Continuing my research on moving image formats, I’ve been very interested in the mutoscope. Flipbook machines were part of how silent cinema was popularized in its earliest era. A rotary flipbook was driven by hand crank and viewed through a magnifying eyepiece. Inside the metal case, 850 cards fan out from a round core, each printed with a sequential frame. When the crank is turned, it plays at about 14 frames/second, strobing a moving image for a minute. I’m struck by the similarity with the short form video that has become predominate on apps like tiktok and instagram.
Mutoscopes were also called folioscopes. Along with Edison’s kinetoscope, which used film loops in the same way, with a single eyepiece and coin operation, they were some of the first ways the moving image was presented. Before large scale projection had been engineered, the problem of monetizing the viewing of short animations was solved with these vending machine-like outlets. They’re like if a film storage cask had mutated into a mechanical theater. The rotary flipbook has a similar sense of being a mutation of film stock stored on a reel. As close as I could abstract it, its almost like an analog instance of a codec or interlacing pattern; linear (film) or planar (flipbook) frames.
The mutoscope machine bears a resemblance to the machinery of the camera in a similar way to how projectors do. Like projectors and televisions, it’s a scale format of the Cinema. I find it an interesting one because in its original use, which it was designed for, it existed in a kind of public space that became sick and died over the twentieth century, which is attested to in the changing fates of the humble hand-cranked theater. For the scale of the object itself, something about the public placement of the machine, and the scale-play of the tiny, magnified moving images that live inside, in a warm light. On the altar-like ornamented metal canister, the eyepiece is at a height accessible to both children and adults (they’d as often be loaded with cartoons as smut). The average man would bow by necessity to turn the crank after dropping his coin in.
In terms of soundtrack the mutoscopic films are silent, only emitting a muffled chatter that evokes the genuine mechanical commotion of a film projector, amidst the white noise of the usually busy place the machine was placed. The images similarly do not flicker in exactly the same way as in film projection, but could almost be said to flutter, as they advance and burst toward the viewer at the speed of the motion. The effect is more or less the same though, because for the flutter to occur and the images to animate there is only one speed, forward. If one stops turning the hand crank, the flipbook goes slack, and flaps back against the card where the image had appeared. Each image that flutters past when in motion is first held in place for a fraction of a second, by a detente, and it is against this point that the rest of the spool will return if not pulled forward by the crank. The only point of tension with the structural points that define cinema is that the moving images are lit externally by light and aren’t as stencils giving it shape in shadow. But mutoscopes elevated the flipbook to a near-indistinguishable scale instance of cinema. Their obscurity today seems to me to be more about the course of their declining use, than anything necessarily about the their competency as an alternative cinema, in much the same way that comics related at one point to genre fiction in the main before a long relegation to outsider art and an eventual resurrection as competent media.
The flipbook conceit of the mutoscope is what allowed it to hold a patent in spite of Edison having one for the Kinetoscope, which achieved the same ends by cranking a loop of actual acetate film. It turned out that the flipbooks were much, much hardier than early film and before long the tempermental nature of the kinetoscope led to its decline. But for decade, after decade, after decade, the mutoscopes continued to collect change in amusement halls. So much so that their coin mechanisms needed to be updated several times to keep up with inflation. So much so that they outlived any public memory of the ‘amusement hall’, with a few practically outliving their descendant, the video arcade. Most met the end of their duty when the porno theaters of the 1970s closed in the late 1990s-mid 2000s, as the internet ushered in a new era of short-form smut, which bears some symmetry to their “what-the-butler-saw” peep-show origins, as prude as they may seem to us now. They can still be found at seaside attractions, where like much of the urban fabric, their seedy midlife is glossed over.
The scale factors all throughout this extinct media fascinate me. As a theater, the audience sits outside and looks in the only windows. The ticket booth is a patinaed plaque bearing instructions, and a burnished crank that brings the theater whispering to life. Only your coin and your gaze are permitted entry. As you turn the crank, you see a warm flickering image in the eyepiece protruding from the metal walls of the machine. Two footmen in swirly armor hum to life, and draw a heavy velvet curtain, revealing a large clamshell, which steadily lifts its top half in a grand yawn and exposes a venusian figure, who rises in a shy stretch before settling back on the soft bed of the shell, as it closes gently on top of her, and on cue, the footmen close the curtain, before a few blank pages of static flicker to a slow, and the light turns off. A little shrine, an architectural aedicula, and one that is also a simulacrum of the camera and the projector.