ABOUT THIS BOOK

Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world’s visual form. Projectionists examines mostly unknown aspects of Muybridge’s work: his period as a touring projectionist who enthralled audiences with unprecedented moving-images and his creation of a moving-image auditorium—long before cinemas—in which to project his work at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. That auditorium was both a catastrophe and a vital precursor for the following century’s manias for projection. Based on new research into his travels, audiences, auditoria, and projectors, Projectionists explores Muybridge’s initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps his driving inspiration for subsequent filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further World’s Exposition events and cinemas’ overheated projection-boxes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Stephen Barber is professor at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, and a visiting research fellow at the Free University Berlin and Keio University Tokyo.He is the author of several books including White Noise Ballrooms, and the editor of Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, both published by DIAPHANES.

REVIEWS

"Beginning in 1992 with Artaud: Blows & bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing. In his latest book, The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge and the future projections of the moving image (Diaphanes), Barber tells the largely unknown story of Muybridge as the first ever moving-image projectionist, retracing the 1891 tour of European cities in which Muybridge first projected his work to audiences of royalty, artists and scientists, none of whom had seen moving images before, visiting many of the auditoria which have miraculously survived. Barber’s own obsession with the moving image began as a teenager in Yorkshire, where he worked as a relief projectionist and, through encounters with projectionists around the world, the book is also an interrogation of the solitary and gradually vanishing occupation of the cinema projectionist as embodied by the enigmatic figure of Muybridge himself."

— Times Literary Supplement

"This is one of those rare books, a very readable and erudite academic account of the innovative filmmakers and projectionists Barber believes should be more prominent as players in the history event of the arts.“

— 3:AM Magazine

"[An] imaginative, complex and singular book."

— Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Projectionists 2. Muybridge's Central European Projections, 1891 3. Muybridge's Chicago Exposition Projections, 1893 4. Projection's Devils: Max and Emil Skladanowsky, 1895-97 5. Projections of the Osaka World Exposition, 1970 6. Lovers: Teiji Furuhashi's Projections, 1994/2016/2020 7. Projections of Future Cities, Projections of Future Bodies Bibliography Illustrations List