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Taking the slide collection of medical expert professor G.H.F. Nuttall as a starting point, this article investigates the representations of the extraordinary human body in West-Europe lantern history and lantern heritage between 1880 and 1930. To explain the at first sight unfamiliar image repertoire of this collection, the authors place the object, the medium and the aesthetical representations in a historical and cultural frame and compare the material on two levels. Firstly, the authors apply a cross-media visual analysis to describe several modes in which the extraordinary body is represented (cartes de visite, early cinema) and secondly, they trace the appearance of extraordinary bodies in other genres within the medium of lantern slides. After these two comparisons the authors provide a contextualized, more nuanced understanding of the archival objects of the G.H.F. Nuttall slide collection and its visual strategies.

Understanding Magic Lantern Slides as relics of a performance situation changes the perspective towards this archival material: It is then no longer a distinct object but one element in a complex relation. “Intermediality” and “performativity” proved to be suitable conceptual tools to investigate these relations. From the 1890s on, mass-produced lantern slide series disseminated images on a yet unprecedented scale. Taking slide series on the Netherlands as an example, the article discusses the relation between the projected image and the text of the lecture as well as the relation between the relative stability of recurring motifs and the relative instability of the attributed meaning. Only in performance, Dellmann argues, are the images embedded in a setting (educational, tourist, ethnographic) and linked to text; only in performance do objects become meaningful objects. This change of perspective has an impact for both archivists and scholars: if the object only makes sense in relation to performance, practices of inventorying and archiving should be reconsidered: the necessarily object-centered databases should include information on e.g. marginalia, lecture notes, reviews, and programs systematically. Although intermediality is by no means new to scholars of early cinema, the variety of sources addressed in research projects has mostly been used to write either a history of technology or to reconstruct the news coverage of an event or in case studies of local history. Adding performativity to intermedial research designs allows studying the question “how is cultural meaning produced?”.

Understanding Magic Lantern Slides as relics of a performance situation changes the perspective towards this archival material: It is then no longer a distinct object but one element in a complex relation. “Intermediality” and “performativity” proved to be suitable conceptual tools to investigate these relations. From the 1890s on, mass-produced lantern slide series disseminated images on a yet unprecedented scale. Taking slide series on the Netherlands as an example, the article discusses the relation between the projected image and the text of the lecture as well as the relation between the relative stability of recurring motifs and the relative instability of the attributed meaning. Only in performance, Dellmann argues, are the images embedded in a setting (educational, tourist, ethnographic) and linked to text; only in performance do objects become meaningful objects. This change of perspective has an impact for both archivists and scholars: if the object only makes sense in relation to performance, practices of inventorying and archiving should be reconsidered: the necessarily object-centered databases should include information on e.g. marginalia, lecture notes, reviews, and programs systematically. Although intermediality is by no means new to scholars of early cinema, the variety of sources addressed in research projects has mostly been used to write either a history of technology or to reconstruct the news coverage of an event or in case studies of local history. Adding performativity to intermedial research designs allows studying the question “how is cultural meaning produced?”.

The authors discuss the concept of intermediality for research in early cinema. After a general introduction to intermediality as research problem in media studies, the question is raised whether the concept of intermediality can be used in diachronic research designs and for media studies that deal with emerging media. The concept of cultural series (Gaudreault) and Intermoldaity (Elleström) are discussed in detail. Two case studies from the scholar’s research test the conceptual ideas. In the case of the Russo-Japanese war on Screen in colonial Indonesia (1903-1907), intermediality and transmediality helps tracing content in diverse media while allowing addressing the changing function of a news item. In the second case, media expressions of the Dutch neutrality policy in World War I are examined. Film, poetry, army performances mediate the same content in differently and borrow from each other. The authors call for a more differentiated view to the various functions that intermediality plays.