In her early film scholarship, the film historian and theorist Anne Friedberg wrote about the filmwork of the American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), a figure known for her association with psychoanalysis (she was analyzed by Freud), her work in independent film (she wrote film criticism and was featured with Paul Robeson in Borderline [1930], a film she also co-edited), and her writerly association with the Imagist emphasis on thingness: objects and materiality. H.D.'s statement about her experience with film projection reflects this focus on projection: “I myself have learned to use the small projector . . . and spend literally hours here in my own apartment making the mountains and village streets and my own acquaintances reel past me in light and light and light” (Friedberg Reference Friedberg1982 and Reference Friedberg1983; Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus Reference Donald, Friedberg and Marcus1998, 98). In her two poems that take as their title the projector (H.D. 1927a and 1927b), H.D. expressed a vitalist fascination with electricity and the instrumentation of life, understanding her own work with film as, importantly, an engagement of the hands with and from behind the projector machine, and not simply a matter of embodied performance in front of the camera or as spectator of the image on the screen.Footnote ¹ Giuliana Bruno picks up the thread of projection in an analysis of aesthetics and science in the laboratory of the Harvard psychologist and film theorist Hugo Münsterberg. “Imagine a room,” she suggests: “a laboratory, a mental space” in which Münsterberg displays his films and conducts his laboratory work (Bruno Reference Bruno2009). I interpret the question that prompted this topical issue – was there a cinematographic turn in the life sciences around 1900? – as an investigation into the turn to chronophotographic and cinematic motion study in the life sciences as a related modernist epistemology that foregrounds life, light, and their instrumentation. Against a historical background of works emphasizing filmstrips, images, and recording devices and in the spirit of media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka Reference Huhtamo and Parikka2011), I bring forward a particular component of the apparatus in the space Bruno asks us to imagine: the projector, and a particular instrument in the constitution of indexicality in the cinematic apparatus: the hand. In the spirit of Friedberg and Bruno, I suggest that we imagine a space – a laboratory, a mental space, or a broader space where the action of projection unfolds, a space that is both psychological and material at once. Rather than considering the production of the film image in that space and our perceptions there, I ask that we consider the work of projection inscribed in the physical artifacts of that space, as well as the interaction of the technician's body with these artifacts as they circulate in the world.

The cinematic turn entailed a shift in sensory methods in which practices of touching and looking at the body were augmented by instruments for experimentation designed to discern not only static form but also systemic function and motility (a term that increased in use along with techniques such as microscopy and photography throughout the nineteenth century). I have previously argued that the taking up of the practice of photographic motion study in experimental physiology and more generally in the life sciences and medical research in the nineteenth century entailed a turn away from the anatomical gaze that characterized, for example, dissection practices during which the dead body paradoxically becomes a source of knowledge about the living body as a set of static structures (Cartwright Reference Cartwright1992 and Reference Cartwright1995). By the end of the nineteenth century, physiological instrumentation offered a range of techniques and disciplines designed to study and represent the body as an entity characterized most significantly by its dynamic living processes and functions, from interior systems to the invisible temporal processes of cellular change and growth of living tissue. Photographic and proto-cinematic devices were among instruments such as the kymograph that were introduced to laboratory practice during the same period that the photographic camera was adapted to the laboratory task of tracking life in terms that foreground movement and growth over time. Anatomy's focus on interior structures within the cadaver and their representation in static form shifted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to include attention to interior processes, living systems newly accessible to the senses through techniques and instruments for studying living bodies as forms increasingly characterized in terms of motility, a shift especially evident in newer fields such as cellular physiology and microbiology. Likewise, the medical examination, with its focus on palpation and what could be observed by eye, expanded to include observation of interior living systems and processes using instruments designed to record movement and change in graphic form: kymography, photomicrography, X-ray, and early experiments with tomography. Just as anatomists incorporated the methods and paradigms of physiology to study organs and structures in and as living process, so clinicians expanded their repertoire of examination techniques to include instruments designed to reveal and track system function and motility. Movement (understood in terms of perceived incremental differences over time) became a more prominent signifier of the normal and the pathological. Laboratory and clinical recording processes such as microcinematography, kymography, cinecardiography, and cineradiology did not simply uncover but also produced the body as animate, as process incarnate.Footnote ²

In the study of cinema and its intersection with the life sciences and medicine, much of the focus has remained primarily with the body of the research subject and its visualization, representation, or the process of graphic tracking on film, screen, or stage (I am referring here not only to the cinematic but also to the fluoroscopic screen and the microscopic stage), with attention to scientific or medical perception and laboratory instruments of visualization and recording such as the microscope, the camera, and the kymograph.Footnote ³ I turn in a different direction now to consider an instrument and a perceptual technique that have tended to be put to the side in these discussions: the projector and the projection process. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century life sciences, absence of the projector proper did not necessarily mean that projection was not a factor in the work of the lab. Photographic and cinematic serial images were often scrutinized under projected magnification, without a camera or projector. Serial motion study preceded cinematic projection and did not always involve photography but sometimes entailed graphic recording of incremental change over time. Even with serial motion devices like the phenakistoscope, visual inspection of serial images and (later) motion picture film frames viewed without a motion projection device offered the study of temporality apart from the standards of reproduction of real time offered in conventional projection, with serial frames offering discernment and close inspection and analysis of incremental differences lost in projection. We standardly understand projection to entail the attempt to reproduce a perceptual experience indexically, as an event “that has been,” in alignment with Roland Barthes’ concept of the that-has-been of the static photographic image (Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1981).Footnote ⁴ As Jimena Canales notes, the matter of projection speed and the relationship of still-image, standard, and variable-speed projection to the knowledge project was a subject of major concern and debate in the cinematic knowledge project within the life sciences (Canales Reference Canales and Canales2009).Footnote ⁵ Researchers associated their choices about the temporal conditions of image viewing with particular epistemic conditions. However, inspection almost always entailed aspects of projection, if only to enlarge the static image held in the photographic negative, and to expose and print it as a positive. In cellular microscopy, motility is rendered visible through a process of magnification and light projection, even in the absence of a photographic or cinematic apparatus (dispositif). Projectors, from the precinematic lantern-slide apparatus to the analytic device that offers a variety of film projection speeds as well as the ability to register and hold a frame for a length of time under the light of projection without burning it, offered considerable control over the pattern and duration of image flow outside the standard projection speed; analytic projectors continued to be used in experimental settings even after the decline in laboratory cinematic motion study noted by Canales (Reference Canales and Canales2009). But the projector was not simply a motion device; it offered articulation of and control over object and image magnification and illumination. Limelight, introduced by the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday over roughly the same period as kymography and photography, is an aspect of the instrumentation of physiologic vision and the tracking of movement and distance that may be considered both in its role within the lantern-slide projection apparatus and in the broader spaces of the laboratory and in popular and surgical theaters, as well as across broad expanses of landscape (in the technique of surveying, for example).

The projector, I suggest, is a lesser-noted black box among the instruments that comprise the laboratory apparatus of the photographic and cinematic motion study – a box that has for the most part remained in the corner of our research field, ignored in favor of the image, the filmstrip, and the body imagined under its projection. Rather than opening this box and describing how technicians and tinkerers gave shape to it in the past, we might note how it circulated and was used from space to space, moved about from laboratory to laboratory and from theater to theater. We could begin with its exterior: affixed to most projection devices is a handle. It is a device that wears the conditions of its portability on the outside.Footnote ⁶ A curious feature of the mid-twentieth century cinematic projectors used in laboratories – typically those that project 16-mm film, is its case design: the machine itself is built integrally with the means for its enclosure and transport.

Attention to earlier forms of the projector allows us to consider the device not only as an instrument that facilitates the relationship between film and spectator or observer, bringing the film to light and projecting it outward as a source of knowledge, but also as an instrument that animated the hands of the projectionist, extending the instrumental capacities of the hand in a manner invisible to us except in the impression left on photographic records of laboratory activity – and in the projectors themselves, artifacts that we may inspect for indexical signs of their circulation and use. In the physiological laboratory where serial images were used, then, these film images became paradigmatic of life in two senses: they vivified the body under study, and they animated the bodies of the researcher and clinician, bringing the hands to life as components of the apparatus for projection as concerted acting into the world. It is to the projector that we can look for evidence of the invisible work of the technician's hands in certain in-between stages of the photographic and cinematic process, stages that anticipate the sharing of the image.

To consider the nature of the hand as a component of the technology of projection in the motion study recalls a familiar story about the place of the hand in the history of the photographic camera apparatus. Henry Fox Talbot's Reference Talbot1844 concept of photographic light as the new “pencil of nature” is generally interpreted to mark the perception of a shift from subjective modes of knowledge represented by the hand-rendered drawing to the more objective instrumental knowledge offered by photography (Talbot [1844-46] Reference Talbot2010).Footnote ⁷ Whereas the subjective human hand wields the pencil or brush in the process of drawing or painting, nature is the objective apparatus that determines the movements of the graphic marking tool that is light. Alan Trachtenberg recounts the wonder of a photographer who wrote under the pen name “Shade” on the occasion of his first success with the daguerreotype process in 1842. Shade suggests a special place for the hand in the work of seeing the image: “For hours I have held it,” wrote Shade, “carefully noting all the soft minutiae of light and shade” (quoted in Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg1990, 14). What Shade holds in his hands is not exactly an image, but an object: the plate on which the image does and does not appear. A daguerreotype, as is well known, is a difficult surface from which to discern an image. To hang a daguerreotype for exhibition requires careful adjustment of lighting so that the viewer might find a position in which its image comes into view. The hands, in Shade's account, make possible and are also the receptacle of the photographer's look. Shade no doubt held the plate, but also turned it to make it catch light in just the right way, to bring the image into view from the otherwise indistinct surface of the object. The “new pleasures” he found in this object were released only through the discerning and selective work of his hands in concert with the plate and his eyes in a compound relationship of projection, a process that was not simply in the service of making visible but which also entailed the pleasure of holding and manipulating the object at hand.

The scientific daguerreotype likewise required a similar sort of manipulation to bring its image into view, a fact obscured by its reproduction in printed articles from which we take out knowledge of past laboratory process. In anatomy, opening up the body to the gaze required a similar using of tools of revelation held, like the pencil, in the hand. Physiological instrumentation, in one way of telling this story, relieves the hand of the burden of making the body apparent, shifting the labor of visibility to the recording apparatus and light's inscription on film within it. Closer inspection of the broader apparatus and the work of projection in particular, however, suggest that the hands have played a more intimate and discerning role in this perceptual experience. The idea of the hands as entities removed from the work of instrumental registration – the activity of releasing the shutter, for instance, which is resolutely digital (involving the fingers) even when remotely effected through cables, as in Muybridge's classic recording of the horse's gait – takes our attention away from the broader status of indexicality as it leaves its traces in and through the apparatus: not just on the surface of the film, but also in the body of the camera/projector, the editing device, the screen. All these are repositories of physical traces, parts of the knowledge work attached to the image. This is a proposition that builds on the classic apparatus theory of film of the 1970s, which includes Jean Baudry's idea that the I/eye merges with and transforms into the projector in a primary identification with the machine, a condition of the viewing situation that, for Baudry, makes possible identification with bodies on screen (Baudry [1970] 1986a and [Reference Baudry and Rosen1975] 1986b).Footnote ⁸ I am suggesting a different sort of engagement in which the projectionist enters into a working relationship with the apparatus centered on the hand. This relationship offers up the projector as a different place to look for signs of cinematic life. The work of the hand in projection is a primary condition of spectatorship, I propose, if an overlooked one. I am suggesting a physical, semiotic role is played by the hands in implementing not only the take (the digital act of releasing the shutter) but also the taking away of meaning and feeling from the image that is literally always at hand, cradled close, and manipulated for view, from the work of the lantern-slide projectionist to that of the technician working with hands and eyes inches from the contemporary digital screen where the body looms and fades in numbers, charts, graphs, scans, and pictures. This idea is, I believe, captured by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his observation that one's body is not so much in space like things. Rather, the body “haunts” space, applying itself in the world “like a hand to an instrument.” More than an instrument or a means, he continues, the body is our expression in the world (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1964, 5). In this sense, our body can be said to matter or to materially organize or compose space as one might play an instrument – the significance being not in inhabiting the empirical ground of space in which one acts, but in permeating a given enclosure, as with sound vibration – a room, or the hollow valley of a landscape – much as a film inhabits the space of projection with the potential for intersubjective meaning and experience.Footnote ⁹

Unlike the cinema image, the body that haunts space does not come forward; it stays in the background registers, doing the signifying and the emotive work of the hand as instrument. My intention here is to suggest a potential for reading the early and pre-cinematic device of the projector (and by extension laboratory equipment that entails projection in the sense of viewing) as indexical register of the work of the scientist, the technician, and the projectionist that applies itself to the world like a hand to an instrument. I will be shifting focus from the filmstrip to the projection device as in itself source of the index, reading the trace across this relationship of instrumentation. My second aim is to introduce the idea of reading the shape of instruments – not their design per se, but the subtle formal deviations and permutations of original design that occur over time in the tool through its repeated use – for what these elements can tell us about the performance of the technician in the production of cinematic life. What I am proposing is speculative, based on physically substantive but weak traces found in objects. I propose that we look back and imagine the engagement of the body of the technician with and through the apparatus in a way that foregrounds the everyday and routine empirical contact.

Interpreting the Closed Box

In the collection of early photographic and filmic projection devices artifacts owned by the media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo there is a simple oblong wooden box dating from the mid 1800s. This is an early lantern slide projector used by an itinerant projectionist. If we were to open it, we might find evidence of its production and use during projection. I prefer to keep it closed in order to discuss it as a form of evidence about the work of carrying projection forward in space at moments not characterized by display. No bigger than a tiny coffin, the box is large enough to hold the projectionist's personal items (such as clothing) as well as his images. The paneled surfaces of the box are rubbed smooth with use, and a slight oblong indentation runs along the length of one panel, to the edges of which are attached two halves of a worn leather belt. The stretched edges and worn surface of the leather suggest that the projectionist wore the box strapped on his back in his travels from town to town, freeing his hands to grasp a walking stick. Merleau-Ponty describes the stick as an extension of the body that is incorporated over time with habitual use: If I want to get used to a stick, I try it by touching a few things with it, and eventually I have it “well in hand,” I can see what things are “within reach or out of reach of my stick” (Merleau-Ponty [Reference Merleau-Ponty and Smith1945] 2002, 166). The original coat of green paint has sunk into the grain of the wood like a stain, pressed into the surface of the box by time and touch, suggesting that the box too may have been incorporated as an extension of the body through its habitual wearing and carrying.

I begin with the stain that has sunk into the grain of the wood. Mary Ann Doane reminds us that, in the writing of André Bazin, photography shares the indexical function of the stain. In his well-known discussion of the shroud of Turin, Bazin refers to the imprint of the body upon this iconic piece of fabric as evidence of a truth that is both revived and substantiated in its photographic imprint, the negative held to have been produced through direct contact with the flesh (Doane Reference Doane2007, 128). Doane recalls Georges Didi-Huberman's account of the reaffirmation of the aura of the shroud as a laying of a trace over a story it in no way represents. The general account is that in 1898 when Secondo Pia, the Italian lawyer and amateur photographer, produced a photographic negative of the shroud, he saw revealed in the glass plate something previously unseen there: the impression of a face, held to be produced through contact of the cloth with Christ's blood, making the impression an index of the absent iconic wound (Didi-Huberman Reference Didi-Huberman1984, 67; Doane Reference Doane2007, 128-9). It is important to note that the public means of representation of the shroud during this event of 1898 was at first to have taken the form neither of the shroud itself nor its photograph, but of paintings. Display of the shroud itself entailed securing permission from King Umberto I, and in 1898 it was not certain this would be secured, though the shroud had been exhibited before (first in France in 1356). With this possibility that the shroud would not be shown, two painters were commissioned to produce works that were intended to stand in for it in a public display celebrating the 400^th anniversary of the Cathedral of Turin. However, the King did authorize the display, precluding the need for the paintings as stand-ins, and he furthermore granted permission for the shroud to be photographed while on display. The work of the hand (the paintings), situated between the real of the cloth and its indexical image (the photograph), was thus eliminated from the scene. However, so were the photographs. Seconda Pia took his photographs not before but during the period of the shroud's public exhibition, and they were not exhibited in this context. His successful photographic session occurred in the dark, during the late-night hours when the public was not in the cathedral. He used electric lamps powered by a generator to illuminate the dark space. News of the print he produced from his glass negatives was published in the Corriere Nazationale after the exhibition was over. For the public, reference between the image and the shroud was possible only through memory of the experience of viewing the object at an earlier date. Interpreting the newspaper report of the glass negative's registration of a positive image of a face required the public to understand the shroud as a negative – a form the shroud held in common with photography. In 1979 the forensic microscopist Walter McCrone deemed the shroud a fake based on his claim of finding paint particles on its fibers, echoing the charge of a medieval bishop that an artist had cunningly painted it. But to understand the shroud as a painted surface would require also an understanding of the concept of the negative as an operative indexical form in the painterly repertoire of the medieval period during which it was purportedly found.Footnote ¹⁰

At the heart of the shroud debate over verification is not only techniques of carbon dating, which in 2005 confirmed findings that the parts of the shroud are over 2000 years old (Rogers Reference Rogers2005), but also slippage between notions of indexicality (which are tied to the face in this case, and not the hand) and symbolic marking (linked to the work of the hand). This slippage is woven into the artifact. The shroud, as is well known, was burned in a fire in 1532. It was then worked over and repaired by hand by nuns, who re-stitched small bits of damaged fibers in a technique known as invisible tapestry. Carbon dating of fibers for authentication of age proceeds by lifting fibers from the cloth with adhesive in a kind of negative process that entails magnified viewing of fibers. In the shroud's radiation-based age estimation, which researchers admit is highly subjective, the crystalline structure of the flax fabric acts like a dosimeter in that the fibers have over many years absorbed radiation and collected radiation defects from various natural sources (Rogers Reference Rogers2005). But this means of authentication that relies on the object itself as recording device is confused by the creative work of the hands of the nuns, which introduced not simply patches – divisible parts – of newer fabric, but interwoven bits of re-working of the fibers, making the separating out of the indexical from the symbolic or representational – the fibers used to invisibly reproduce the original cloth – extremely difficult for the already subjective process of radiation-based age estimation. The task of dating the shroud thus entails separating out minute bits of fiber, sorting the older indexically marked pieces from the newer fibers that make up the interstitial creative reproduction imperceptibly woven into that original. Thus there are two “original” dates, but these are indivisibly interwoven. As well two kinds of recordings or markings, the indexical and the symbolic, are woven into one fabric. For the photograph to exist as index required a separation of photography (understood as a form of indexical marking) from the interpretive techniques of marking by hand. That distinction is not managed easily, as we can see when we consider the integral work of the mending hand in this object that is the very icon of indexicality. Rather than being tied to the photographic film (or the shroud) alone, the concept of indexicality similarly requires the creative work of the apparatus, with all of its involvement of the work of the hand, to shore up its authenticity.

The physiological, unlike the anatomical, does not lend itself easily to the register of the iconic image. The anatomical icon is relatively timeless, more prone to be fixed in its ontological status of that which has been. The closed box of the itinerant projectionist is like the indexical photograph in that it holds an ontological stain, but this stain bears witness to a process of long duration over which it was carried and touched, not a being or moment that has been. The stain was worn in over time and not, like the stain on the shroud of Turin understood in its indexical purity, in a supposed moment of contact. Like the shroud understood as a weave of the index and its symbolic restoration, the painted box is not exactly an indexical sign of its use in the sense that there is no one moment or one body to which its worn surface points. The box refers, as I will try to explain, not to the truth of the existence of a body it remembers (that of the projectionist for example), but to the truth of a process of work in between the display of the image – the work of handling the box in a range of ways in the course of mattering space.

Merleau-Ponty suggested that, if perception is the common act of all of our motor and affective functions, we should discover its structure by digging down to the perceived world buried under the sedimentation of knowledge in the manner of an archaeologist (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1964, 5). His idea is resonant in the work of media archaeologists, in which we consider the interplay of bodies and instruments as negotiators and composers of organized space (Huhtamo and Parrika Reference Huhtamo and Parikka2011).

But it is also resonant with work in psychology on identification and projection. I have noted that the box is an instrument of projection, however, it is also subject to projection: it is carried from town to town so the projectionist can share his views with others. Merleau-Ponty wrote of the psychological transitivism through which what happens to each of us does not happen only to us but to our entire world. This transitivism, he explains “is the same notion that psychoanalysts are using when they speak of projection.” Citing Henri Wallon (whose work on the mirror phase was foundational for this Lacanian concept), he describes a case of negative projection in which a child is ensconced in a state of anxiety and impulsively slaps the child beside her, projecting the blame by accusing the other girl of slapping her, failing to understand the distinction of self and other, and projecting responsibility for our own actions onto the other (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1964, 148). In the classic works in which the term projection is introduced to psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud uses projection to describe the ego's techniques of defense. Projection occurs when the subject attributes its own unconscious feelings and motivations to others and to objects outside of itself. Projection entails unwitting disavowal and casting off onto others of one's own feelings (Freud [Reference Freud and Strachey1915] 1957, [Reference Freud and Strachey1911] 1959, [Reference Freud and Strachey1920] 1961, [Reference Freud and Strachey1894] 1962a, [Reference Freud and Strachey1896] 1962b). Melanie Klein and her followers developed the concept to describe aspects of projective behavior evident in every kind of setting, from play and fantasy to religious beliefs to political life. Typically the concept of projection has been used to describe the incarnation of one's unconscious negative feelings in another person, turning them into objects of anger and contempt. However, projection need not be limited to the negative affects. Projection is a useful means through which to interpret spectatorial experience – a point that Metz explicitly noted in his work on the cinematic apparatus. Equipment, Metz explained in The Imaginary Signifier, is both a metaphor and a component of mental processes (Metz Reference Metz, Britton, Williams, Brewster and Guzzetti1982, 51). Two of that book's most notorious statements about the spectator are “I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all perceiving”; and “it is I who make [sic] the film” (Metz [1977] Reference Metz, Britton, Williams, Brewster and Guzzetti1982, 48). These statements are directly followed by an explanation of this concept that features a piece of equipment: the projector. “I know that I am really perceiving” in the cinema, he explains, because “there is a projector” facing the screen. In this model, the projector is the other on whom I depend for my sense of all-perceiving unity. Metz makes this point clear in his statement that “it is not I who am [sic] projecting, or at least not [I] all alone.” What is projected is “deposited in me as if on a second screen”; “I am the place where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic” (ibid.).

My aim here is to shift the focus from the experience of projection in front of the apparatus, turned toward the screen, to the hand of the projectionist who is instrumental in the process of projection, understood as both a technique of the material apparatus of bodies, instruments, and objects in the world, and as a psychic relationship key to identification and intersubjective experience. Merleau-Ponty disparages the impoverishment of perception as merely a matter of knowledge, “a progressive noting down of qualities and of their most habitual distribution,” in which the perceiving subject approaches the world “as the scientist approaches his experiments.” He counters this model with a concept of projection as lived intersubjective experience: “If on the other hand we admit that all these ‘projections’, all these ‘associations’, all these ‘transferences’ are based on some intrinsic characteristic of the object, the ‘human world’ ceases to be a metaphor and becomes once more what it really is, the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts” (Merleau-Ponty [Reference Merleau-Ponty and Smith1945] 2002, 28). In the pages that follow I do not propose this same splitting of scientific and projective models, but rather propose that projection, experienced with and through instruments in the everyday work of both the laboratory and the theater, always entails this kind of interstitial engagement with objects and the world.

Consider projection in the literal sense of connoting the relationship of carrying the box from town to town that makes projection possible in any given location. I mean to suggest this act of carrying is a productive part of an affective relationship that we can understand by considering the closed box. I noted that attached to the sides of the box are worn leather straps, between which is a shallow indentation that is barely perceptible. Like the paint that has over time sunk in to give the appearance of a stain, the shallow hollowed-out space gives slight evidence of a process that has been embedded in the box over a very long time of repeated movement. The hollow negative space is a historical repository, an almost imperceptible material trace of an experience of its carrying and moving from place to place repeated many times over a long period. What is indexically referenced by the worn spot in the wood, the physical imprint of the back of the man, is not simply an anatomical body that has been, but the backbone and the hard muscle of the back as tools that carved this faint imprint into the box over long and repeated contact during movement, bone and muscle against wood having the equivalent grinding or carving effect of a slow drip of water on stone. The grain of the wooden box, like the grain of the photographic film, is a negative of the ontological weight of a process that has been, a process of carrying that made projection possible in different places at different times. What is evoked, as that which has been, is not the man, the traveling showman in all of his iconic stature, but the anticipation of projection that is the man strapped to the box as one.

On the status of one's own body in motion, Merleau-Ponty writes that in the case of “my body itself I move directly, I do not find it at one point of objective space and transfer it to another, I have no need to look for it, it is already with me – I do not need to lead it towards the movement's completion, it is in contact with it from the start and propels itself towards that end. The relationships between my decision and my body are, in movement, magic ones (ibid., 107-108). In this account, he is describing the kinesthetic sensations that make up aspects of the spatiality and mobility of one's own body. Kinesthetic sensations are notably without a sense of the externalized body image as such; they are performed as if with a magical spontaneity that comes with the habit of repetition captured in the walking and carrying of the itinerant projectionist.

The Turin shroud tells us a story of the cultural value of the face as a register of identity. It is significant that it is not the back of Christ's head but the negative of his face that rivets viewers. Contact between the projectionist and the projection box is back to back, not face to face like the face of Christ meeting the fabric of the shroud, or the fabric turning its negative face to the electric lighting (a novelty then) and to the lens of the camera that captures it. Imagine the shape, the reciprocal curves in two surfaces: The projectionist, with his back to his instrument, is bent, his profile bowed under the task, and the soft pine box slowly takes on the indexical hollow. Projection, in this case, is from behind, just like in the lantern slide show, in which the projectionist is seated out of view of his audience. The back projects into the box; the box is projected forward but always out of the projectionist's sight, hoisted as it is up into the air behind his back. It follows him. Perhaps the spine of the projectionist takes on a reciprocal curve or some degeneration of structure as well. The projector serves as a protective shell even as it holds its kernel, the photographic images that are the anticipated destination of this labor of walking. Together the man and the box are an extraordinary unit, practiced in their task over time and indivisible, each the other's prop in the reciprocal tasks of carrying and projection. Rather than tracing the movement of the projectionist and his box from town to town, I emphasize the unity of their projective process in which there is always an anticipation of showing film, an anticipation of meeting others in the light of projection.

Bergson similarly invites consideration of an imaginary hand sifting through iron filings, the final arrangement of which he interprets as a kind of index, an order created in concert with the hand in a relationship that is “expressed negatively” in the impression left in the bed of shavings. He likens the concerted, undivided movement of the hand and the filings to the relationship of vision to the visual apparatus: they leave a trace that is reciprocal – that is co-produced, rather than simply indexical of the hand. This trace is similarly canalized. Like the indexical surface of the box, which is evacuated of content and presence, a hollowed out sign (Doane Reference Doane2007, 133), this is a hollowed-out shape, an impression that registers the limitation the field of filings (like the field of vision) places on the instrumental movement of the hand, which Bergson, in this example, likens to the work of the eye (Bergson [Reference Bergson and Mitchell1911] 2008, 95). I suggest that this relational impression is indexical of that reciprocal, mutually constituted movement of projection and the instrumental work of the body that like a hand haunts space. It is not an index of absent body or part.

Doane reminds us that indices are characterized by singularity; they are dependent upon contingencies. Her examples are the wind blowing at the moment in a certain direction, a foot having landed in the mud at precisely this place, the camera's shutter opening at a given time (Doane Reference Doane2007, 133). The indexical mark of the footprint of the itinerant projectionist is something we should take into account. In the footprint, we see an impression not of the body in full, but of the underside of the foot, the sole that bears the full weight of the body and the projector. This part of the body, the sole, remains mostly out of sight, making repeated contact with the ground in walking, a serial process. The footprint never exists apart from the other potential footprints it suggests. The bottom of the foot is a surface of the skin that is furthest from the face of the walker, the part of the body typically identified with identity and the soul. The sole of the foot turns and even pushes itself repeatedly away from the direction of both its own body's face and the light (the sun) in a process intended to propel the body forward in the direction that is anticipated by the direction of the face, its scanning forward gaze. Balanced against the pressure of the hand with its walking stick that is also sunk into and lifted from the earth repeatedly, the foot propels the torso forward but also in the moments of pressing forward momentarily squeezes out the barely visible space below the base of the foot in which we might momentarily glimpse the downturned sole. The sole sinks fleetingly and repeatedly into the ground's surface, revealing that inscriptive surface to be in fact a space of shallow malleable depth, accommodating an impression that, like the impression of the movement of the hand in a pool of iron filings, is a sculptural negative: a canalization (a channel), a frieze in negative form, a mold with no intention to be cast. The footprint is not so much like a stain, which implied surface inscription, as a spatial record of the combined pressure of body and projector, a dimensional impression of weight, a displacement of space that becomes visible only after the duration of the journey that produced it.

The unique circumstance of the foot in the labor of the body is hinted at in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, where reference to the foot is tied to pain. It is in reference to the foot that he speaks of the “voluminousness of pain,” with the experience of the hurt foot as inhabiting a “pain-infested space” and not an object that the body can contemplate in its injury through an externalized impression (Merleau-Ponty [Reference Merleau-Ponty and Smith1945] 2002, 107).

The footprint, like a motion picture film frame, rarely exists on its own. It exists in a series, or at least it implies a series of steps that have been taken, even if not all the steps taken found soft ground in which to produce a record. With the footprint, Barthes’ “that which has been” (Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1981) of the photograph becomes a matter of “that which has unfolded over time” in a continuous series. In the surface marks of the journey of the projectionist is embedded not an appearance or trace of a moment in time, but a serial displacement of the material conditions of appearance. The footprint as indexical register differs from the photograph in its implication of indivisible seriality: the print cannot exist outside of the temporality of its steps from here to there. We might say that the foot in the mud is a cast, an inverted form of resemblance from which we might constitute a sense of the form of the foot but also the body's force, its indexical pressure not into the space of light toward which the face would be directed (in watching a film, for example) but down into the earth. Whereas the pressure of the cloth upon the body is light and the body's impression there shallow, the pressure of the projector upon the body of the projectionist is more substantial, and is potentially transformative of the body as well as of the depth and nature of the imprint left in the ground over the course of the projectionist's journey. The projector is not so much an instrumental extension then, like the walking stick. It provides a kind of ballast, a stabilizing weight that brings substance through mutual resistance to the work of the body as the hand that instrumentally inhabits space.

More typically we think of carrying as a task of the two hands and not of the back. Imagine the projectionist at work projecting slides from inside his box. He is shrouded in darkness in a theater or outdoors with assembled spectators facing a blank wall. Coming out from under the box to stand behind it, he arranges the slides, loads the carrier, ignites the projection lamp to further carry forward the task of projection.

Another instrument in Huhtamo's collection of proto-cinematic objects is a box manufactured by the company operated by J. B. Dancer, the Manchester optician who pioneered the making of microphotographs and manufactured a variety of photomicroscopic viewers and projectors. This particular Dancer box is a dual lantern slide projector for dissolving views, a twentieth-century device the source of illumination for which is gas jets. There is not one but two gas sources and lamps, one for each projection, housed in the single unit. The housing of projection mechanisms for two images in one box allowed for the tighter manipulation of dissolves and other transitional effects in serial projection, effects that could not be achieved by a single projectionist working with just his two hands across two machines.

Two hands, two gas jets, two flames, two turns of the nozzle to control the flow of gas over and over, all in the space of one projection box: The projector is outfitted with a dual set of tubes that were coupled to a gas source, each set outfitted with a nozzle and a lever to control the delivery of the combustible substance to the interior of the box. The projectionist must work fast and carefully, generating interest in the audience while manipulating the flow of gas, limiting the potential for fire and explosion. The gas couplings are visible to my eye, dangling from the ends of hoses that lead into the box. In an earlier iteration of the technology during the limelight period (the 1850s through the early 1900s), projectionists and lighting technicians sometimes sat atop bladders holding oxygen and hydrogen, using their weight to control the pressure of the flow to the lime, setting it aglow with always the potential for a burst sac and ensuing explosion and fire in the theater (IATSE n.d.; Malkames Reference Malkames and Fielding1967). Life is at stake in the tension between the technician and the instrument as they co-produce light. In the later system that illuminates the serial slides projected from this Dancer box, the pressure of the flow of gas into the box is manipulated by the projectionist by hand. At the back of the box where the tubes snake in, and where the projectionist uses his hands to manage the show, is something like a proscenium, a little stage set. Hanging from a copper rod shaped into a convex arc is an elegant little velvet drape hanging like a puppet-theater curtain. This is the sort of miniature curtain on the scale one might find inside the window of a Victorian dollhouse, but inverted – a decorative exoskeleton of concealment and display here positioned around the back of the apparatus, out of view of the audience. Lifting the curtain reveals a complex set of levers, pipes, and tubing. This is the area of the box in which the projectionist uses his hands to control the gas input that powers the illumination of the two slides.

What is this curtain meant to mask, and from whose view? The drape extends not across the dual lenses at the projector's front side, to mask the projection of light, but across the back of the box, where an opening large enough to fit the hands of the projectionist is also the point of entry for gas lines and housings and the various other mechanisms for holding and illuminating the lantern slides. The drape at the back of the box, when drawn, conceals these inner mechanisms of projection, including the complex gas paraphernalia. We could speculate that the curtain conceals the work of the projectionist's hands from members of the audience whose eyes might be drawn by the quick movements of the projectionist's two hands as they turn off and on the two gas jets in rapid succession, orchestrating the projection from inside the back of the box like the hands of a puppeteer. But more likely it stops light from passing out of the box and into the room, limiting any contribution to ambient light from the back of the box and concentrating light in the projection cones beamed toward the wall or screen. The curtain also conceals the sight of the working hands from the projectionist himself, who works doubly in the dark. Already in a dark room, his hands are further concealed by the drape, even as he faces the opening with its interior radiant with the heat and sparks of the gas jets. He must keep the curtains drawn while projecting in order to conceal not only the light but also the sight of his two hands moving, the mechanisms and activities inside the box. Line Describing a Cone (1973), a film installation by Anthony McCall, is a particularly good example of this effect, as well as of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body's “haunting” of space as a weak but pervasive and articulate material inhabitance. The 30-minute structural and minimalist film gradually traces a circle onto the screen – this is the circumference of the projection beam, the light from which gradually fills the space of the theater with a palpable spatialized cone. A haze appears like a dimensional smoke-screen in the air, a glittering field of suspended dust particles like fine snow catching the changing light and gradually articulating the body of a dimensional cone in light, drawing the spectator's attention from the flat space of the screen and the graphic circle being sketched there to the dimensional cone taking shape in the space of the room like a ghostly body we may inhabit (inside the cone, we can sit or move about the theater).

The situation I bring forward here, then, is the relationship of the hand and the body of the technician with its projection apparatus as this unit actively matters (makes materially meaningful) the world in the subtle or weak but nonetheless materially pervasive action suggested by projection or haunting. The operation of the dual projector, with its two flames needing to be turned on and off in rapid succession to achieve the semblance of sequence and flow, is in itself dangerous enough. The volatility of gas jet projection is well known. One might think that it would have been prudent to allow the projectionist the tool of his eyes as an added safeguard in the manipulation of not one but two jets. The little proscenium at the back of the box becomes a macabre sight, one that, like the coffin-like green wooden box, invokes the hidden labor of the body, the black-boxing of the labor of projection, which I am reading here not by opening the box, but by interpreting its shuttered surface. The box literally wears the hands out, both in the sense that it keeps the hand back at its perimeter where the heat is not so intense, and in that it works the hands vigorously in their joint projections of images. Imagine the projectionist manipulating two gas jets on and off to achieve the semblance of lightning-fast sequence and continuity between two slides, mastering a light touch without the aid of his eyes, guarding against the potentially fatal slip of the hand. The work of the hands must be careful and exact even as it is creative and intuitive.

The experience of the co-presence of one's two hands touching one another, belonging to the same body, is, for Emmanuel Levinas, the prototype for the experience of intersubjectivity in the touching of another person. Intersubjectivity is constituted through the mutual experience of the other person and I as “elements of one incorporeity.” I am constituted through a “borrowing of myself from the other” (Levinas [Reference Levinas and Smith1987] 1993, 100, citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The projectionist's two hands touch not one another but the valves that control two flames, two sources of light and projection which work in sequence not simultaneity like a conversation, but which merge to appear as one sequential flow to the spectator of the show.

The light in the Dancer box produces sparks, cinders, soot, and smoke – materials that require a path out of the box and into the room. A chimney channels these elements that, in their erratic projection into the room, diminish in intensity but continue to pose the threat of igniting things (the hair, skin, and clothing of projectionist and spectators, the surfaces of furniture and floors, the screen). Midway up its length, the chimney bends its path, forcing the sparks to hit a surface and expire, leaving the smoke and the soot that does not fall back down to take a detour sideways along the deviated diagonal slope of the remaining portion of the chute. Some of the snuffed sparks fall back down into the box, a sooty residue both of the projection process and of the averted disaster. Do the hands of the projectionist become black with this sediment? Do his slides bear sooty fingerprints that he must carefully remove before each show?

Henri Bergson likens the attempt to reconstitute movement from distinct successive states with the failed attempts of the child who “tries by clapping his hands together to crush the smoke” (Bergson [Reference Bergson and Mitchell1911] 2008, 308), an image that suggests a scene such as this one in which smoke is the unstable artifact of projection that fills the room, anticipating McCall's recollection of just this sort of spatialized image-world in Line Describing a Cone. But the materials are volatile. Were there small holes burned into the wool of the projectionist's coat and cuffs, artifacts of his engagement with the machine? Was there the smell of singed hair and wool in the room? The specificity of the film medium, its being, as Doane has noted, was incarnated by the mid-century Structural filmmakers in the materiality of the celluloid strip, the grain of the film, the emulsion (Doane Reference Doane2007, 129). My concern is not the apparatus in its hard materiality, though, but the material relationship of action in space among bodies and objects, and the potential for volatility through which the body and the hardware are co-constituted, and in their co-constitution effect a projection of something other than image or knowledge, something more like a spark between the projectionist and his audience, between whom the excitement of the spectacle resonates for reasons that have to do with much more than the image.

That the material image in itself is not timeless (iconic) but ephemeral has been widely noted, and Bill Morrison's found-footage film Decasia (2002) graphically demonstrates this point. Thin white cotton gloves worn while editing film, neoprene gloves for added protection in working with old stock: These protect the hands from irritation, but they also protect the film's emulsion from contact with the oils secreted in the shallow crevices of the fingers even after they are washed clean. The projectionist, like the editor, is careful to leave no indexical stain, no trace of fingers that point to use, on the film stock. Like light and heat, fingers expose the stock to deterioration. To touch photographic film is always to leave a print behind, and the print is never inert or static. Like the footprint, the fingerprint tells us not only of that which has been, but of that which will be. With touch, a physical and chemical process of deformation is launched. Compression and staining, as indexical processes, initiate durational responses that unfold slowly over time. These states of becoming are nearly imperceptible.

Decasia includes close-up footage documenting the burning and melting of a film frame trapped in the registration plate, a location it is meant to pass through, so that the projection beam can in turn pass through it for a fraction of a second and project its image to the screen. It is well known that the cellulose nitrate filmstock that became popular in photography in the late 1880s and was used for X-ray and motion picture film into the early 1950s is a highly unstable medium with a rate of combustion around 15 times that of wood. Dry cellulose nitrate is prone to explode when subject to heat, sparks, or shock. Stories of the self-combustion of cellulose nitrate motion-picture films are well known. Fatalities in film studios and movie houses due to contact with fire as well as through inhalation of the highly toxic gaseous smoke emitted by burning cellulose nitrate stock led to the establishment internationally of city fire codes and regulations to manage the problem that began with the introduction of gas as a means of stage illumination early in the nineteenth century (Select Committee 1892; Booth Reference Booth1991). Early in the twentieth century, the London City Council's regulations for film exhibition included detailed requirements for architectural and technological safeguards against fire in the cinema hall. Instability and volatility were qualities that went beyond the film stock alone to include various conditions of film projection. The projector's arc lamp and gas jets were the most pressing sources of potential calamity. Electrical cables introduced to the theater projection booth posed further problems. This change was met with new language mandating that cables, including leads to lamps, should be housed in fire-resisting insulation. Smoking was not permitted inside the enclosure. The threat of a stray spark loomed in the imagination of the magistrates, who noted that even when non-flammable film was introduced, it could not be demonstrated that this new safety stock would under no circumstances catch fire. The movement of the film was subject to strict regulation. All films were to be kept inside closed metal boxes when not in use. The construction of the housing for the films inside the projector itself was also subject to guidelines. Mandated at 14-mm interior diameter, the film box of each projector was required to have a slot for entry and exit of the filmstrip constructed so as to prevent the passage of flame into the box. The projectionist's job became one of controlling for potential combustion, and not just ensuring the regular flow of the film. Michael Booth describes gas leaking from perishing tubing and ill-fitting joints, and the tinder-dry conditions of wood, cloth, canvas muslin – the materials exposed to the gas jets burning above ands around the theatrical stage (Booth Reference Booth1991). Moviehouse codes introduced later in the century specified not only architecture and equipment standards of manufacture and use, but also the behavior and movement of production and exhibition personnel as well as the flow of movie house patrons in and through the theater space. Although production of this film stock type had largely ceased by 1951, the problem of the continued circulation and need for conservation of remaining prints, as well as the continued use of the stock in radiology and other branches of medical clinical practice and research, remained (Babin Reference Babin1991).

The projectionist performs an important task in the process of identification that is much more than mediation of the image (Cartwright Reference Cartwright2008). Scientific cinematic techniques and bodies working with films in laboratories are not exempt from this process. By focusing on the projectionist as a figure in a broader process whose body is implicated in ways that we have not yet fully considered, I have tried to identify a small aspect of a cinematographic turn with respect to the apparatus, shifting the focus of study from image to the work of the body as the hand as instrumental element mattering space, making meaning of the material world. Recall that apparatus theory was not only about the film image, the instrument, and scientific knowledge, but also about capturing the nature of psychic life in processes as they are enmeshed, like the fabric of the shroud, in the work of the camera, the projector, and the screen. This essay has not gone far enough in tying the implications of projection and the reading of the closed box to laboratory studies where it intersects with apparatus theory, however it has suggested a starting point for that project.