It’s November 13, and you are feeling sleeeepy… how do I know that? Simple — today’s the anniversary of the day in 1841 that James Braid, a reasonable and respected medical man from the UK, attended a demonstration of animal magnetism by Charles Lafontaine. “Animal magnetism” was supposedly an invisible force that was common to everything living, from plants to humans (the “animal” part was evidently imprecise). You could use it to trick guards into believing that these are not the droids they’re looking for…no, wait, what I meant to say was that the theory was proposed by Franz Mesmer. You’ve sort of heard of him if you’ve ever happened across the phrase “they were mesmerized.” There wasn’t anything magnetic about it, but in the early 1800s nobody knew how magnets worked either, and both forces were invisible, so that was that.
Like most people who investigated animal magnetism in those days, Charles Lafontaine was at least ostensibly serious about it. But he was a performer. He grew up in a theatrical family, and grew up in and around acting. But in 1831 he was introduced to animal magnetism and the growing literature around it, and pretty soon afterward quit acting and began to tour Europe demonstrating the technique.
In 1841 Lafontaine took his demonstration tour to England, where he astonished everyone by using animal magnetism to mesmerize a lion in the London Zoo. This was all the more amazing because he didn’t speak any English at all, which virtually eliminated the possibility that the lion was in on the trick. Come on, where would a lion in the London Zoo learn French? When James Braid attended one of the demonstrations — not the one with the lion — he began to question his skepticism. He was already aware of mesmerism, and had been convinced by an article in the London Medical Gazette that it didn’t exist. But he hadn’t seen it for himself until Lafontaine arrived.
Braid participated in the demonstration he witnessed. As a prominent medical expert, he was invited to the stage to examine the subjects, and concluded that they had, in fact, entered a different physical and mental state. After a couple more demonstrations, Braid was convinced, and began his own independent research. Among other things, he proved that it had nothing to do with magnetism, and none of the more outlandish claims of some mesmerists were true. They often made claims that mesmerized subjects could read sealed letters and detect hidden objects. Just google “mentalist illusions” to find out how that sort of thing is done; the tricks are simple and mostly centuries old.
Braid developed his own approach to inducing a trance state, and it’s thanks to him that we now call the process “hypnosis” — he called it “neurohypnology,” and later adopted the current term. He wasn’t the first. “Hypnotism” was probably coined by another practitioner of the Fabulous and Mysterious Mesmeric Art of Animal Magnetism, Baron de Cuvillers. Braid’s contribution was to popularize the term in English. As Braid himself explained in 1845: “I adopted the term ‘hypnotism’ [and] distinctly avowed that hypnotism laid no claim to produce any phenomena which were not ‘quite reconcilable with well-established physiological and psychological principles.’” Some people wanted to call it “Braidism,” by the way, but Braid did his best to squash that term.
Altered mental states and road shows were highlighted again on November 13, 1940, when Disney’s Fantasia opened in New York. It opened as a “roadshow” (in the movie business that meant it was only available in select theaters around the country) because RKO, which usually distributed Disney films, thought it was too long at 2 hours 5 minutes plus an intermission. Also it was a “longhair musical” that they thought nobody would be interested in. So Disney took back the distribution and organized showings as more exclusive events than just a normal film. There were reserved seats, the prices were higher, and there was a special program booklet handed out by ushers who were hired and trained by Disney. They also installed their own sound system called Fantasound. Attending Fantasia was designed as a special event, like attending a Broadway play.
It worked; the film was shown in only 13 theaters across the country, and sold out for weeks and months in all of them. People would travel hundreds of miles to see it, and come dressed in their fanciest clothes. But on the other hand it cost Disney $85,000 to install each Fantasound system, and because they were using regular theaters instead of movie houses, they had to lease the venues. Fantasia brought in $1.3 million in its first six months, but that didn’t come close to being profitable. Nearly half of Disney’s earnings typically came from Europe, but this was 1940-41, and there was a war on. The road shows closed, the Fantasound installations were donated to the war effort (it’s not clear what they were used for), and Disney ceded the distribution rights back to RKO.
RKO proceeded to convert the soundtrack from Fantasound, which was a form of stereo, to mono, and edited the film down from over two hours to 80 minutes. They showed it in their theaters as the second half of a “double bill” — to see it, you’d first sit through Valley of the Sun, a western (starring, believe it or not, Lucille Ball). RKO reedited the film again and re-released it in 1946. Then it was changed again for a 1956 re-release. This time the stereo sound was restored, and the picture was modified to the wide-screen CinemaScope format.
The same thing happened yet again in 1966 when the format was altered to SuperScope (there was a “standard” version too, for theaters with older projectors), and it was re-edited to be slightly longer. Then in 1969, the movie was returned to theaters again, and promoted on the basis of its consciousness-altering quality, which was as big a deal in 1969 as animal magnetism was in 1840. Another edit was done because some scenes were beginning to feel offensive due to racial stereotyping. The biggest event for Disney, of course, was that in 1969, Fantasia finally turned a profit!
There’s more, of course — in 1982 the soundtrack was re-recorded in Dolby Stereo by a new orchestra and choir. When it was released in 1985 it was the first movie with digital sound. But the story doesn’t stop there. 1990 was the fiftieth anniversary of Fantasia, and another new version was released. They found the original negatives and edited them together into a new print with the color corrected frame by frame. Since there were 535,680 frames, many of the people working on it probably fell into an altered state of consciousness due to long periods of concentration on a single thing —right around the 150th anniversary of James Baird explaining how neurohypnology really worked.
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