Media as modern magic: Early x-ray imaging and cinematography in Sweden

摘要

This article examines different forms of intermedial relations between x-ray imaging and cinematography in the media culture around 1900, mainly in a Swedish context. With the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897 as one of the focal points, the author argues that these two media were linked in their production, distribution and exhibition as well as in the envisioned audience reception. More specifically, the aim is to show how collaboration and competition between these new media can be understood in relation to nineteenth-century discourses on 'modern magic'. Through the marketing in other media - illustrated books, articles, caricatures and advertising in the press - an expectation was fostered that the x-ray apparatus and the Cinmatographe could perform operations that once had been thought of as impossible or magical. In a similar manner, the media industries, scientific performers and entrepreneurial showmen launched x-ray imaging and cinematography as something new, strange and even exotic. In the end it was the cinema that proved to be more successful in inventing new 'magical' tricks, and x-rays were appropriated for other, medical services, but through innovative uses, the moving x-ray pictures could once again become new and fascinating.