In the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, built in 1876 for Richard Wagner to stage his music dramas, darkness was carefully manufactured and controlled. In earlier theatres, the audience was as much a spectacle as the play, and lighting was balanced so that you could see the dignitaries in attendance as clearly as the performers. But Wagner, with his windowless cathedral, intended the audience to disappear entirely so that spectators would project all their attention to the stage. The orchestra was hidden behind a hood in a pit, referred to as the “mystical abyss,” which created a clear division between a blacked-out reality and the ideal world of the artwork. For Noam M. Elcott, in his compelling study of early cinema and avant-garde performance, it was a new mode of seeing to which all the deliberate darknesses of our contemporary cinemas is indebted.
Elcott was a student of Jonathan Crary, the author of the seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), a book that examined how—for René Descartes and John Locke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the camera obscura was a metaphor for human understanding. In the nineteenth century, however, Goethe inverted this model by studying after-images, emphasizing instead the corporeality of vision. The kaleidoscope, stereoscope and other precinematic devices represented, for Crary, a seismic shift: they weren’t the mechanized products of a Renaissance way of seeing, but a rupture in the idea of perspectival space, with its presumed unity in the eye of the viewer. Long before the advent of modernist abstraction, vision no longer belonged to the “real” world, but wholly to the realm of illusion: optics were a creation of the dark recesses of the mind.
In Artificial Darkness, Elcott looks in detail at the architecture of this new era of physiological vision, which rendered the world a fragmented, hallucinogenic spectacle. His “obscure history” is both an archaeology of cinema and a brave attempt to find a series of new, architectural metaphors of the fin-desiècle and early twentieth-century mind. In these spaces, blackness was carefully constructed and prioritized over light: “enlightenment was achieved through darkness”, he writes, “invisibility was a trap.” As Foucault looked in Discipline and Punish (1975) to the panopticon, in which a guard was hidden in the darkness of an observation tower as a looming absence or presence (it didn’t really matter which), Elcott looks to early theatres and film studios for models of technological shifts in the structures of visual power.
