Page 95 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Henry Pepper: Pepper’s Ghost 1862.
Pepper popularised this illusion in a demonstration he made in 1862 (I think at the Polytechnic of Central London ). The effect had been modernised a few years before by the RSA fellow and engineer Henry Dircks. The illusion was definitely in use before then. It involves an angled translucent screen (this was generally stretched theatrical gauze), a mirror, and a slide projector or ‘magic lantern’ projecting its image onto the mirror which reflects it up onto the gauze screen between the live actors on stage and the audience, thus creating an illusion of ‘ghostly’ figures appearing on stage alongside ‘live’ actors. Carnival and fair-ground illusionists used the Pepper’s Ghost effect in shows that featured pretty girls turning into old crones, or even into animals, as a result of the illusion. The earliest description of this illusion is in a 1584 work by Giambattista della Porta: Magia Naturalis, so Henry Dircks and Henry Pepper were merely documenting it, and modernising it (magic lanterns with bright Argand lamps, later with gas light, electric light etc)
Of course, Peppers Ghost was reinvented for the movies, notably by Eugen Schufftan, whose Schufftan process used mirrors to insert actors into miniature sets (see Fritz Lang: Metropolis 1927). Schufftan also worked on Abel Gance’s famous triple-screen feature: Napoleon (also 1927). The Schufftan Process creates a unified composited image in the camera, avoiding expensive post production optical printing, but involving detailed small-scale 3d modelling. It is often used alongside traditional matte techniques. Jimi Famurewa, writing in Wired 2018, describes the current success of digital versions of Pepper’s Ghost in modern live Rock and stage performances: “The performance, at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, was the latest in a stream of holograms featuring deceased artists. Just as, two years earlier, Tupac Shakur had been beamed on to the stage at Coachella, here was another computer-generated resurrection to meet with a combination of awe and disquiet.