What the Butler Saw

In 1894 Herman Casler, a former engineer for Edison, brought to market a motion picture machine that avoided expensive and dangerously flammable nitrate film. Nothing more than a circular flipbook with a gear attached, the Mutoscope was immediately put to use filling bars and arcades with one to two minute doses of penny-per-play peep shows. In England the machine was known by the name of it’s earliest soft-core feature,[“What the Butler Saw.” **]4 Middle Class Moralizers went bonkers, even though **the names **were racier than the content.**

I saw my first Mutoscope in the fall of 2007, when Janine and I visited the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. I loved the machine for a mechanical elegance directly embodying the process of animation. In a film machine the photo medium and the motion mechanism are separate, but the Mutoscope relies on the picture medium itself for the motion mechanics. In an age of bits, I was enthralled by the ambiguous line between player and content found in the Mutoscope.

Now I’m building an unusually large one for Fernando Renes. When I first went into his studio and saw stacks of 13,000 page-animations all watercolored onto 11″x 13″ paper I knew they needed a more appropriate container than some home-burned DVD. It took a year to get the project going, but now it is. I’ll post more as I work. My machine owes it’s origins to the card design of the Kinora, and the innovations of a mid-century pinball mogul. More on that later.

kinora-the_sphere_oct1911_pg14_thekinora_barry-anthony

Fernando loves making home movies, so the Kinora is appropriate place to start, being the first truly affordable home movie machine ever sold. In 1909 a Kinora home camera that printed directly onto punch paper monoprint reels was released. Although I’ve found no evidence, I bet the Butler saw a whole lot more than made it into wide distribution.  Two things sell video players- porn, and the promise of a better golf swing.

Read more on motion portraiture and advances in flipbook technology in this article I copied from History of Photography Volume 13 Number 1, January/March 1989. Stephen Hebert wrote it, he’s definitely the expert on this topic.