the moving image as a trajectory in which fictional and
purportedly ‘real’ apparitions of ghosts mutually reinforced their appeal with a
public of sitters, viewers and, ultimately, spectators. Although spirit photographs
were believed by many to be truly manifestations of spirit agency, they were
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seen by others as a curiosity, rather than as an object of faith. As I will show,

numerous late-nineteenth-century attempts to debunk this spiritualist technique
further testify to this merging of spectacle with religious and superstitious
belief.

Debunking spirit photography

The advent of spiritualism in the nineteenth century resulted not only in a craze for
spirit séances, but also in an unprecedented effort on the part of sceptics to expose
beliefs in ghosts as superstition and fraud. This enlightening attempt gave rise to an
impressive body of publications (see Natale 2010). In this context, spirit photogra-
phy was demystified as a photographic trick, and fake spirit photographs were
described as the result of multiple exposure and other techniques for the purpose of
exposing the dishonesty of mediums.
Applications of trick photography to produce illusions of magical appearance
were known as ‘photographic amusements’ during the second half of the nine-
teenth century. An article published in the British Journal of Photography
included in the category of photographic amusements ‘an extended class of effects,
produced by the aid of the camera, which, in their complete state, serve to excite
the curiosity or the amusement of the public, and in some measure to justify the
occasionally-lengthy correspondence which we have seen in our scientific journals
to explain and account for them’ (Statham 1880, 79). In this context, prior to
Mumler’s introduction of this phenomenon into the spiritualist world, the Scottish
physicist Sir David Brewster, one of the main characters involved in the mid-nine-
teenth-century popularization of stereoscopic photography, suggested a technique
to produce, ‘for the purpose of amusement’ (1856, 205), an effect similar to spirit
photography. Following Brewster’s suggestion, ante-litteram spirit photographs
were successively produced: the ‘Ghost in the Stereoscope’ series, for instance,
were a series of stereoscopic prints of this kind that was commercialized in the
1850s.2 But the introduction of spirit photography in the 1860s altered the context
for use and production of these images. Photographs in the style of the ‘ghost in
the stereoscope’ series were now explicitly linked to spiritualism, and the purpose
of amusement came together with the moral duty of exposing superstition and
gullibility.
 Early Popular Visual Culture 131

During the late nineteenth century, photographic tricks were often described in
popular scientific publications such as Scientific American or the French journal La
Nature, which published a series of articles later collected in Hopkins’ Magic: Stage
Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (1897). Containing
the explanation of a number of illusory techniques taken from stage magic and
prestidigitation, this book went through several editions at the turn of the century. It
included chapters on chronophotography and the projection of moving pictures and
an entire section dedicated to popular ‘photographic diversions’. Also, a highly
detailed explanation of how to perform the photographs of so-called spirits was
given, in the hope that ‘they will be made merely for amusement, and, if possible,
to expose persons who practice on the gullibility of experienced persons’ (435).
Engravings illustrated how multiple exposure could be used to produce so-called
spirit photographs (Figure 2), as well as other photographic illusions (Figures 3–5).
The main context for imitations of spirit photography was stage magic. After
the rise of the spiritualist movement in the mid nineteenth century, magicians
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engaged in the polemical attempt to demonstrate that behind the craze for spirit
séances was concealed the trickery of fraudulent mediums. Pointing out that their
knowledge in illusionism and optics allowed them to recognize and explain spirit
séances, stage conjurors exploited the fascination for the supernatural, often per-
forming on the stage a kind of anti-spiritualist show that aimed to reproduce techni-
cally the ‘phenomena’ of spiritualism. Although spirit photography could not be
conveniently exhibited on the magic stage, exposés of this spiritualist practice can

Figure 2. A ‘spirit’ photograph. From: Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and
Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (New York, 1897).
 132 S. Natale
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Figure 3. ‘Composite Photograph in Two Poses, at Different Distances, on the Same Plate’.
From: Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick
Photography (New York, 1897).

be found in several printed sources that were published in connection to magicians’

debunking of spiritualism. In contrast to their stage shows, these images broke with
the magicians’ tradition of live performance. Instead of being produced in real time
through mirror or hidden projections, the ghostly illusion was now conjured with
the photographic medium. The effect, however, was not less spectacular. A particu-
larly interesting example of this anti-spiritualist spirit photography is the engraving
used as frontispiece for The Supernatural?, an 1891 book that featured a chapter on
modern spiritualism written by the prominent English magician John Nevil Maske-
lyne. In this ironical and symbolic picture, the ‘spirit’ of John Nevil Maskelyne
appears beside the author of the book, Lionel A. Weatherly, as if intending to clasp
his hand (Figure 6). In the text, it was Maskelyne himself who explained how these
images could be produced, pointing to two possible tricks: ‘double-printing’, which
 Early Popular Visual Culture 133
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Figure 4. ‘Facsimile of a Composite Photograph’. From: Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage

Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (New York, 1897).

involved the superimposition of two negatives on the same print, and ‘double-
exposure’, a technique that followed the method illustrated by Brewster. In both
cases, the second exposure or print was too brief for the image to be fully fixed.
The result, Maskelyne explained, was that ‘whilst all else is sharp and well-defined,
the “spirit” is represented by a hazy outline, through which all that is behind it
shows. There is nothing very ”spiritual” about this, is there?’ (1891, 203–4).
Among other fake spirit photographs made by magicians are the two images
published in Carl Willmann’s 1886 Moderne Wunder [Modern Wonders]. Willmann,
a German watchmaker and amateur magician, wrote several books on stage magic
and was engaged in exposing spiritualist trickery; in Moderne Wunder, he made
clear that such ‘spirit’ photographs were produced through fully explainable, artifi-
cial means (1886, 211). The first engraving, titled ‘Jacoby in the Realm of his
Ghosts (So-called Spirit Photography)’, was a relatively conventional image in
which the magician Jacoby seemed frightened before a spectral apparition (Figure 7).
The other, ‘The Liberation of the Prestidigitator Jacoby’, involved a more compli-
cated multiple exposure, incorporating apparitions of a ghost, a skull, and a levitat-
ing hand (Figure 8). This illustration seems to play ironically with the tradition of
escape art, which had been practiced in spiritualism by the Davenport Brothers, and
in magic by a number of showmen, including the American Harry Houdini, who
would eventually make it his most successful feat at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
Magicians and other opponents of spiritualism kept alive the debunking of spirit
photography as multiple exposure well beyond the end of the nineteenth century.
This tradition also contributed to the questioning of photography’s claims of
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Figure 5. ‘Group in Open Air, in Two Different Poses on One Plate’. From: Albert A.
Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography
(New York, 1897).

objectivity, and continued to foreground the ability of this medium to create fic-
tional worlds and also, in cases when there was the intent to deceive, to lie. As a
debunker of spiritualism pointed out some years later, ‘so unreliable I consider any
photograph to which is attached the slightest taint of spiritualism, that when in this
connection I have been asked, “Can a photograph lie?”, I have frequently replied,
“A spirit photograph is absolutely unable to speak the truth”’ (Fawkes 1920, 99).

Projecting ghosts
The history of superimposition is connected not only with the photographic med-
ium, but also with the projected image. During the nineteenth century, the technol-
ogy of magic lantern projection developed as a spectacular recreational and
didactical means. In this process, a number of techniques were introduced to create
visual effects that could stimulate the wonder and the attention of its spectator. One
of these, involving the employment of two magic lanterns to superpose a figure on
a background, has been compared to the use of superimposition in early cinema
(Mannoni 2002, 50). This, however, was not the only means by which superimposi-
tion intertwined with the projection of images. Magic lanterns were used for the
projection of photographic images that featured the trick of multiple exposure; and
in at least one case, as I will show, they were used for the projection of spirit pho-
tographs, too.
 Early Popular Visual Culture 135
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Figure 6. ‘A Spirit Photograph: The Wraith of Mr. Maskelyne Appearing to Dr.

Weatherly’. Frontispiece to Lionel A. Weatherly, The Supernatural? (Bristol, 1891).

The technique of superposing one image over the other had been common in
magic lantern shows at least since the spectacles of phantasmagoria popularized by
Etienne Gaspard Robertson in the 1790s. Playing on the uncanny relationship
between the projected images and the apparitions of ghosts, Robertson staged his
performances in the lugubrious rooms of an abandoned chapel in the Couvent des
Capucines in Paris. Although he presented his shows as a spectacle, and introduced
them with a warning against superstition and impostors, Robertson’s phantasmago-
ria played with the fascination for the worlds of the supernatural and the occult.
 136 S. Natale
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Figure 7. ‘Jacoby im Reiche seiner Geister: Sogenannte Geister-Photographier’ [Jacoby in

the Realm of his Spirits: So-Called Spirit Photography]. From Carl Willmann, Moderne
Wunder: Natürliche Erklärung der älteren wie neueren Geheimnisse der Spiritisten und
Antispiritisten, Geisterritieren, Hellseher, Gedankenleser, Heilmedien, Mnemotechniker und
Rechenkünstler (Leipzig, 1886), p. 212.

The concealment of the projector, which remained invisible to the spectators, con-
tributed to creating the mysterious atmosphere of these spectacles. He used multiple
visual effects, such as dissolves and the illusion of movement, which he obtained
through the means of mechanical slides and by moving the lantern forward and
back, making an image seemingly approaching the spectator.3 The figures were
sometimes projected onto smoke, creating the effect that the apparitions were float-
ing over the audience.
 Early Popular Visual Culture 137
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Fig. 8. ‘Die Entfesselung der Prestidigitateurs Jacoby’ [The Liberation of the Prestidigitator
Jacoby]. From Carl Willmann, Moderne Wunder: Natürliche Erklärung der älteren wie
neueren Geheimnisse der Spiritisten und Antispiritisten, Geisterritieren, Hellseher,
Gedankenleser, Heilmedien, Mnemotechniker und Rechenkünstler (Leipzig, 1886), p. 66.

Superimposition in Robertson’s phantasmagoria was performed through the use

of two projectors. The first lantern usually provided the background, while the other
was mobile, and could produce the illusion that the apparition, often a ghost or a
skeleton, was moving toward the public. This trick was often used by lanternists in
the nineteenth century, building a long tradition of superimposition with the magic
lantern (Barber 1989); a similar technique was involved in the illusion known as
Pepper’s Ghost, which was first presented at London’s Royal Polytechnic in 1863
and combined real actors with projected images (Brooker 2007).
The employment of a dark background in the superimposition trick is common
to magic lantern projections and spirit photography. In early cinema, filmmakers
 138 S. Natale

such as Georges Méliès would eventually adopt the same procedure: in Le

Mélomane [The Melomaniac] (1903), for instance, the dark background allows
Méliès to make his heads appear on the musical staff in the top part of the screen.
The common use of superimposition in magic lantern shows may have played a
role in the establishment of superimposition in early film. Indeed, as Deac Rossell
(1998, 153), among others, has documented, many pioneers and early practitioners
of the moving image had a background in the art of lantern projection.
The magic lantern was also used to project photographic superimpositions. In
April 1882, the spiritualist journal Medium and Daybreak published the report of
an evening ceremony organized in London to celebrate the 34th anniversary of
modern spiritualism. It was, according to this report, ‘a general meeting of British
spiritualists’ that gathered together representatives of many spiritualist communities
outside the capital. The Neumeyer Hall, which had been chosen to host the celebra-
tion, was soon crammed to capacity; chairs had to be placed in every available
space to accommodate the number of visitors. For those who had not reserved a
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place, ordinary tickets were sold at the entrance, where the pressure of the crowd
became quite intense. But neither the delay nor the discomfort of the line could ruin
the atmosphere of the gathering; as the reporter put it, ‘on the contrary the principle
of love seemed to dominate so completely that it was a pleasure to press the one
against the other’ (Anon. 1882b, 257).
A solo pianist inaugurated the evening’s entertainment. After this musical intro-
duction, the programme went on with the introductory addresses of the celebration’s
committee, the performance of a vocalist, ‘through whose voice the spirit world
seems to breathe its harmonies’ (258), and two trance lectures performed by spiritu-
alist mediums. Then, it was time for the principal attraction, spirit photography. A
lantern-slide operator, Mr. Middleton,4 set up the projection, while a piano player
furnished musical accompaniment. Lights were turned off in order to ensure a suit-
able condition for the projection. When the images started to be projected, James
Burns, the editor of the Medium and Daybreak, acted as presenter, introducing
every slide with his ‘descriptive remarks’. The projection included some illustra-
tions and photographs that represented the salient moments in the history of spiritu-
alism during the past decades, as well as a few samples of manifestations, such as
slate writing and direct drawing. But the attention soon turned toward spirit photo-
graphs. The first series of images of this kind was titled ‘The Substance of which
Spirit-Photographs are Made’ (260) and included some photographs of mediums
with a halo of light over their hands or body – a phenomenon that, according to
Burns, modern science had been unable to explain. The next sequence – which,
with 37 images, accounted for the majority of the slides – exhibited the spirit pho-
tographs of Frederick Hudson, whose reproduction had been repeatedly offered on
sale to the readers of the Medium and Daybreak. A few examples of spirit images
made by other photographers, among them some by William Mumler, completed
the 40-minute projection, which was followed by a speech from the medium
Georgiana Houghton and by a few words of thanks from Hudson.
While in the case of the phantasmagoria and other spectacular uses of magic
lantern tricks the illusion – or, in the believer’s perspective, the spirit manifestation
– took place right before the spectator, the projection of spirit photography is in a
certain regard a different case, since the manipulation preceded the show, having
been produced by the camera while taking the photograph and not directly before
the audience of the Neumeyer Hall. The magic lantern was employed to project on
 Early Popular Visual Culture 139

the stage images that had been previously made; it was not used to conjure the
superimposition effect, nor was it involved in the reputedly supernatural phenome-
non. The audience, however, did not seem to be completely aware of this distinc-
tion. Reportedly, the magic lantern spiritualist show was seen by many as a mystic
event. As the reporter stated, ‘the darkness which prevailed during the exhibition
was very favourable for the exercise of the clairvoyance’ (263), and several among
the public claimed to have seen visions of spirits, or to have felt the presence of
them. The account in the Medium and Daybreak mentioned a spectator affirming to
have seen the apparition of a horseman, over whose head six different spirits of dif-
ferent nationalities were hovering. Apparently, then, a trace of the supernatural pres-
ence which, according to the spiritualists’ claims, had produced the images was
believed to be carried also in the slides projected before the audience. This might
suggest that not only the photograph as a concrete object, but also the visual repre-
sentation as such, regardless of the medium employed to show it, was believed to
be of spiritualist meaning.
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The account of this event, apart from providing proof of the richness of the spir-
itualist visual culture, demonstrates that at least on one occasion – although the use
of a consistent number of magic-lantern glass slides featuring spirit photographs in
the London celebrative evening show indicate there could have been more events
of this kind – spirit photography intertwined with the technology of the projected
image. Although the author of the report insisted that ‘the sole purpose’ of the
evening was ‘the work of the angel-world amongst humanity’ (257), the gathering
of the London spiritualist community was presented as a highly spectacular event,
with the public taking part in a performance that resembled not only magic lantern
shows of the time, but also the spectacular situation of early film shows. In fact,
some of the conditions of display that were highlighted by the author of this report,
such as the darkness of the room, the musical accompaniment, the paying public,
and the presence of a presenter who gave commentaries and explanations, came to
be customary some decades later for the projection of films.

Towards the trick movie

In early cinema, the technique of multiple exposure was successfully introduced in
a genre – the trick film – that rose to great popularity during the first years of the
moving image. It was particularly the involvement of filmmakers who were impli-
cated in the tradition of stage magic that contributed to popularizing this technique
in film production. Through their creative solutions, photographic tricks were
applied to the new moving images, and new tricks, such as substitution splicing,
were successfully established. Multiple exposure was used to produce several differ-
ent effects, including dissolves, replications of characters or objects, superimposi-
tions and transparencies.
Bazin’s essay on superimposition opened with a consideration of the coexistence
of realism and fantasy on the cinematic screen. ‘The fantastic in the cinema,‘ he
argued, ‘is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic
image. It is the image that can bring us face to face with the unreal, that can intro-
duce the unreal into the world of the visible’. As an example, Bazin mentioned
James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), arguing that as an animated film it would
have immediately lost all interest, since what appealed to the audience was ‘the
contradiction between the irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image and the
 140 S. Natale

unbelievable nature of the events that it depicts’ (2002). The observation that real-
ism is needed to bring the viewer into the world of fantasy could be applied to the
history of superimposition before cinema. The most astounding paradox of this
technique is that it was regarded at the same time as a spirit manifestation by spiri-
tualists and as a mere trick by magicians, expert photographers, and sceptics in gen-
eral. In this sense, superimposition brought to cinema what Dan North called ‘the
synthesis between photographic similitude and its fantastic, transformative effect’
(2008, 49). The fact that multiple exposure was used in two contexts, spiritualism
and magic, exploiting respectively its realist and its fantastic power, may explain
the fascination of early filmmakers with this technique and its extensive employ-
ment in the trick film.
The relationship between stage magic and early cinema has been increasingly
acknowledged in film history. As Erik Barnouw, the author of a pioneering work on
this topic, put it, given the extent to which professional magicians relied on techni-
cal means and magic lantern projection to perform their tricks, it is not surprising
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that the debut of the Lumières’ cinématographe ‘set off a gold rush’ in the magic
arena (1981, 38). Practising theatrical conjurers such as Gaston Velle, Walter Booth,
J. Stuart Blackton, Albert E. Smith, Georges Méliès, and many others were among
the first motion picture exhibitionists and filmmakers; magic theatres, such as the
Egyptian Hall in London, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin and the Théâtre Isola in Paris,
were among the places where the earliest projection with cinematographic devices
took place, and Tom Gunning (1989, 10), Lucy Fischer (1979), Simon During
(2002, 135–77), and Karen Beckman (2003), among others, have all posited that
many spectators of the time experienced cinema as a kind of magic show.
Notwithstanding Matthew Solomon’s convincing demonstration that magic dia-
logued with cinema well beyond the novelty period (2010, 1–10), the most relevant
contribution of stage magic to film practice is certainly the trick film. Trick films
were composed of a series of apparitions, transformations, and magical attractions
that aimed at astonishing the spectator with the visual wonder of complex visual
tricks. Especially in the earliest years, they did not rely on a convincing narrative
plot, but on a series of magical attractions that were performed through photo-
graphic tricks such as substitution splicing and multiple exposure. Filmmakers such
as Georges Méliès, a professional stage magician who owned the Théâtre
Robert-Houdin in Paris, and George Albert Smith, who produced a number of films
of this genre in Britain, were the protagonists of this genre. Devils, fairies, skeletons
and ghosts were, alongside the stage magician who was often the protagonist of
these short movies, the figures that populated this imaginary world.
Images such as those technically created by Maskelyne and Willmann demon-
strate that photographic tricks were in use in the world of magic and illusionism
well before the invention of cinema. The exposure of spirit photography can thus
be seen as evidence of the pre-cinematic involvement of stage magicians in the art
of chemicals, dark rooms, and photographic manipulation, an art that was at the
root of the success in early cinema of magicians such as Méliès and Smith. It is
probably no coincidence that multiple exposure and other darkroom tricks were first
popularized in the motion picture by those filmmakers who came to film production
from the stage magic profession, and who were particularly aware of the artifices
used by spiritualist mediums.
In 1898, the British pioneer of trick film George Albert Smith produced a film
called Photographing a Ghost. Although no copies of the original film have been
 Early Popular Visual Culture 141

preserved, Smith’s catalogue description offers insight into its simple plot, which
involved the comical and unfortunate attempt of a photographer to take the picture
of a spirit (Chanan 1996, 117–8). The text mentions that the ghost was perfectly
transparent, so that the background was visible behind him, and that the ghost also
kept disappearing and reappearing. Smith – who, before becoming involved in film
production, had been a magic lanternist, a portrait photographer, and a stage hypno-
tist, and took part in the Society for Psychical Research’s experiments on hypnotism
and thought-reading (Gray 1998) – certainly had a career trajectory that was remi-
niscent of the spiritualist practitioners of spirit photography. The catalogue descrip-
tion suggests that he used multiple exposure to insert the transparent image of the
spectre into the scene, performing through the moving photograph something simi-
lar to what Mumler and other spirit photographers had been doing with the still
image. In other films of the same period, Smith skilfully exploited superimposition
tricks; he even obtained a patent for double exposure (Brosnan 1974, 11), which he
used for representing a ghost and a vision in his film The Corsican Brothers.
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According to Frank Gray, he was the first British filmmaker to render ghost illu-
sions and vision scenes through multiple exposure (Gray 2000, 177).
Georges Méliès was also involved in the tradition of spiritualism’s debunking.
One of his most successful magic plays, Le décapité recalcitrant [The Recalcitrant
Decapitated Man], popular enough to be performed 1200 times at the theatre Rob-
ert-Houdin, featured the decapitation of a spiritualist medium who annoyed the pub-
lic by assuring them of the trustworthiness of spirit séances. Méliès also shot
l’armoire des frères Davenport [The Cabinet Trick of the Davenport Brothers]
(1902) mocking the performances of two famous American stage mediums. Like
Smith, Méliès also shot a film on spirit photography, called Le portrait spirite [A
Spiritualist Photographer] (1903).
Méliès’ familiarity with spirit photography might date back to 1884, when he
sojourned in London to learn about modern stage magic techniques. During this
period he became a devotee of the most famous London magic theatre, the Egyp-
tian Hall, and a friend of John Nevil Maskelyne. In the years 1883–4, Maskelyne
gave 200 anti-spiritualist performances at the Egyptian Hall, during which, as he
put it, ‘I explained every trick, together with several improvements of my own’
(Maskelyne 1891, 190). At the beginning of the 1880s, several spirit photographers
were active in London (Coates 1911, 57–60), and it is possible that Maskelyne was
already involved in the production of fake spirit photographs like the one he later
published in Weatherly’s book (1891). In 1884, Méliès was also in contact with
David Devant, another Egyptian Hall magician who after 1896 introduced film pro-
jections in his shows.5 Devant was known at the time for making a life-sized por-
trait of a woman came to life, an illusion that some decades later would eventually
inspire Méliès’ Le portrait spirite.
Multiple exposure and superimposition effects were widely used in film produc-
tion in the following decades, even after the trick film had virtually disappeared as
a genre. In 1922, for instance, the American magician Harry Houdini produced and
acted in The Man from Beyond, a film featuring ghostly apparitions using the
technique of multiple exposure. Although Houdini had already been the protagonist
of several non-fiction and fiction films (Solomon 2010, 80–101), this was the first
of his films to rely on the supernatural and, in particular, on themes taken from
beliefs in spiritualism and reincarnation. Using superimposition to visually express
spirit apparitions, Houdini deliberately mocked spirit photography. During his entire
 142 S. Natale

career, he had been involved in the exposure of spiritualist trickery, claiming to

consider it a moral duty (1924, 12) and comparing mediums to gamblers who
‘resort to deception and take advantage of the sitters at all angles’ (245). The col-
lection he donated after his death to the Library of Congress, which he described as
‘one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism,
magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc., some of the material going back as
far as 1489’ (Salamanca 1942, 325), reveals how anti-spiritualist activities not only
played a part in his shows, but were a sort of obsession to him. The image of the
spectres appearing in The Man from Beyond can be considered a kind of homage to
the iconography of spirit photography, a phenomenon he exposed as multiple expo-
sure in his A Magician Among the Spirits (1924).

Conclusion
In ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Gregory Bateson argues that a crucial stage in
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the evolution of communication occurs when ‘the organism gradually ceases to

respond quite ”automatically” to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to
recognize the sign as a signal, that is, to recognize that the other individual’s and
its own signals are only signals, that can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied,
amplified, corrected, and so forth’ (1955, 40). As a consequence, the definition of
an event as serious or non-serious will vary, depending on the meaning that an indi-
vidual gives of this event. In some cases, however, we may be uncertain if the right
interpretation of a situation is reality or play. Bateson’s suggestion, recalled by
Erving Goffman in his discussion of frame analysis (1974, 2–5), can be helpful in
understanding how the ghostly image of superimposition wavered between fictional
and religious contexts, lacking a precise definition of its meaning, or perhaps allow-
ing for its annexation to the worlds of belief and entertainment at the same time.
Flowing through technological and cultural contexts as distinct as spiritualism, the
magic lantern lecturing circuit, stage magic, photographic amusements and early
cinema, superimposition effects produced ambivalent images that could carry the
viewer into fictional realms or passionate beliefs, into the marvels of illusion or the
spirit world. Depending on the perspective from which they were regarded, they
opened the door to realms that were only apparently contradictory. This is probably
the reason why superimposition, as a visual practice, was so widely employed in
the early years of the motion picture. As Michael Chanan has argued, cinema was
from its very start ‘an art of both realism and illusion, veracity and deception,
transparency and trickery – in short, a highly paradoxical medium’ (1996, 117).
Superimposition, being the subject of different and sometimes divergent interpreta-
tions – the revelation of spirit agency, a mere trick, a photographic accident – seems
to have shared with film this paradoxical character.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Silvio Alovisio, Nicoletta Leonardi and Matthew Solomon for their
commentaries upon an earlier version of this text. I also thank editor Andrew Shail for his
thorough reading and suggestions.

Notes
1. With some relevant exceptions: see, in particular, Tucker (2005), Mnookin (1998), and
Leja (2004).
 Early Popular Visual Culture 143

2. Tom Gunning pointed out that ‘perhaps the most extraordinary historical fact about
Spirit Photographs lies in the fact that such images existed for years before any Spiritu-
alist seemed to have claimed them’ (2007, 112).
3. The literature on Robertson’s phantasmagoria is extensive. See, among others, Mannoni
(1995), Milner (1982) and Gunning (2003).
4. This Mr. Middleton could be Thomas John Middleton, who was active in London in
those years as a magic lantern manufacturer, or a member of his family. See http://www.
npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-of-suppliers/m.php.
5. Also some of the producers of fake-spirit photographs, such as John Nevil Maskelyne,
were directly engaged in producing films during its novelty period. Maskelyne appeared
in a 1896 film by Robert Paul and produced trick films together with his son Nevil in
the following years. The Egyptian Hall hosted film shows from March 1896.

Notes on contributor
Simone Natale is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the
Institut für Medienkultur und Theater at the University of Cologne, Germany. He has
published in several journals, including Media History, the Canadian Journal of
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Communication and the European Journal of Communication, and is presently working on a

monograph titled The Spectacular Supernatural: Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Show
Business.

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