Ralf Remshardt
University of Florida
My research work at Firestone Library was concentrated on the Alexander Black
Collection. Alexander Black (1859-1940) was a journalist, novelist, and amateur
photographer whose interest in narrative photography in the 1890s led him to experiment
with a form of public performance he came to call "Picture Plays." A Picture Play was a
sustained feature-length story told through several hundred projected lantern slides which
used a sophisticated system of image transitions between two stereopticon projectors to
suggest movement and continuity. Accompanied by a musician, Black himself recited the
text and gave voice to the various roles. The critic of the New York Sun, on occasion of
the first Picture Play, Miss Jerry, in 1894, wrote: "One loses the sense of viewing pictures
and fancies the figures as real." Well in advance of the Lumière Brothers' first public
display of a motion picture in 1895, Black's unusual experiments drew on photographic
technique, dramatic structure, literary recitation, and the subjects of the popular novel in
ways that later became normative in the developing cinema. Black (who always
emphasized that he regarded himself as a pioneer not of film, but of the "screen play") is
thus an important intermediary figure for any investigation into the genesis of the
dramaturgy of the cinema, and in particular its debt to other genres.
My research on Black is part of a book-length study of the intersections of 19th-
century theatre and early motion pictures, tentatively titled Muse of Fire/Muse of Light:
Theatre and the Rise of Motion Pictures. It concerns the nexus between theatre and
cinema from approximately the middle of the 18th century to the early 20th century, that
is, from pre- or proto-cinematic forms of spectacle through the development of cinema in
the 1890s and 1900s with its often "stagy" appearance to the mature interactions between
both media immediately preceding and following World War I. In particular, the book
addresses the multiple ways in which theatre and film, sometimes in a complementary
manner, other times through vastly contradictory strategies, have fed what film theorist
Christian Metz has called the ?scopophilic urges of their audiences. The aim is a revision
of what, with respect to the theatre, has mostly been a rather crudely Darwinist
understanding of the emergence of film.
The Alexander Black Collection at Princeton comprises 144 lantern slides as well
as diverse ancillary materials such as the novels Black published, based on his Picture
Play scripts. The collection came to Princeton after Black's death through unknown
provenance; it is one of three sets of Black-related holdings in the United States (the
others are at St. Lawrence University and in the New York Public Library Manuscripts
Division) but the only one to contain slides. Although no complete Picture Play has been
preserved (the lantern slides are made of glass and thus quite fragile), I was able to
examine sequences of slides belonging to the three narrative Picture Plays Miss Jerry, A
Capital Courtship, and The Girl and the Guardsman, as well as the slide lectures Miss
America and Modern Daughters. Close study revealed Black's careful compositional
work and gave insight into the structuring of his pictorial sequences. I was able to visit
the New York Public Library during my stay in Princeton and examine the typescripts of
several Picture Plays as well as Black's letters; in combination with the Princeton
materials, these sources allowed me to re-imagine Black's unique contribution to the
emergent cinema.
I want to thank the Friends of the Princeton Library for granting me this
opportunity, and express my particular gratitude to the staff of Rare Books and Special
Collections of Firestone Library who have made my stay pleasant and productive,
especially Margaret Rich and AnnaLee Pauls. It should also be noted that my work on the
collection was made infinitely easier by the extensive and skillful inventory of the
holdings which Paula Entin completed upon my first inquiry.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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