Magic Lantern Slides

A part of early cinema shows was the old fashioned sing a long. This had developed during the magic lantern days before the moving picture shows into an entrancing form of entertainment and continued as an item during the early cinema era. Illustrated songs were sung to a piano accompaniment with lantern slides illustrating each line. Audiences were invited to join in the chorus. The title slide showed the cover of the sheet music and this music was often on sale in the foyer of the theatre. Because they always were the popular songs of the era, each song very quickly went out of fashion and were discarded. Added to this the extreme fragility of the glass slide, very few sets remain today. The slides started as simple black and white photos illustrating each line of a song, but developed to complicated double exposures  and hand colouring. By World War One they were beginning to go out of fashion. We are very lucky to have a fan of our show, Mr Bruce Medhurst, whose father was a projectionist at the South Hurstville Theatre and preserved an amazing cache of these slides. To him I must give my heartfelt thanks in allowing me to copy and perform these slides.Even theatres not offering illustrated song slides, still used glass slides for advertisements and announcements. The advertisements were not very different to today’s film theatres, but the announcements were often to teach the audience how to behave in a film show. This style of advertising slide I have used for interval, here accompanied by a pianola playing rolls from the Mastertouch Company which was once based in Petersham. The use of just a piano or pianola for some parts of a show was done in the era to give the orchestra a chance to rest. Read the history of illustrated songs below, written by the owner of the largest collection of slides in the world and who has helped to fill  Bruce’s collection.