oa Religious Temperance Propaganda and Multimodal Aesthetics of Emotion. The Lantern Slide Set ‘Un poison mortel’ and Early Film Adaptations of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir

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This contribution explores the expressive qualities of the lantern medium through a close examination of the emotional communication and aesthetics in religious temperance propaganda. By relating a temperance lantern slide set and its text, produced by the Catholic publisher Tolra, to early melodramatic temperance films based on adaptations of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, the authors subsequently aim to place these lantern practices in a broader media historical context. Accordingly, they discuss the role that the melodramatic mode of expression holds in anti-alcohol campaigns by means of these primary sources that have not been interconnected before. An analysis of the case-studies confirms that eliciting emotional experiences is central in religious temperance propaganda, and the multimodal expressive qualities of both the lantern and film medium are employed as an effective vehicle for conviction in temperance propaganda and education. Through emotional communication and attraction the same kind of dramatization of alcoholism as a narrative fiction remained engaging, even if repeated time and time again through different media. It is precisely the connection between the social issue and the melodramatic mode of expression with its overt emotions and clear-cut representations, present in various media, which served the propagandistic aims of the anti-alcohol societies to reassert the virtue of temperance.