Join experimental filmmaker and magic lantern aficionado Joel Schlemowitz for a spectacular live journey in the elemental images conjured through the pre-cinematic play of light and shadow. 19th century optical devices will project a flight of fantasy through the environmental imaginations of a prior era, bringing to life visions of the natural world in a specially curated program unique to FLEFF 2025 and its special theme of 'movement.'
Cinemapolis: 1:00pm, Sunday April 13 - with live performance by Elliott & Schlemowitz and pre-screening introduction by Thomas Bohn
Elliott and Schlemowitz’s Magic Lantern Show: Views of Nature and Moving Images Before the Movies
Further details:
From the late 17th century to the dawn of the 20th, the magic lantern transformed storytelling into an enlivened visual experience. By the late-Victorian era, the magic lantern was an important and ubiquitous visual medium. Eventually eclipsed by the coming of the movies, this once-familiar entertainment is rarely experienced by the modern audiences.
But even before the motion pictures, motion on the screen was experienced by audiences through the magic lantern’s animated effect slides: slip-slides, lever slides, gearwork slides, and dissolving views.
Magic lantern performers Dawn Elliott and Joel Schlemowitz have been bringing this fascinating medium back to life, presenting award-winning magic lantern shows using period-era glass slides, magic lantern projectors, music and narration.
The program encompasses a variety of magic lantern entertainments: Scenes of nature transforming from season to season, tales of arctic exploration, the antics anthropomorphic animals, and the astonishing mechanical slides used for astronomy lectures depicting revolving planets, the rotundity of the earth, and the moon and tides.
More information about Elliott & Schlemowitz Magic Lanternists, can be found on their website: www.magiclanternexhibition.com