The Lantern Cinema of Ostrand

Overview

Thirty years before photographic film, Wilhelmina Fosse-Arden, a scene painter at the Ostrand Assembly Rooms, built a theatre that showed moving pictures. Audiences in 1859 watched ships sail across a painted sea, birds take off from a harbour wall, and a dancer turn a full circle, all projected on a wide linen screen.

The theatre used ninety-six lanterns arranged in a ring around the auditorium, each holding a single painted glass slide. Together they formed the frames of a short animation that lasted about twelve seconds and repeated as long as the operator kept turning the handle.

How it worked

At the centre of the ring stood a spinning mirror drum, a tall cylinder covered with narrow vertical mirrors. As the drum turned, each mirror caught the beam of one lantern for a fraction of a second and threw it onto the screen. Because the lanterns were lit one after another, the audience saw a sequence of slightly different pictures, and the eye blended them into motion.

Fosse-Arden painted every slide by hand, often using the same brushes she used for theatre backdrops. Changing a programme meant repainting all ninety-six slides, which took her about three weeks.

Timing was everything. The operator turned a brass handle that both spun the drum and moved a row of shutters in front of the lanterns, so only one lantern shone at a time. Too slow, and the ship lurched across the sea in jerks. Too fast, and the pictures smeared into a bright grey blur.

Why it disappeared

The theatre was a sensation for two seasons and a burden for the third. The lanterns burned oil, the auditorium grew unbearably hot, and the smoke darkened the mirrors within an hour. The Assembly Rooms installed fans and then larger fans, but audiences still left with sooty collars.

A small fire in 1862 damaged the drum, and the owners decided not to repair it. Fosse-Arden returned to painting scenery and later described the project as the most beautiful headache of her life.

What survives

Fourteen of the original slides survive, enough to show the first second of the ship animation. Film historians occasionally mention the Ostrand theatre in footnotes, and the slides were exhibited together for the first time in 1994, projected with electric light that their painter would have envied.