Our latest blog comes from stipend holder Dr Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal. Anushrut is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of St.Andrews and writes about the importance of glass to screen media in Britain.
Cameramen, art-directors, and producers carry a yellow glass. This small square of glass… can easily be carried in a waistcoat pocket… With a yellow glass you can see things exactly as they will appear on screen. Look through the yellow glass and you are transported to realms more grotesque than the looking-glass.
- Oswell Blakeston, Through a Yellow Glass (1928; p.42)
In Through a Yellow Glass (BDCM 16096), the writer, artist, and critic Oswell Blakeston details the workings of the British film industry and succinctly highlights the dual nature of glass as a media object – both the material useful to imagine the filmic image and the metaphor for the film industry and its practices at large. For Blakeston the view through the yellow glass is cinema, but one might go further: glass is a cornerstone of modern British visuality.
Figure 1: EXEBD 16096
Nothing quite captures the significance of glass here more than the majesty of the Crystal Palace in London, inaugurated in 1851. Just look at the shine of glass emphasised on the cover of Robert Stephenson’s The great exhibition: its palace, and its principal contents (BDCM 42700). This glass will reflect and refract light to make the things from all over the world appear worthy of collection and attention (also see BDCM 40068, 40109).
Figure 2: EXEBD 42700
Equally, without lenses, mirrors, glass plates, and glass slides, there is no photographic or film projection (or televisual screen for that matter). How is one to see the world then? Add to it the figurative value of glass as the prototype of imagined screens of the future, a transparent and (in)visible surface, and glass emerges as the essential material and the principal metaphor of visual cultures past, present, and future.
The ubiquity of glass, however, makes it notoriously difficult to chart its media history, yet this is precisely the task I have set myself for my next project. The delightful variety of items at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum have given me many things to grapple with, though. What follows is less an exhaustive account of glass as a media object and more an engagement with select artefacts that have afforded me ways to look at and see through glass, yellow or otherwise, in British screen media.
The art of transparent painting on glass by Edward Groom (1856, BDCM 42616, see featured image at the top of the page) and the Theodore Brown and E. Osman Brown’s Magic Postcards (c.1890, eg. BDCM 8034, 8035) are valuable starting points. Groom advocates for lantern slides as educational tools – “it is submitted that painting on glass should contribute amusement of a more useful kind than that afforded by the grotesques of the magic lantern” (p.8) – and provides an instruction manual on the necessary craft and conventions to portray knowledge, successfully and accurately, on glass. Each magic postcard has a distorted image and an attached stereoscope viewer, which provides the clear picture (in 3D). While the stereoscope is not made of glass, but rather some kind of plastic, its lenticular nature connects to a wider Victorian glass and lens culture (also see Armstrong 2008). Groom’s book and Browns’ postcards acknowledge the amusement of looking through glass, but also suggest a value in using the same look to cultivate an educational curiosity in the observer. The postcards particularly engender the idea of clarity, an ‘accurate’ view of the distorted world, through a vitreous vision, as it were.
Figure 3: EXEBD 08035 Magic Postcard of Kew Gardens
This accuracy is not without prejudicial connotations. Mastery of glass was used to emphasise Western superiority. The Scottish botanist David Douglas recounts his travels on the Columbia River with tribes from the Chinook territories in North America stating: “My canoe men and guides were much surprised to see me… lighting my tobacco pipe with my lens and the sun, but above all to place a pair of spectacles on the nose is beyond all the comprehension, they immediately place the hand tight on the mouth, a gesture of dread or astonishment” (1825; [RHS]/Col/5/2/1/1). For Douglas, command over glass – lenses and spectacles – separates the European from the “astonished” Other.
The observations of Henry Mayhew, a sociologist from the nineteenth century, indicate that the body was not just a Western one, but a white-collared one at that. Reporting one of his interviews with a seventy-nine-year-old and recently bespectacled carpenter, he notes, “One master discharged two men when he saw them at work in glasses. . . said to me, “Pooh, you won’t do—you were born too soon” (Henry Mayhew in the Morning Chronicle, quoted in Gagnier 1991; p.76). As Regenia Gagnier eloquently puts it, spectacles, the “very symbol of the thinker and reader in the upper classes signified destitution for workers” (Ibid; p.24). The nineteenth-century vitreous vision thus appears to have race- and class-exclusionary elements.
The circulation of the glass slides – their construction based on Groom’s instruction – and the postcards literally made vitreous objects the bearer of leisure and learning while also having them carry the figurative weight of these race and class exclusions. I wonder if the ones excluded ever held these objects. What did they make of them? Did factory workers express disapprobation that the distorted images on the postcards, in a sense representing the weak eyesight that jeopardised their livelihood, were so callously distributed as pleasurable curiosities? Is it possible that the people David Douglas was with did not so much find his spectacles “beyond comprehension,” but rather, quite sensibly, considered it foolish to think one had command over an object that could burn one's eyes like tobacco? Essentially, how did vitreous fantasies measure up to the realities of those excluded?
As my investigations take me further, I hope to answer such questions with more detail. But there is an object about an object that might prove insightful even now: a lantern slide with a cartoon strip of glass production (BDCM 64346). This slide is likely a part of a pack that completes the story this slide begins. The clothing of those in the cartoon, as well as the design of the crane, makes me think it is from late 1920s. The strip depicts a conversation between a young man, a young woman, and an older man who explains to the other two the history of British glassmaking. Glass, he claims is “vital to our civilization.” Self-sufficiency with the requisite raw materials for glassmaking – “Silica (Sand), soda-ash, limestone, and dolomite” – undoubtedly position Britain at the forefront of that civilisation.
Figure 4: EXEBD 64346
For me this slide is a remarkable artefact. Its glass construction acts as implicit proof of the arguments that the man makes. It is both the material and the metaphor for Britain’s glassmaking prowess. However, in the immediate aftermath of WW1, Britain was importing most of its glass, and its own glass-industry and its workers faced an uncertain future (see Brown 1999; p.17). I wonder, was the glass of the glass slide made in Britain or aboard? Poetically ironic if abroad and potentially duplicitous even if this bit of glass was British.
This slide thus either proliferates a false narrative of a strong British industry or projects a desire to reinvigorate British glass after the Great War, possibly both. Maybe the slide is also tied to imperial pride, an aspiration to seem independently powerful to British colonies (especially given how economically dependent Britain was on the empire). My guess is that the slide was exhibited in schools to educate students as part of a larger series on British industries, at home and in the colonies. Remarkably, the process of glassmaking depicted is shorn of any factory worker. Perhaps this is where the material becomes the metaphor; what is envisioned is a Britain that needs nothing for its glass, not the world and not even its workers. Positioning British brittleness as robustness, this glass slide about glass both conceals and reveals British vulnerabilities.
Glass in British media continues to glaze reality with fantasy. Shooting Without Stars by Clifford Hornby (1940, BDCM 33637) is ostensibly a true account of the exciting travels of a cinematographer, Hornby, sent to capture background footage of distant lands, such as ‘Africa,’ India, Persia, and Palestine. The footage is then projected on glass backgrounds in film studios, precursor of the green screen if you will, to give the impression a film was shot at ‘exotic’ locations. As a brief aside, this book about travel begins with the tersest (if not curtest) of dedications: “To Gladys [Hornby’s wife] who stayed at home.” A thank you would not have gone amiss…
Figures 5 and 6: EXEBD 33637
More to the point, the ‘truthfulness’ of Hornby’s account should not be taken to mean an absence of colonial tropes. In one place he comments how he and the rest of the shooting crew felt like “heroes of Boy Own Paper,” a popular British magazine with pulp fiction of escapades, voyages, and conquests, aimed at teenage boys (p.96). Hornby’s writing reads like any other bit of imperial adventure narrative, never in short supply since the nineteenth century. Sent to Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) to shoot exterior scenes for the 1936 Cecil Rhodes hagiography, Rhodes of Africa, his prose about the British responsibility to “civilise” the “native” is similarly trite (and overtly racist) (p.138-140).
The colonial project of the films Hornby contributes to is indistinguishable from his ‘accurate’ account of the regions. In a way, Hornby never sees the spaces he is sent to record outside of Oswell Blakeston’s yellow glass. It is quite possible he also actually had a yellow glass with him. The yellow glass here imbricates imperial reverie with geographical documentation, that is then projected on glass backgrounds on film sets. Had Hornby stayed at home with Gladys would much have changed in how he viewed the world? Beyond the intended insolence of my quip, the point I want to make is that the view on, or through, glass reveals more about the viewer than the view.
The final objects I want to discuss in this regard relate to the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1947 classic Black Narcissus, which is based on Rumer Godden’s 1939 book of the same name. In the film, Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh leads a group of nuns to the Himalayan Village of Mopu to establish a convent for the region and educate its local inhabitants. They are sponsored by the General Toda Rai who gives them his old palace, previously used by his own father as a harem. The general also offers them the services of his British agent, Mr Dean, played by David Farrar, who is an Englishman “gone native,” in Godden’s description (1947[1939]; p.30). Over a period of a few months the climate of the space – and its irresistible and colourful botanical splendour – chips away at the resilience of the nuns, leading to temptation, lust, chaos, tragedy, and despair.
A publicity still for the film (BDCM 59844) depicts the British actress, May Hallatt, who in the film portrays the bawdy and borderline-hysteric Angu Ayah, the ‘native’ caretaker of the palace. She is surrounded by the erotic ‘eastern’ imagery of the palace walls. This picture reads like an allegory of the production process of Black Narcissus. The film was completely shot in Britain (mostly at Pinewood studios). Not dissimilar to the projection of footage on glass of the type recorded by Clifford Hornby, the film used matte paintings on glass to depict the Himalayan backdrops. The painted glass partially covered the camera lens to suggest that actors were on location. This special effect was colloquially referred to as the ‘glass shot,’ and while glass shots were used in all sorts of films, they were closely associated in film discussions with the representation of tropical and ‘oriental’ locales (an excellent and comical example of this is at the start of Agatha Christie’s Poirot episode ‘The King of Clubs’, 1989).
Figure 7: EXEBD 59844
Angu Ayah in the eroticised oriental palace can be comprehended as a reference to the glass shot: there is a British actor portraying an Indian. This actor is enveloped by a British painted set representing an ‘Indian’ palace. All of this in a film where some nuns are corrupted by a British imagination of Himalayas (painted on glass). Everything is an impression of something not actually there. The still of Angu Ayah, along with an image of the holy man in the film staring at the glass shot of ‘Kanchenjunga,’ is also in a film-promotional version of Rumer Godden’s book (BDCM 41967). Across media, glass is entrenched in processes that mix the factual with the fanciful.
Figure 8: EXEBD 41967
The BDCM curator, Phil Wickham, once said to me, “Black Narcissus is more about Britain than it is about India.” Powell and Pressburger’s treatment of glass in the film reveals this. In Godden’s book, the palace is covered in glass – “every space had a thick glass pane. To step into the house was to step into stillness” (1947 [1939]; p.24) – separating the British body from the native Other. But the palace in the film has no glass barriers and the corrupting winds have free reign of the space as any other part of Mopu. In their place is the glass of the glass shot that forms the boundary of the world created by the filmmakers, and everyone – mostly British actors bar Sabu and a legion of tiny horses – is wrapped in it. The film, unlike the book, does not distinguish the viewer and the viewed; everyone is on the same side equally affected by warped perceptions of reality generated by the Himalayan climate. Ironically, unlike those magic postcards, the view through glass is more distorted than the outside of it.
The glass shots of Black Narcissus here also feel like both the ultimate embodiment and the categorical rebuttal of Edward’s Groom’s suggested conventions for ‘accurately’ portraying the world on glass. David Farrar gives his most strained expression for a Mr Dean line from the film (which is not in the book). He says that “there is something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated.” But this atmosphere and exaggeration are British constructs. Such constructs cripple the British with the atmospheric anxieties they produce, and yet, they also reveal that no one could think outside of the fictions painted on glass; a people consumed in a reflection of their own making. I am yet to find a fully convincing answer as to why glass was the best substance for matte painted special effects. But perhaps the metaphor justifies the material here. Britain’s worldview is fragile, and a fragile object is a fitting surface to portray and project the British worldview.
Whether in lantern slides, postcards, or film production, glass blurs rather than clarifies the distinctions between the real and the fantastical, the literal and the figurative. Hopefully this blog has shown that this constant oscillation from metaphor to material is what excites me about glass as a media object, tying together class and colonial fantasies in the process. Oswell Blakeston writes, “Look through the yellow glass and you are transported to realms more grotesque than the looking-glass.” Perhaps what makes the yellow glass grotesque is that it affects what you see even when you take it away.
Bibliography:
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830—1880 (London: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 1-28.
Douglas, David. Second expedition of David Douglas: Journal 1 (London: Royal Horticultural Society Digital Collections, accessed 2025 [1825])
Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Godden, Rummer. Black Narcissus. (London: The Albatross, 1947 [1939])
Additional Sources: Here is a link to the National Gallery Portrait of Michael Powell looking through the yellow glass.