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28/10/1892: Emile Reynaud: Painter of Pictures
Emile Reynaud is a largely forgotten figure today, his name familiar only to film historians who have researched the hectic activity that took place in the field of moving images throughout Europe and America in the final decade of the Nineteenth century. But in 1892, the assiduous Frenchman was providing Parisian audiences with probably the most sophisticated form of imagery available anywhere in the world.
Born in 1844, Reynaud inherited the qualities of both his watchmaker father and artist mother, and applied these qualities to making shadow theatres at an early age. His parents fell on hard times when Reynaud was a child, and he was apprenticed to a precision engineer. He worked hard to improve himself, however and, by the late 1870s, was a teacher of mechanics and physics at a technical college in Puy.
A series of articles on optical illusions in Gaston Tissandier’s popular La Nature magazine in 1876 inspired Reynaud to construct his own effort from biscuit tins and cardboard – a device which was to be the prototype of his Praxinoscope. Reynaud realised that the major setback of the popular ‘illusion of movement’ toys of the day, was the fact that the illusion was achieved by a progressive series of images passing behind some form of shutter – which often meant as much as 9/10ths of the light from the viewer was obstructed by the shutter. Reynaud’s solution was as simple as it was successful: he replaced the shutter with a polygonal drum of mirrors which was viewed from above as it was rotated, thus presenting the viewer with an unbroken succession of images.
Reynaud patented the Praxinoscope in December 1877 and established a small factory in Paris. His toy was a great success, and received an honourable mention at the Universal Exhibition of 1878. In addition to designing the machine, Reynaud also designed all of the images for them; these intricately detailed colour prints included jugglers, clowns, high-wire walkers, a baby eating its breakfast, and a monkey playing a cello.
Reynaud’s next development was the Praxinoscope Théâtre, in which his figures were viewed through an arched frame and superimposed against a painted background. In his patent application, Reynaud proposed that these images could be projected onto a screen by passing light through the images reflected from the mirror drum that was passed through a projecting lens.
Reynaud then set his mind to resolving another problem common to all image toys: the fact that they could only show a short sequence of images on a revolving band. Reynaud overcame this problem by simply running a band of images of any length from one reel to another.
Reynaud had perfected this new technique by 1892; while the images passed in front of a light were projected onto a screen, a second projector superimposed the scenery. This was easier said than done, and Reynaud felt unable to trust anybody else to operate the sensitive machinery properly.
Reynaud entered into a contract with the Muséé Grévin in Paris and presented his first performance of Pantomimes Lumineuses on his Théâtre Optique on 28th October 1892. The performance consisted of three sketches: Un Bon Bock, (1888), in which a customer at a café has his beer stolen while he argues with passers-by; Clown et Ses Chiens (1890), about a circus act, and Pauvre Pierrot (1891), a romantic comedy featuring Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot. Reynaud was accompanied by Gaston Paulin, who had written a different score for each sketch, on the piano. As well as drawing all the images – around 700 for each sketch – Reynaud took it upon himself to personally operate the machinery for each screening – and there were as many as twelve per day. The show was a huge success, and would run for eight years. [ADD]
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