Patrick Ellis
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Literature, Media, and Communication
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Animated Postcard
Postcards boomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were an affordable mass communication, sent with a frequency that is hard to imagine today. A single address might receive as many as five postcard deliveries a day. People once sent more than 200,000 postcards from Coney Island in a single day. It can be difficult to characterize the scope of this vast phenomenon, given the simultaneous ephemerality and volume of the cards. The Animated Postcard thus zooms in on a neglected genre, the so-called animated postcard.
The animated postcard (sometimes called “mechanical”) uniquely incorporated images that moved. There were moving-panoramic postcards with views that rotated on a spindle; holographic postcards that produced a single shift in movement; travelogue postcards that used accordion-style pullouts to suggest film editing; and many more. Developed in the early twentieth century, but clustering particularly around 1909, the animated postcard borrowed techniques from motion pictures and optical toys in order to add movement to the individual card.
I argue that animated postcards adopted and repurposed expressly cinematic techniques in order self-reflexively comment on their means of delivery. That is to say that the images included on the animated postcard typically depicted elements of their route from sender to receiver, be it car, bus, train, or airplane. These cards thus moved at multiple levels: as an apparatus reliant on the human motor of the user, who had to pull the tab or spin the volvelle; as a cultural residue of the growing mobility of the populace that used postcards; and as a reflection of the cards’ own transit pathways.
