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The
vaudeville and cheap-show nature of the medium flourished,
more and more stories and narrative uses for the medium
were created, and within a few years the film industry
and the techniques of presenting persuasive, compelling
and entertaining screened motion had fully taken shape.
As we explored the uses of the
camera obscura, and explored early developments with
still photography, we began to see a reoccurring social
fascination with the occult and magic in connection
to the use of captured and/or projected still or moving
images. Any good look at the history of film and photography
eventually reveals that the process of capturing a "realistic"
image on film, either for stills or for the movies,
has often been directly associated with the presence
of ghosts (Cherchi). As
I discussed earlier, camera obscura technology was used
as a component of a formal séance, and early
still photography was also associated with the attempt
to "capture" the ghostly images of the deceased
as they floated close to those who had recently lost
a loved one.
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