Introduction: The Ludic Archive

My introduction to optical toys, like many other scholars of film, was in the first chapters of my introductory film textbooks. There, these nineteenth-century playthings were mentioned as points of origin in a chronological succession culminating in the technology and institution of cinema.1 The thaumatrope (1825) is a square or round card with part of an image printed on each side (a bird and a cage, for example). When spun on two strings, the two images combine into a single composite. The phenakistoscope (1832) arrayed a sequence of ten or twelve images (a spinning dancer, for instance) around the perimeter of a slotted disk. When the disk is spun and the images' reflections are viewed through the slots, they appear to move as a smooth, animated sequence. The zoetrope (1834) used a slotted drum and changeable paper strips to animate its image sequences, while the praxinoscope (1877) replaced the slotted shutter mechanism with a prismatic mirror (figure 0.1) These toys demonstrated a perceptual phenomenon advanced during the nineteenth century known as persistence of vision—a theory that when the eye is exposed to an image, the image remains on the retina for a fraction of a second after the stimulus that produced it is removed.2 If a series of images depicting incremental phases of movement is presented to the eye rapidly enough, the brain assembles them into a fluid animated sequence. In this way, optical toys contributed to the trajectories of both vision research and media culture that would include motion pictures by the late nineteenth century.