When in 1921 the French micro-cinematographist Jean Comandon gave a series of illustrated lectures in the Netherlands, a newspaper reported that Comandon showed “‘living’ jitter-pictures” – that is: films – “instead of the usual lantern slides”. To consider this as a remarkable fact, the author of the article clearly must have expected slide projections as a default option for an illustrated science lecture. This led to yet another observation: Comandon did not give a lecture but rather commented the moving images. The reporter, in other words, was faced with a different projection technology than he or she expected, thus constituting a different dispositif.

The article discusses this shift from the educational lantern slide lecture dispositif to the scientific film projection dispositif in the perspective of a historical pragmatics to elucidate how it affected the way how knowledge was communicated.

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Kessler, F. (2021) Wissenschaftliche “Zappelbilder”. Zur historischen Pragmatik eines Dispositivs. Montage AV 30,2 (Historische Rezeption): 149-163.