Getting to Know the Dutch: Magic Lantern Slides as Traces of Intermedial Performance Practices

Understanding Magic Lantern Slides as relics of a performance situation changes the perspective towards this archival material: It is then no longer a distinct object but one element in a complex relation. “Intermediality” and “performativity” proved to be suitable conceptual tools to investigate these relations. From the 1890s on, mass-produced lantern slide series disseminated images on a yet unprecedented scale. Taking slide series on the Netherlands as an example, the article discusses the relation between the projected image and the text of the lecture as well as the relation between the relative stability of recurring motifs and the relative instability of the attributed meaning. Only in performance, Dellmann argues, are the images embedded in a setting (educational, tourist, ethnographic) and linked to text; only in performance do objects become meaningful objects. This change of perspective has an impact for both archivists and scholars: if the object only makes sense in relation to performance, practices of inventorying and archiving should be reconsidered: the necessarily object-centered databases should include information on e.g. marginalia, lecture notes, reviews, and programs systematically. Although intermediality is by no means new to scholars of early cinema, the variety of sources addressed in research projects has mostly been used to write either a history of technology or to reconstruct the news coverage of an event or in case studies of local history. Adding performativity to intermedial research designs allows studying the question “how is cultural meaning produced?”.