(n.) An optical effect produced by a magic lantern. The figures are painted in transparent colors, and all the rest of the glass is opaque black. The screen is between the spectators and the instrument, and the figures are often made to appear as in motion, or to merge into one another.
(n.) The apparatus by which such an effect is produced.
(n.) Fig.: A medley of figures; illusive images.
Example Sentences:
(1) Dell'Utri managed the 1994 campaign – a dazzling phantasmagoria of dancing girls under the lights, while he saw to the shadows.
(2) Behind Scott's gothic phantasmagoria - a building "too good for its purpose", said the architect - passengers found themselves beneath the roof of what remains one of the wonders of the railway world.
(3) It works because, beneath all the flummery and phantasmagoria, the tentacular vines and the drooping purple "gems", "M de l'Aubépine", as usual, has uncovered something dark in the nature of human relations - in this case the instinct for parents, and perhaps especially fathers, to wish to grow their daughters in their own image and according to their own design, and, worse, to make sure that once grown those daughters are never capable of true biological (or in the Rappaccini case, horticultural) separation.