#mutoscope

[paintermagazine]

‘Show off!’

Artist: Howard Connolly

Source: ‘International Mutoscope Reel Company’ (1941)

[poussiere-des-toiles]

via @blackmancruz

[holmesoldfellow]

"Sherlock Holmes Baffled" Mutoscope silent film, earliest known film to feature Sherlock Holmes (1900, Arthur Marvin)

[squidinkarchives]

Pin-Up Girl Card Dispenser - "World's Fair Postcard Vender" by International Mutoscope Reel Co.

Maple case with decorated sides and maker's plaque at the top. Inset behind glass "A Machine Full Of Glorified Glamour Girls" above three sample cards and "You Will Require A Complete Set For Your Private Collection" followed by the vending instructions for obtaining the 1¢ cards.

Source: Hanover, MA Eldred's

[thepastisalreadywritten]

“Hello Mother, Dad, and Blanche,” a quiet voice says above the cracks and pops of an old vinyl record, which has clearly been played many times over.

“How’s everything at home? I’m recording this from Dallas…from this very little place where there are pinball machines and many other things like that…”

The disc is small, seven inches across, dated October 1954.

The faded green label shows that the speaker’s name is “Gene,” the recording addressed to “Folks.”

Gene suggests in his minute-long message that he is traveling — “seeing America” — and tells his family not to worry about him.

“I should complete my trip sometime around Thanksgiving,” he continues in a second recording made in Hot Springs, Texas, not too long after his first one.

“I hope you received my letter and I, in turn, hope to receive some of the letters that you sent me. It’s been a very long time since we’ve corresponded, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you very, very much.”

This largely forgotten sound is one of the world’s early “voice mails.”

During the first half of the 20th century, these audio letters and other messages were recorded largely in booths, pressed onto metal discs and vinyl records, and mailed in places all over the world.

Best known today for playing music at home, record players were then being used as a means of communication over long distances.

Reach out and touch someone

The idea of transporting a person’s voice had loomed large in the human imagination for some three centuries before it was finally achieved with the invention of the phonograph in the late 19th century.

Historical documents from the Qing Dynasty in 16th-century China suggest the existence of a mysterious device called the “thousand-mile speaker,” a wooden cylinder that could be spoken into and sealed, such that the recipient could still hear the reverberations when opening it back up.

Top: A Kodisk horn and recording stylus attachment in the Princeton Phono-Post Archive was used in the early 1920s for home recordings on pre-grooved blank metal discs using a normal gramophone.

Bottom: A Gem Recordmaker attachment at the Princeton Phono-Post Archive was used in the 1950s for children to "make your own permanent records" on blank six-inch discs using their own gramophone at home.

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he envisioned a device that could reproduce music and even preserve languages.

He saw, in its earliest uses, the potential to transform business, education, and timekeeping.

He even imagined a so-called “Family Record” — a “registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices and of the last words of dying persons.”

But correspondence was at the top of his mind: Edison thought his invention could be used for dictation and letter writing.

In the late 19th century, handwritten letters were the most common form of everyday personal communication.

The telegram, which later became popular in the early 1900s, was used for shorter, urgent messages.

While Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental telephone call from New York to San Francisco in 1915, long-distance calling remained expensive and inaccessible to most ordinary people until the 1950s.

Voice-O-Graph

The gramophone, a later form of the phonograph developed by Emile Berliner in 1887, provided a first possibility for recorded sound being used for long distance communication.

It made recording and playback possible on discs, which were easier to store, reproduce, and send.

The earliest known record to have been put in the mail as a means of correspondence would be sent in the early 1920s, but the practice of sending voice mail really got going across the world in the 1930s and 1940s.

It was personal and affordable as long as customers could find a recording booth or home device.

In the early 1940s, the American company Mutoscope rolled out the Voice-O-Graph machine, which vastly popularized voice mail in the United States.

It was a tall wooden cabinet, shaped not unlike a modern-day photo booth, that declared, on one side: RECORD YOUR OWN VOICE!

Invented by Alexander Lissiansky, these recording booths were marketed as novelties and set up at common gathering places: amusement parks, boardwalks, tourist attractions, transportation hubs, military bases and U.S.O. events.

There was a Voice-O-Graph machine at the top of the Empire State Building, on the piers of San Francisco, and by the Mississippi River in New Orleans.

The speaker entered the Voice-O-Graph, inserted a couple of coins, and had a few minutes to record a message.

Then, out popped a record the size of a 45-rpm single that was not only durable enough to be played multiple times, but also flimsy and lightweight enough to send in the mail for little more than the cost of a regular letter.

Oftentimes, the envelopes themselves would come included.

Top: A soldier sends a Christmas greeting to his mother in Chicago.

The envelope, which came with the record, depicts a soldier anxiously imagining his wife with another man in his absence (Princeton Phono-Post Archive).

Bottom: Pre-grooved metal discs were used for domestic gramophone recordings in the early 1920s.

The paper sleeve illustrates the two methods of recording: one, depicted on the right, involved using a megaphone to shout into the phonograph's horn; the other method, depicted on the left, involved using a Kodisk-branded external horn and recording stylus, which would be attached to one's home gramophone and is shown in another image above (Princeton Phono-Post Archive).

Top: A “Recordio” home-recording demonstration disc from the 1940s illustrating five different models of radio-recording-playback consoles made by the Wilcox-Gay Corporation, ranging from massive living-room consoles to portable “airplane type” suitcase versions (Princeton Phono-Post Archive).

Bottom: Wilcox-Gay Recordio demonstration picture disc featuring the violinist and radio star David Rubinoff (1897-1986) and his $100,000 Stradivarius making a recording at home (Princeton Phono-Post Archive).

Photographs by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff

Words of love

The messages people sent would range in emotion — from excitement to nervousness, joy to embarrassment.

Travelers would make recordings to update family and friends on long trips.

Especially during World War II, where there were recording booths on military bases in nearly every theater of the conflict, soldiers used voice mail to reassure loved ones with the sound of their voice, even if some them would never return home.

There are countless “voice mail valentines,” surprisingly intimate audio love letters.

Many of the messages, sent from far away, express longing.

“You keep your chin up,” a voice named Leland tells his wife in a recording dated 1945, from a booth in New York City.

“All of you keep those chins up. Mike, all of us will all be home, be home where we can pick up, and carry on as we did before.”

In one recording made in Argentina in the 1940s, a man plays the violin before he recites a lullaby.

“Sleep, sleep my darling girl,” the man says. “It’s getting late.”

Phono-Post archive

Back then, families could listen to the messages on repeat — gathering together around the record player whenever one arrived.

They could play it proudly again anytime there were guests, but with each play, the needle would scrape away at the delicate grooves until the message could hardly be heard any longer.

Today at Princeton University, professor and media theorist Thomas Levin is dedicated to preserving these sounds of the past.

He maintains the world’s only archive dedicated to what he calls the “Phono-Post.”

At the height of the phenomenon, there were perhaps thousands of Voice-O-Graph machines in America and many more recording stations across the world.

“Millions of these audio letters were sent across the United States, South America, in Europe, in Russia, in China,” Levin says.

Levin’s office is crammed with many of the items he has collected over the years, including books, posters, and other ephemera—as well as, of course, the records themselves.

Levin has already digitized some 3,000 of the discs, all of which are tucked into clear plastic sleeves and carefully catalogued.

He keeps them filed into cabinets and stackable storage bins in a temperature-controlled room.

Thousands more records lie waiting to be processed in a nearly seven-year backlog that keeps growing as Levin continues collecting.

He employs AI bots that constantly comb through eBay pages and bid for items on his behalf.

Sometimes, he will come across people selling, knowingly or unknowingly, the voice of a relative.

“I write to them and I say, you’re selling the voice of your grandfather?’” Levin says.

“There’s not a sense of the value of the voice, such that people are willing to part with these objects.”

Still, he offers to share an MP3 file of the recording with them, and for that, they are often very grateful.

Voices of the Past

For the most part, there aren’t many celebrity voices stashed away in the Princeton Phono-Post Archive.

“The bulk of the recordings in this archive are of very unextraordinary people articulating desires, wishes, fantasies, of a very quotidian sort,” Levin says.

They are enormously telling, if one is willing to listen closely.

Much like paper letters, these audio missives can also reveal insights about particular moments in history through the accounts of individual lives lived within them, but with added layers of sensory detail.

Historical linguists are particularly interested in “voice mail” because it provides some of the earliest-ever recorded samples of how regular people spoke — their conversational vocabulary, their pronunciation and accents, their sentence structure, their intonation.

“There’s no editing. There’s no cleaning up,” Levin says. “Once the recording starts, it will run until it ends, whether you have something to say or not.”

He smiled. “If you don’t have anything to say, that says something too.”

The advent of cassette tapes in the 1960s meant that services like the Voice-O-Graph quickly fell out of fashion.

(For a few decades, people were sending long distance messages on audiocassettes, too — a practice that became particularly common for U.S. soldiers deployed in the Vietnam War.)

But this voice mail phenomenon, while short-lived, holds a significant place in the history of global communication.

“What we’re recovering now are the remnants of a chapter of media history, a cultural practice, that was huge, ubiquitous,” Levin says, “but has now been forgotten.”

For many people, these recordings were the first time they had ever recorded their own voice.

They sound nervous, even awkward, while others even sound like they are reading from a piece of paper.

Some, when faced with their very first self-recording, confronted the realization that they were leaving a highly personal trace that would likely outlive them.

“People strangely, but with remarkable regularity, talk about death,” Levin says.

“They’re writing to a future.” He pauses. “And one thing is known about that future: that they will not be a part of it.”

[zippocreed501]

Mutoscope/'What The Butler Saw' machines

[funjoke]

Mutoscopes en Californie, 1942. Un mutoscope est un appareil qui permet de visionner des images animées à partir de cartes photographiques disposées en cercle sur un tambour rotatif. L’utilisateur tourne une manivelle pour faire défiler les images et créer l’illusion du mouvement. Le mutoscope a été inventé en 1895. Il était très populaire dans les foires et les parcs d’attractions. Il est considéré comme l’un des ancêtres du cinéma.

[vintage-every-day]

American Mutoscope card by The Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company. Image by Zoë Mozert.

[luckykittycolor]

Mutoscope

[coupleofdays]

Another couple of background characters in Tron that I think are funny is the old man and woman visiting Flynn's Arcade, all dressed up in fancy clothes, sticking out among all the sweaty youngsters. Did they decide to have an evening at this new-fangled "video arcade" they had heard so much about, and didn't realize that it was a "casual dress" environment? Are they parents looking for their kid in the crowd? Maybe Flynn bought an old arcade with a long history, stretching back to the days of pinball, love testers, mutoscopes and other such non-electronic arcade entertainments, and this couple has visited the same spot ever since their youth, and are happy to see that their old haunt is still popular?

My craziest theory is that they're actually Alan and Lora time-travelling from the future, visiting on the day that would turn out to be so important for them.

[creepingirrelevance]

Earl Moran Mutoscope cards

(via eBay)

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Mary Pickford by Truus, Bob & Jan too! Via Flickr: Vintage Swedish postcard. Förlag Nordisk Konst, Stockholm, No. 1236. Mary Pickford (1892-1979) was a legendary silent film actress and was known as 'America’s sweetheart.' She was a founder of United Artists and helped establish the Academy. Mary Pickford was born Gladys Mary Smith in 1892, in Toronto, Canada. She was the sister of actor/director Jack Pickford and stage/screen actress Lottie Pickford. Pickford began performing at the age of five on the stage and was known for a time as 'Baby Gladys.' After touring in different shows and productions for more than nine years, she went to New York to conquer Broadway. In 1907, she made her Broadway debut in The Warrens of Virginia. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name, Mary Pickford. In 1909, Pickford got into film, working for D. W. Griffith, a director and head of the Biograph Company (American Mutoscope & Biograph). That same year, 'the girl with the curls' appeared in 40 films for Biograph (According to some sources even 51 films). In January 1910, Griffith moved his operation to California, and Pickford went with him. Actors were not listed in the credits of the Biograph pictures. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors in turn capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring 'The Girl with the Golden Curls' or 'The Biograph Girl' was inside. Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. Some of her best performances were in his films, such as Friends, The Mender of Nets, and The Female of the Species. In 1913, she moved on to Adolph Zukor who had formed one of the first American feature film companies: Famous Players in Famous Plays later known as Paramount Pictures. Hearts Adrift (1914) made her irresistible to moviegoers. The film was so popular that Pickford asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford’s name was featured above the title on cinema marquees.Tess of the Storm Country was released five weeks later. Biographer Kevin Brownlow observed that the film "sent her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world." Over the years, her fame grew as well as her salary. 'Little Mary' became an international star, beloved for her beauty and charm. She often appeared on screen in young girl roles, even when she was an adult. Some of Mary Pickford’s greatest films were a collaborative effort with her friend and writer-director Frances Marion. Together they worked on such hits as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) and Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). She also worked as a producer and co-founded United Artists, with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who would become her second husband. She had been married to actor Owen Moore since 1911 and divorced him in 1920 to be with Fairbanks. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in 1920, becoming one of Hollywood’s earliest supercouples. Fans adored the pairing, and the couple were known to host fabulous events at their home, called Pickfair, which were attended many of the leading figures in film. In the 1920s, Pickford continued to score more box-office hits with Polyanna (1920) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1922). Ernst Lubitsch came to America at Mary's invitation to direct Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), but when he arrived he had changed his mind and would not do it (it was eventually directed by Marshall Neilan). Instead, he and Mary made Rosita (1923) together. She was one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. Around this time, the film industry was changing and talking pictures were on the rise. In 1929, Pickford starred in her first talkie Coquette, which explored the dark side of a wealthy family. She won an Academy Award for her work on the film. Still she was never quite able to recreate the phenomenal success she had in the silent pictures with the sound films. Her last film was Secrets (1933). Mary Pickford retired from the screen in 1933 but continued to produce. In 1936, she divorced Douglas Fairbanks. A year later, she married her third husband, actor and bandleader Charles 'Buddy' Rogers. They stayed together until her death and adopted two children. Mary Pickford died in 1979 in Santa Monica, California. Sources: The Biography.com website, Wikipedia and IMDb.

[k00295632]

Week 1: Secondary Research & my Idea.

These are some of the different artists I was looking at during the week.

This is Stuart Blackton, the first person to use pixilation and the creator of the "the enchanted mirror". He would "interact" with the drawing, even "removing" parts of the drawing and making them "reappear" as real objects, and would make the face "react". He would stop the recording, make his changes, and continue as before.

This here is Windsor McCay, american cartoonist who created "Gertie the dinosaur", the earliest cartoon to ever feature a dinosaur. This was also the first film to ever use Keyframes, Registration marks, Tracing paper, Animation loops, and Mutoscope action viewer. He would similarly interact with the animation, "throwing" an apple onto the screen and pocketing it when no one looked while an "apple" would appear on the screen, or he would walk behind the stage and "reappear" on screen and ride Gertie.

Georges meileis "trip to the moon (1902)", the first film to use Double exposure, Stop motion, and Slow motion. He was a illusionist film maker and a magician. The film took 3 months to make and was filmed in a greenhouse like building to get as much light as possible.

"Loving Vincent" directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the worlds first fully painted film with over 65,000 frames. The they would record the actors dressed as their characters , and would use a projector to project the frames from the video onto the canvases and the animators would paint each frame in Van Gogh's art style.

I briefly looked at Jan Svankmajers "Darkness light Darkness", its a very peculiar piece of media, and it is a 7 minute clay stop motion animation. Its just a body reconstructing itself in a miniature house and figuring out where everything goes.

How does this relate to my project?

Well my idea is to create a mixed media short film based in a haunted art gallery/museum ( some place with a lot of artwork) with a security guard monitoring the building and the strange occurrences within its walls. The main focus will be the different security cameras, which will be changing perspectives a lot, and even the p.o.v of the guard. The centerpiece will be an an animation of a portrait crawling out of the frame, but the first part of the animation will be painted like in "Loving Vincent", but as the creature begins to leave the frame it transforms into stop motion animation with clay. I was thinking that since the creature is made of paint it would make a wet sound when it moves, which is where I want to incorporate foley sound, and leave traces of itself around the building. In the background I want to create other spooky visuals like other paintings distorting or objects from paintings disapearing and showing up in the wrong places like in "The enchanted mirror". I want to experiment with different Camera trick to create different visuals and create suspense like the dutch tilt. I want to slowly unnerve the viewer, using different visual affects and changes in each camera.

There's a lot of work to be done and I'm looking forward to see how I'll incorporate the different workshops into it too

[oldguydoesstuff]

The Mutoscope Drive Yourself Road Test coin-operated arcade game from 1954.

You had me at "Mutoscope"...

[ambiguouspuzuma]

Escapism

It had started as escapism. Since Cadsik knew that he was going to die, he wanted to distract himself from that knowledge - and more than that, he wanted to enjoy the little time that he had left. Not while away his final moments in dread, but savour every endangered minute. Six years. He figured that he might as well make the most of them.

This was the time to take risks. To do the things he'd always wanted to, but been too afraid to try: he'd once dreamt of paragliding, motorbike riding, sky and deep-sea diving, and now he'd been given the incentive to give them a go. He knew they couldn't kill him, and that he had no hope of living anyway. He was a man with nothing left to lose.

With a six-year diagnosis, Cadsik had no need to save or worry for the future. He had no use for his career, his mortgage, his longer-term plans: only a hunger to travel the world, seeking out the taste of dreams. Whatever it cost, and whatever it took. He was a man reborn, his life one endless adventure - at least, if he didn't think about the end. Deprived of a future, he had learnt how to live in the present.

It was a silver lining, he thought - like the insulating foil on the capsule, the crest of starlight on the bow of the command module. The spectre of death had transformed his life, and almost always for the better, as if he'd traded quantity for quality. Space had always been the greatest dream of all, and now he was here: Cadsik had volunteered for every programme going, dedicating his life to that application, and finally been accepted. A voyage into the stars.

It was a five year mission, which suited him perfectly. He'd had a year to exhaust the adrenaline stores on Earth, and this was the ideal opportunity to try something new, to risk his life in the name of science, whilst risking nothing at all. He would die on his return to base, once his six years were up, when the mission was done. Returning as a hero, no doubt martyred by some rival cosmonaut. If he did have to be murdered, it was the perfect way to go.

"You can ask three questions," they'd told him. "Lady Mzila will answer in her style. There will be no follow-up, no clarification. If you wish for more detail, you must use your questions to ask it."

His first choice was obvious. "How will I die?"

"You will be poisoned." Lady Mzila sat behind a small table draped with lace. The attendants had ushered them through in silence, the instructions delivered outside, and Cadsik and Doka had perched on uncomfortable stools across from her. Only when they were alone did she speak.

They'd found her in a disused amusement arcade. Most of the empty stores had been packed with coin machines, mutoscopes and automata, and they'd expected her to be another fortune-teller in a box. To their surprise, the curtain had revealed a real woman, flesh and blood and incense - although she was barely more animated than those clockwork puppets, and equally as creepy.

"Poisoned by whom?" Cadsik asked next.

"Halan Gyravic." It was a Yaurian name, which felt a little stereotypical, given the history of conflict and spycraft between their nations. Not that Cadsik had ever imagined himself a target. He'd worked as a grocer before he left to travel the world, and then beyond it, and couldn't believe that anyone would waste their poison on his death.

"When will they do it?"

"Six years from now."

At first, he had paid no heed to her ridiculous warnings. Even his friend Doka, who received more worrying replies to the same questions - a truck, three weeks on - was only slightly unsettled. But then three weeks passed, and Cadsik understood the truth. As they buried Doka, he vowed to make the most of his remaining years. Grief and shock made way for a new joie de vivre. At his funeral, they would say that he'd died happy.

It was the perfect opportunity. The technology remained experimental, and none had yet undertaken such a lengthy trip, but Cadsik, the man with one fear, was undeterred. He knew that space would not kill him, and that he'd spend five years in regret if he let this chance pass him by. People said that life was too short not to follow their dreams; in his case, he knew exactly by how much.

It had started as escapism. But as Cadsik gazed out into infinity, he realised that his capsule might offer an actual escape: if he dawdled on the return to Earth, remaining in orbit for longer than planned, he might pass the six year deadline. This was a closed system, adrift on his own, with no chance for poison to reach him.

Given their history of conflict, which had spilled over into rival space programmes, the scramble for the solar system, no Yaurians had been involved with the programme, and security was tight. There could have been no tampering before he left, and now he was untouchable. Could he really avoid his fate, or was it something else? What if Doka had stayed away from the road? What if the Lady's warning had been meant to be heeded?

He put that theory into practice. Cadsik was careful, keeping a count of Earth days, other days, in case there had been some sort of catch, and year was given an astronomical meaning. He tracked his own orbits of the sun, and those of the neighbouring planets. He rationed his supplies, and ate them warily, in case Halan Gyravic had prepared them, a long fuse to catch him far away.

But five years on, Cadsik was still alive, and ready for the journey home. The six years had passed, by any definition, and he was over the moon as he circled back into his return orbit. He couldn't wait to be back. This was the point at which all of his sacrifice would become worthwhile: giving up five years of his life to the abyss, in exchange for who knew how many decades more.

He hailed the station on the radio - there was no response, which wasn't a good sign. Neither was the murky sky above the designated landing zone, as he crashed in through the ruined atmosphere. The planet had been blue when Cadsik had left it, but now it all seemed grey, deserted and bare. Nobody came to recover his capsule, and he had to wait for the tide to carry him back to shore.

There was no home to go back to. Everybody else was dead, and seemed to have been for some time. The first city he reached was a graveyard, except that even the weeds were smothered under a thick layer of crematorium ash. Cadsik breathed in the irradiated air, and knew that he'd been poisoned too. A nuclear war, it seemed like - although there was no-one left that he could ask, no surviving records of their end. Only Lady Mzila's cryptic prophecy.

That Gyravic person must have made the bomb, or launched the missile that struck his home: he wasn't really sure how it worked, but they'd killed him with a long fuse, struck just as she'd foretold. He thought about her timescale, and wondered how many would have received the same diagnosis. Most people except Doka, perhaps. If he'd been with anyone else, they might have questioned their shared fate - but then without his early death at the wheels of that truck, neither would have believed it.

They'd just been asking the wrong questions.

[zippocreed501]

Steptoe and Son