Phantasmagoric Empire in Times of the Other: Magic Lantern Shows and Pre-Cinema Modernity in Colonial Taiwan

• In Event: Identity in Motion, History in Question: Horizons of the Visual Cultural Practices in Taiwan

Abstract

Among the missing puzzle pieces in the visual culture of colonial Taiwan, the magic lantern show is a crucial yet less-discussed "event of seeing" that provokes issues concerning optical modernity, images of colonial edification, and the projection of empires. Traditionally viewed as the prehistory of cinema since its introduction in Europe during the seventeenth century and its development with the benshi culture in nineteenth-century Japan, the magic lantern show was widely deployed in colonial Taiwan at the turn of the twentieth century before the screening of motion pictures took its place of significance. Considering the projection of moving lantern slides as an apparatus of power, the visual dominance of which intertwined with the technological capacities and imperial control at the time, this paper investigates the “one and multiple” modernity mediated by Japanese magic lantern shows in colonial Taiwan. By the 1910s, magic lantern shows were educational occasions to visualize news and modern knowledge on the benshi-voiced, theatrical screen. In the 1940s, due to the pressing necessity of wartime propaganda, Japanese authorities reenacted magic lantern as substitutes for cinema in rural villages. Colonial edification facilitated the development and revival of magic lantern shows in colonial Taiwan, bringing the linear historiography of mechanical vision, as well as the idea of old and new media, into question. On the surface, the magic lantern show seemed to be an extension of the colonial power, yet, the process of its projection and mediation also revealed the disintegrated temporality between the colony and the imperial screen.

Author

• Laura Jo-Han Wen, University of Wisconsin-Madison