Artificial Darkness

This ambitious study explores how important darkness--artificial darkness--was, as an actual technology, in producing not just photographs but visual novelties and experiments in cinema in the nineteenth century. The study plays out against a backdrop of urban history, where most scholars have focused on the growth of artificial light and the electrification of cities. Elcott’s study challenges that approach. In considering zones of darkness, it ranges from the sites of production (darkrooms, studios) to those of reception (theaters/cinemas/arcades) that shaped modern media and perceptions. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde was often less interested in the filmed image than in everything surrounding it: the screen, the projected light, the darkness, the experience of disembodiment. He argues that darkness has a history separate from night, evil, or the color black, and has a specifically modern manifestation as a media technology. We are all aware of the "velvet light trap” in photography, but at the heart of this book are technologies of darkness crucial to cinema that were commonly known as "the black screen,” but have, over time, faded from the storied discourse.