La lanterne magique pour enfants : jouet attractif ou média narratif ?
(2025)
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- This dissertation focuses on toy magic lanterns and their use by children and their families within domestic settings at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, it aims to shed light on the multiplicity of practices and expressive gestures —whether possible or necessary— that contribute to projections performed with toy lanterns and a specific type of glass slides (elongated-format slides designed for a young audience). As part of the Belgian inter-university and interdisciplinary project entitled B-Magic : The Magic Lantern and Its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830-1940), this research is based on the exploration of a corpus mainly made up of slides from three Belgian collections : those of the Speelgoedmuseum in Mechelen, those of the Musée de la Vie Wallonne in Liège and those of the private collection of the Antwerp collector Léo Coolen. In addition to the analysis of the slides, the study also considers documents and objects from the period between 1880 and 1920 — the golden age of toy magic lantern production. Particular attention is paid to the materiality of the ensemble (slides, lanterns and objects) in order to understand the relationships between the technical aspects of projection, the slides, those who handle them and those who produce them. The dissertation is built around three axes, each devoted to one or more expressive gestures constituting either a modality of projection or a step leading to it. The first deals with the lantern's role as a toy and its potential for use in play contexts. The second deals with the editing of slides by producers, and its place in the context of the industrialization of cultural production. The third considers the narrative and performative dimensions of projection. These different axes are constructed in an intermedial approach, drawing on disciplines such as media archaeology, game theories, the study of editorial practices and film studies, in order to think about slides and lanterns in the media environment to which they belong.
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Werry, A. (2025). La lanterne magique pour enfants : jouet attractif ou média narratif ? https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/248807