Herrero now blends two passions in his upcoming film. chiaroscuro is a documentary feature, largely animated, exploring the origins of cinema and the audiovisual world from prehistory through the early nineteenth century.
“People often doubt that cinema began as audiovisual. He believes the seed lies with him, yet the magic lantern—the leading device of the cinematograph—emerged in the 17th century. It spanned three centuries and resembled a television in its ambition,” explains the filmmaker from Sax. “Visual and audio experiences, along with earlier gadgets capable of producing motion pictures, laid the groundwork. Those tools enabled travel, special effects, multiple projections, and rear projections. They were early methods that felt both new and familiar.”
Blacksmiths tested optical boxes and new World panoramas, polyoramas, magic lanterns, and other devices that project images through hand-painted and often colored plates. These performances typically featured live music or narration, transporting audiences to distant places and presenting landscapes, biblical scenes, phantasmagorias, horror, or humor. “People first saw these shows, then traveling artists brought them to towns, and finally they reached homes,” Herrero notes.
Owning a selection of these devices and many optical binoculars would allow recreations of images via animation and visualizations of what people witnessed a century or two ago. Animators such as Manuel Ferri, Álvaro Quinto Abellán, Sofia Herrero Gil, Marta Lluch, and José Francisco Sánchez contributed to filming these scenes.
interviews
chiaroscuro will present a historical tour of cinema’s precursors, tracing the thread from early optical entertainments to the Lumière brothers, described in chronological order. From the shadows of prehistory to the last century, the documentary benefits from collaboration with numerous institutions and organizations and includes a dozen expert interviews from France and Spain, focusing on cinema, illusionism, and collecting.
Participants include archaeologists and art historians such as Jean Clots, a French archaeologist and anthropologist who advised the French Ministry of Culture and served as General Curator of Heritage. Also involved are the French prehistoricist, filmmaker, and writer Marc Azema; illusionists Juan Tamariz, Juan Luque, Sergi Buka, and Gonzalo Albiñana; writer Ramon Mayrata, renowned for the cultural history of illusionism; Juan Carlos Jimenez Ruiz, director of the Madrid Film Museum; Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban from the University of Salamanca, a media archaeologist; Maite Conesa, director of the Castilla y León Film Library; Jordi Pons, director of the Girona Film Museum and the Tomàs Mallol Collection; Josep Maria Queraltó, a picker; Thomas Camacho, a doctor and collector; and photographer and collector Jose Luis Mur.
The idea grows from Herrero’s own investigations. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including works on hallucination, magic,Illusionism, and cinema. His publications include Magic, Illusionism, and Cinema with a foreword by Juan Tamariz, Necromancy and Media Archaeology, and Gadgets to Excite. Robertson’s Complete Works accompanies his studies. He has been honored with the Mervyn Heard Award from the British Magic Lantern Society for his research.
Chiaroscuro is selected from feature film projects in recent years, with DocsValencia and the gravitational equator among them, and it awaits its premiere next year.