“Quo Vadis” and the Historiography of Visual Culture: Between Film, Magic Lantern, and Postcards
Jakub Kłeczek
jakub.kleczek@umk.plNicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-1567
Abstract
This article interprets Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis as a phenomenon of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture whose recognisability was shaped not only by literature and early cinema, but also by lantern slides, illustrated lectures, postcards, and other forms of printed imagery. It argues that, during this period, Quo Vadis circulated as a relatively stable package of scenes and visual motifs, open to serial reproduction, projection-based sequencing, and further transformation across media. The study adopts an approach informed by media archaeology, especially the work of Thomas Elsaesser, and supplements it with Martyn Jolly’s insights into the sequential logic of lantern slides. In dialogue with existing scholarship, the article revises and develops perspectives advanced by Maria Wyke, Monika Woźniak, and Ivo Blom, shifting attention away from the history of individual works and film adaptations toward the relations between lantern-slide series, postcard cycles, and the practices of circulation that connected them.
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Keywords:
media archaeology, magic lantern, postcards, Henryk Sienkiewicz, visual culture, Quo VadisReferences
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Authors
Jakub Kłeczekjakub.kleczek@umk.pl
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-1567
Assistant Professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Cultural historian and media scholar specialising in intermedial performance, media archaeology, and the relations between performance and media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He received his PhD from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he also taught. He has contributed to journals including the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and authored the book Digital Performance: Historical and Media Transformations (2023). He carried out postdoctoral research at UCLA and the University of Cologne, and received grants and fellowships from the National Science Centre, the Lanckoroński Foundation, and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. His work combines archival research, reconstruction, and the study of the material media culture. He also collects rare media artefacts, which he uses in both academic teaching and public workshops.
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