NOW SHOWING
On the ground floor, 35,000 Years to Catch a Shadow: A Reflective Exhibition challenges visitors to explore the Phenomenon, Arts, and Technologies of the Shadow.
Our new exhibition, World War One on Film and in the Media: Representation & Remembrance, Art & Authenticity, begins in the hallway, and travels upstairs into the lobby, Front Room and Viewing Room.
In the first-floor Terence Marsh Gallery, and adjoining rooms, is our exhibition, Passport to Ealing: The Films and Their Posters, 1938-1958, a major retrospective of a unique moment in cinema history.
In Susan's Room, the first of the Ealing rooms, is a new exhibition of 19th-century magic lanterns and equipment, Dissolving Views: Victorian Super-Spectacle. (Vinten cameras will return!)
World War One on Film and in the Media:
Representation & Remembrance, Art & Authenticity
On the first and ground floors
Of all the means by which we remember World War I, none has proven as powerful as movies – "Animated Pictures", as they once were known, that is, still images that seem to move. Like photographs, cinematic images are traces of reality. Unlike language, they have no past or future tenses. Remembrance on film can thus feel like resurrection: making present, bringing back to life. But cinematic remembrance is only and also a form of representation; and the authenticity we seek in the films of World War One is always mediated by art.
This exhibition has three objectives.
First, to understand how cinema represented WWI – both during the war, when the medium itself came of age, and after the war, in documentaries and fiction films.
Second, to understand how the war impacted the cinema, pushing it to new heights of technical and imaginative achievement, and installing a new world order of national cinemas.
Third, to understand what cinema did and could not do, compared to other media.
The exhibition tells its stories through: cinema and other posters; film clips; film stills, production photographs, fan photos, programmes, pressbooks, and business correspondence; illustrated magazines; photographs, postcards and stereocards; lantern slides; authentic WWI uniforms used in famous films; and original artefacts, like an aviation stuntman's golden helmets and a Moy & Bastie camera used to film battles on the Western Front.
Don't miss the British officers' "dugout", filled with items of entertainment and distraction, or "Comedy Corner", in which Charlie Chaplin figures in surprising ways.
Passport to Ealing: The Films and Their Posters, 1938-1958
The Terence Marsh Gallery and adjoining rooms
At Ealing Studios, in the Balcon era, 1938-1958, all the forces that might make great British films and great poster art converged:
Michael Balcon, a producer at the height of his powers, determined "to project Britain and the British character" to the world ...
the talented directors, writers, cameramen and editors from the free-war documentary and feature film industries who thrashed out ideas at the Studio's famous round table ...
the Studio itself, intimate and friendly, with a bee hive in its rose garden, and the Red Lion pub handily opposite ...
a studio publicist of genius and a well-connected art director, who were given the unique mandate to commission from the best artists of the day ...
the artists themselves, who came to Ealing posters and pamphlets as war artists, illustrators, painters, print-makers, and typographers …
a window of opportunity, when war and its aftermath suspended (temporarily) American domination of British cinema screens, and home-made films that "begged to differ" (temporarily) prospered.
35,000 Years to Catch a Shadow: A Reflective Exhibition
The Margaret Amaral Gallery
Pagans and Christians, primitives and moderns, scientists and artists: for as long as we have been human, we have been intrigued by the phenomenon of the Shadow. The Shadow marks a passage of time. It confers identity ad self-consciousness. But it is also a warning of our destiny: that we are as fleeting and as insubstantial as Shadows. The Shadow is near the root of all mythology, folktale, and religious belief. It falls across the origin of Art.
Deep in caves, about 35,000 B.C., early men drew a magical world of mimic images: Shadows of horses and bison and deer. Greek tradition finds the origin of painting in the story of Kora or Sicyon: grieving to lose her lover, she traced his Shadow on the wall. For hundreds of years, in Java, Indonesia, India, and Turkey, Shadow Puppets have told and retold heroic and comic tales.
In the modern age of Enlightenment and Reason, Science encountered, reshaped, and fell in love with the Shadow. The Silhouette, the Photograph, the Moving Picture: all are Arts and Technologies of the Shadow.
And those technologies begat styles and genres: the Portrait and the Carte-de-Visite; the Horror Film and Expressionism; Cartoons and Silhouette Films; film noir and its shadowy acts of deception, detection, and death.
This exhibition traces the History of Shadows. In doing should, it asks to engage both with the deep History of Cinema and with the History of Representation itself.
Dissolving Views: Victorian Super-Spectacle
Susan's Room
Dissolving Views: Victorian Super-Spectacle foregrounds the most enchanting and sophisticated magic-lantern attraction of the pre-cinema era. Colourful, quirky, and packed with ingenious inventions, it will be a surprise to many.
OFF-SCREEN
Farewell to our Royal Polytechnic exhibition!
We have just taken down the first of our original exhibitions. We weren’t sure how our visitors would respond to this in-depth examination of one of the Victorian era’s most fascinating organisations, virtually forgotten until two recent books, Brenda Weedon’s The Education of the Eye and Jeremy Brooker’s The Temple of Minerva, looked at the way it used the projection of images to educate and amuse the general public. Fortunately, our fears were unfounded and the exhibition inspired many interesting and challenging questions.
It was through my interest in the magic lantern that I first learnt about the Polytechnic’s purpose-built optical theatre, its remarkable slide presentations (using no fewer than six huge magic lanterns) and "Pepper’s Ghost". If you missed the exhibition, you can see the exhibition's information boards (beautifully designed by Neal Potter, and incorporating many original images) and the exhibition film showing animated slides as they would have been seen on the Polytechnic screen (expertly edited by volunteer Kevin Shea) below. If there is enough demand, once we have our new exhibition installed, we will put up individual note sheets prepared for the different sections of the Polytechnic exhibition, and digital images of the exhibits.
Our thanks to all who contributed to this exhibition, (besides Neal and Kev), not least volunteer Julie Settle, our ingenious building manager Stuart Moore, and magic lanternist Lester Smith.
David Francis, July 2020
The Royal Polytechnic Institution and Multi-Media Victorian London
The Front Room
19th-century London had doubled in size every decade. The "Monster City" and its restless hordes demanded entertainment. Up sprang the West End—and the extraordinary visual experiences of the Panorama, the Diorama, and the Colosseum.
In 1838, a multimedia palace called the "Polytechnic Institution" joined the list, outdoing its rivals with magnificent "dissolving views"—giant lantern slide images that moved spectators through space and time—in the world's first purpose-built projection theatre, the ancestor of all cinemas. Londoners and visitors flocked to the Poly, by the new train and omnibus—the first generation also to see illustrated newspapers, photographs, 3-D stereoscopes, kaleidoscopes, and the host of Victorian optical toys.
This exhibition use original artefacts to tell this dynamic story. Don't forget to push the Button and see the Ghost!
To see (and download) PDFs of the Polytechnic exhibition's information panels, designed by Neal Potter, with text by Joss Marsh and David Francis and a wealth of images from the museum's collection, click on the links below:
Information Board 1 / Information Board 2 / Information Board 3
COMING SOON
Exhibitions in preparation include:
Production Design
Film’s most invisible ArtMulti-Media Dickens
Britain’s Greatest Novelist and the History of Visual Story-TellingCinema and the History of Celebrity