The year is 1900. You’re a Rochester boy old enough to ride the streetcars, and you’ve got a few nickels in your pocket. Where to go? There’s the ballpark on Culver Road or the races at Driving Park. You could ride up to the beach if the weather is good, or down to the South Avenue bathhou ses if it isn’t. Or – if your taste runs toward the risqué – you could slink downtown to the Clinton Avenue moving picture parlor. From the mutoscope archives at George Eastman Museum. PHOTO BY ROBERTO FELIPE LAGARES. You’ll know you’ve arrived as soon as you turn the corner and hear the mechanical banjo strumming maniacally over clanging carnival games. Don’t get distracted, though. Press on to the real prize: a long line of gleaming mutoscope machines, each one offering a few flickering seconds of delight. They could be showing re-enacted boxing matches or sensationalized scenes from the headlines. Be honest, though. You’re not here for the news. You scan the cardboard placards for the promise of something special.  “The Corset Model.” “A Dressing Room Scene.” “Two Girls in a Hammock.” “The Way French Bathing Girls Bathe” — there’s something to dream on. You drop your penny into the slot, mash your eye against the lens and turn the crank until the reel whirs choppily into motion. A shapely bare ankle, white skin gleaming, rackets into focus.  A mutoscope slide from the archives at George Eastman Museum. PHOTO BY ROBERTO FELIPE LAGARES. Before you know it, 60 seconds have passed and the machine shudders to a stop. You dig another coin from your pocket and plunk it in. Ain’t life grand? The mutoscope, invented in Syracuse by Herman Casler in 1895, was essentially a mechanized flipbook. Individual film images, printed on hardy stock, spun around a Rolodex-style cylinder at the rate of about 800 per minute. Films seldom lasted longer than one minute, and they generally could only be seen by one person at a time pressing his or her face up to a lens piece. In a technological sense, mutoscopes were eclipsed almost as soon as they were invented. Projected film had obvious advantages: paying audiences of hundreds could watch it together, and films could continue for much longer in duration. But mutoscopes did not disappear. Instead, the private nature of the viewing experience gave the machines a decades-long life as salacious sideshows at penny arcades, amusement parks and fairgrounds. Manufacturers embraced this bawdy connotation and churned out scores of “girlie reels.” Writer Justin Murphy looks into a mutoscope at the George Eastman Museum. PHOTO BY ROBERTO FELIPE LAGARES. “They have that peep show nature built right into the design,” said Sophia Lorent, assistant archivist of the Stills, Posters and Paper Collections at George Eastman Museum. Early films, like those on display at the Moving Picture Parlor on North Clinton Avenue in 1900, barely scan as sexual today. “From Show Girl to Burlesque Queen,” for instance, shows a woman stripping down to her slip, then retreating behind a dressing curtain to finish her wardrobe change. By the late 1930s, mutoscope films had become more erotic, sometimes even showing glimpses of full (female) nudity. It was enough to earn them a reputation as thoroughly crude. That was how most people thought of mutoscopes by the late 1930s, if they thought of them at all.  At about the same time, though, graphic artist and animator Douglass Crockwell recognized the technology’s potential to create an entirely different sort of art. Crockwell, who spent his adult life in nearby Glens Falls, was one of the few people in the mid-20th century to collect old mutoscope machines and reels.  Mutoscopes slides at George Eastman Museum. PHOTO BY ROBERTO FELIPE LAGARES. More importantly, he also created his own reels — not erotica, but rather “sequential art,” as he put it. He used the machines’ juddering flipbook effect — “one image after another, after another, after another,” as he worded it in the program of a 1967 mutoscope exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – as a deep philosophical statement on the nature of film as an art form. One of Crockwell’s mutoscope films, “Duopusses,” shows swirls and splotches of white ink, spinning and multiplying like algae blooms against a black backdrop. It then shifts to a sort of grappling between two abstract characters, with one lassoing the other and unleashing a vivid red splotch — an effect Crockwell added by hand. When Crockwell died in 1968, his widow donated his mutoscope collection, including 108 reels that he collected or created, to the George Eastman Museum. Lorent said it is likely the largest collection in any single American archive.  The original films are now too fragile to project using the original equipment, so Lorent and a former student, Masha Matzke, have developed a painstaking method of stabilizing and scanning the reels using glass plates and digital photography. Their first priority is to restore Crockwell’s art films rather than the commercial reels he dutifully collected. Doing so, Lorent said, would help restore the mutoscope’s place in film history. Until then, you’ll have to make do with imagining a coin clinking into place at the Clinton Avenue motion picture parlor, and a shapely, bare ankle coming into focus. Justin Murphy is a freelance journalist and author of the book “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York.” Find him at justinmurphywriter.com. The post Mutoscopes provided a window into the risqué appeared first on CITY Magazine. Arts. Music. 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