Francesco Casetti: On mimetic birth of media. The strange case of the Phantasmagoria

In the last decade of the 18th Century, a new medium came to life: the Phantasmagoria. Generally conceived as an advancement of the Magic Lantern show, the Phantasmagoria went further than that.  Imitation of ancient rituals, reenactment of revolutionary phantasies, appropriation of emerging marketing practices, and representations able to provoke hallucinations, merged in an unprecedented complex. Examining this complex allows us to unearth the diverse and yet convergent mimetic acts that underpin the birth of a medium. A technical invention implies a wide range of mimetic processes that go from the simple transference of previous devices to their full reconfiguration, from the simple allusion to the social context to its metaphoric recreation, and from the depiction of the external world to a “map” of reality aimed at providing instructions.

Francesco Casetti is the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Among his books are Inside the Gaze: Theories of Cinema, 1945-1995; Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity; and The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. He currently works on fears that cinema raised in the first decades of its life, and on the increasing interdependence of media and environment.