Hidden in plain sight

Th roughout fi lm history the cinema has been inseparable from the fi gure of the onscreen magician who, like Welles, shapes the experience of wonder as an opportunity of learning by inv

Volumes in the Techniques of the Moving Image series explore the ship between what we see onscreen and the technical achievements under-taken in fi lmmaking to make this possible Books explore some defi ned aspect

relation-of cinema—work from a particular era, work in a particular genre, work by a particular fi lmmaker or team, work from a particular studio, or work on a par-ticular theme—in light of some technique and/or technical achievement, such

as cinematography, direction, acting, lighting, costuming, set design, legal arrangements, agenting, scripting, sound design and recording, and sound or picture editing Historical and social background contextualize the subject of each volume

Murray PomeranceSeries Editor

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Death of the Moguls: Th e End of Classical Hollywood Murray Pomerance, Th e Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Eff ect

Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism

HIDDEN IN

PL AIN SIGHT

An Archaeology of

Magic and the Cinema

C oli n W i lli a m son

R u tger s Un i v er sit y P r essNew Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williamson, Colin, 1984–

Hidden in plain sight : an archaeology of magic and the cinema/Colin Williamson.

pages cm — (Techniques of the moving image)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7254–3 (hardcover : alk paper) —

ISBN 978–0–8135–7253–6 (pbk : alk paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7255–0 (e-book) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7256–7 (e-book (web pdf))

1 Trick cinematography—History 2 Cinematography—Special eff ects— History 3 Magic tricks in motion pictures I Title.

Copyright © 2015 by Colin Williamson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without writt en permission from the publisher Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Th e only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defi ned by U.S copyright law.

Visit our website: htt p://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgments ix

at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where I oped an interest in the cinema’s relationship with animation, science, and

surprise me but also to remind me how much I owe to a group of people whose encouragements, insights, and c riticisms made it possible for me to turn an interest into a book

My undergraduate adviser, Peter Bloom, supported this project from its earliest stages to its completion I am grateful for his guidance and his enthusiasm, and for the fact that over the years we have become good friends My mentor at the University of Chicago, Tom Gunning, is a vital part of my research on and understanding of early cinema, particularly in

my dissertation, and it is to him that I owe the biggest debt for helping me bring the idea for this book to life Similarly, Jim Lastra was most infl uential

as a benchmark for the kind of balanced and careful scholarship I have sued here Very early on, Miriam Hansen, Edward Branigan, Jennifer Wild, and Judy Hoff man showed me how to focus my interests in ways that are still guiding my work Karen Beckman at the University of Pennsylvania generously read and off ered illuminating commentary and edits on draft s

pur-of several chapters, and Matt hew Solomon at the University pur-of Michigan inspired and guided many of this book’s central aims I am particularly grateful to Stephen Prince for his incisive and extensive feedback on the

fi nal draft s of this book Suzanne Buchan and Oliver Gaycken provided me with valuable feedback that placed my forays into animation studies and the history of science and technology on more solid ground My research and writing have benefi ted tremendously from the spirit and rigor these indi-viduals bring to their own work and the expertise they generously extended

to mine

At Rutgers University Press, I would very sincerely like to thank Leslie Mitchner for her interest in and support of this project when it was far from resembling a book She, Lisa Boyajian, and India Cooper were crucial to helping me navigate the challenges of publishing, and I am grateful for their

x Acknowledgments

editorial expertise, without which this book would not have taken shape

as enjoyably as it has Likewise, Murray Pomerance, who is not only an exceptional and tireless editor but also a tremendous source of guidance for younger scholars like myself, transformed what I thought this project could be in ways that have changed how I think about writing in cinema and media studies His generosity and his commitment to supporting my work made this book possible

possi-ble by a postdoctoral research fellowship I was awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in conjunction with the Mahindra Humani-

unique opportunity to workshop various draft s of my project with ars from a wide range of disciplines Th rough seminars, presentations, and conversations in this context I was able to navigate the many challenges

schol-of transforming a dissertation into a book I also came to appreciate the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue in producing scholarship in the humanities For their crucial roles in this I am thankful to Mary Dunn, Patricia Spacks, Kornel Chang, Jillian Hess, Heather Houser, Ju Yon Kim, Gretchen Purser, Crystal Sanders, Bernardo Zacka, Stephen Tardif, John Tessitore, and Hilary Dobel

I was also fortunate to have had the opportunity to present my research

in a variety of forums to people whose thoughtful engagements with my work are refl ected strongly in the many pages that follow I am grateful to Philippe Gauthier, Hannah Frank, Artemis Willis, Phil Kaff en, Adam Hart, Chris Carloy, and the members of the University of Chicago’s Mass Culture Workshop for pointing me in unexpected directions Chuck Wolfe, Bhaskar Sarkar, Constance Penley, and Christina Venegas off ered very helpful criti-cism and guidance in response to my participation in the Department of Film and Media Studies Colloquium Series at UCSB A great deal of my work on digital special eff ects was infl uenced by questions posed by Nick Cull, Paul Lesch, David Culbert, Leen Engelen, and other members of the International Association for Media and History Brett Bowles in particu-lar helped me rethink the relevance of Georges Méliès to my argument and gave me valuable insight into the aft erlife of my project Several of the chapters in this book also benefi ted from helpful feedback I received when

I presented my research at various stages at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conferences (2013 and 2014), the Magic of Special

Eff ects conference hosted by André Gaudreault, Martin Lefebvre, and

Conference (2014) A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as “Quicker

Sciences, and Technology (doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_00810), print publication

Book, Performance Magic, and Early Animation: Mediating the Living

Dead,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 6, no 2 ( July 2011): 111–126.

A fair amount of the work that went into this book was done in the

reading rooms of special collections libraries and other archives I would

very sincerely like to thank Rick Watson at the Harry Ransom Research

Center for sharing my enthusiasm and taking the time to sift through the

centuries’ worth of performing-arts ephemera around which my project

took shape Jenny Romero at the Margaret Herrick Library, Amy Wong at

the UCLA Department of Special Collections, Frances Terpak at the Gett y

Research Institute, Stephanie Müller at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Nancy

Spiegel at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, Siera Heavner

at the Winnetka Historical Society, and Christophe Meunier at INSEP

(Institut national du sport, de l’expertise et de la performance) in Paris,

France, also provided much-needed support in my research I owe a great

deal to the staff at the Newberry Library and Brown University’s John Hay

Library, to Susannah Carroll, Steve Snyder, John Alviti, Charles Penniman,

and Andrew Baron at the Franklin Institute, and to Pierre Buffi n and India

my research questions Th e research I conducted with the guidance of this

wonderful group of people was also facilitated by a Mellon Dissertation

Fellowship, a research fund from the American Academy of Arts and

Sci-ences, and a grant from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB

Special thanks in this regard go to Miranda Swanson and the Division of the

Humanities at the University of Chicago, as well as Dick Hebdige at UCSB

My own questions and concerns about this project were always met with

helpful advice and kind words of encouragement from a group of people

to whom I owe much more than this acknowledgment My good friends

Nathan Holmes and Matt Hauske, along with Jim Hodge, Andrew Johnston,

and Christina Peterson, consistently provided me with the most honest

and thoughtful feedback and perspective on my ideas I am additionally

xii Acknowledgments

indebted to John Garner for the good conversations and philosophical debates, to Deb Peck and Scout for their much-needed support in the

fi nal stages of this project, to the Berne and Driskel families for treating

me like family, and to Mike Margol for always thinking that what I do is important and reminding me that this, like everything else, is an adventure

respects has carried me a long way To my parents, Jim and Diane, and my

understanding, and for modeling the kind of commitment and excitement that inform everything I do

Finally, my wife, Ariel, has shown me the many layers and values of patience, persistence, and laughter Th ank you for never lett ing me forget what a wonderful thing it is to love the movies In undertaking this project I could not have asked for a bett er friend

no longer astonished audiences because their tricks lacked the novelty and virtuosity they possessed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when magicians aspired not to catch and entertain the eye but to engage audiences in a complex game of perception.1 Th is game is one in which the magi-cian pits the evidence of our senses against the evidence of our minds and

provokes the response: “I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable

los-ing, because the resulting uncertainty about how tricks work generates a delightful, sometimes profound, experience of wonder

To restore this experience to theatrical magic, Welles invited his reader, the amateur magician, to become a detective and go behind the scenes of illusions to discover the techniques magicians use to aston-ish their audiences His hope was that, by learning “how it’s done,” a new generation of magicians would be inspired to rediscover the craft’s deep-lying powers of enchantment In the process, magic would be

2 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

renewed, and those adults who were no longer “elevated  .  to the status

of delighted children” by the magician’s tricks would be taught how to

A similar interplay between wonder and rediscovery weaves through the

associated with the domain of magic since its emergence in the 1890s, when stage magicians appropriated the new medium and explored its poten-tial as a form of mechanical magic In our everyday experience of motion pictures, however, particularly in the twenty-fi rst century, we tend not to

contemplate the cinema as a trick that can cause us to question the nature,

habits, and limits of our faculties of sight and reason To varying degrees, our experience of the cinema is one of being immersed in a world of story and not one of wonderment, although special eff ects can shock us into an awareness of the cinema’s capacity for trickery.4 But even beyond the scope

of special eff ects, cinemagoers have long been fascinated with the power of moving-image technologies, like the magician, to enchant and astonish, to baffl e and awe Th is fascination has fl ickered in and out of view as part of the cinematic experience for more than a century, largely in concert with technological innovations that challenge what audiences think they know about fi lm and related media

experience of motion pictures by compelling audiences to wonder anew at the cinema Th roughout fi lm history the cinema has been inseparable from the fi gure of the onscreen magician who, like Welles, shapes the experience

of wonder as an opportunity of learning by inviting audiences to become detectives and discover the techniques and technologies behind cinematic illusions Th e idea that trickery and discovery are thus linked might seem strange because, intuitively, we understand the magician’s goal to be the performance of tricks that rely for their wondrousness on obscuring the secret techniques behind magical eff ects Th e art of magic, we might say, is the art of obscurity craft ed by reticent magicians who guard their secrets in order to keep audiences from knowing too much As Welles suggests, the act of discovery is risky business However, it is also true that knowledge of

“how it’s done” is the object of any trick Knowledge is what the magician conceals and what the spectator aims to uncover; it is what shadows the question that we are most likely to ask of the magician’s and the cinema’s tricks alike: “I wonder how . . .?”

Similarly, one of the pleasures of being a spectator at the cinema is rooted

in the possibility of discovering visual evidence of the techniques behind

illusions In fact, the very wonder response that compels us to speak of the

cinema as a form of magical spectacle is shaped powerfully by this

possibil-ity As the historian Caroline Bynum explains, for example, the experience

of wonder has for centuries “entailed a passionate desire for the scientia

[knowledge or understanding] it lacked; it was a stimulus and incentive

to investigation.”5 Magicians have a long history of inspiring audiences to

wonder at and investigate new technologies (including the cinema),

sci-entifi c discoveries, and baffl ing natural and artifi cial phenomena It is

pre-cisely this complementarity of trickery and demystifi cation that underpins

my particular use of the phrase “I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable

nonetheless.” Whether they are experienced live or on the cinema screen,

magical spectacles are unifi ed signifi cantly by a “desire” for knowledge, an

impulse to explain “how it’s done.”

Granted, many spectators beholding stage or cinematic tricks

undoubt-edly take great pleasure in not actively searching for visual evidence that

will help to demystify such illusions And, of course, magicians guard their

secrets very closely because if they did not, their tricks would not cause us

to wonder But it remains that the standing possibility of demystifying the

wonders of novel phenomena upholds our most basic notion of trickery in

the cinema At the heart of this notion is the expectation or faith (conscious

or unconscious) that techniques of illusion are never undetectable but

rather go unnoticed; that the secrets behind wondrous spectacles, whether

we seek them out or not, are hidden in plain sight Our almost automatic

inclination to say that there must be an ordinary explanation for a

phenom-enon that we experience as wonderful defi nes our sense of being tricked and

not credulous Indeed, the fact that we wonder at the cinema rather than

fl ee in terror from it confi rms that we expect this at the most basic level

every time we enter a movie theater

In what follows I examine the long history of these expectations,

assumptions, and convictions in order to make three interventions in

expanding the history of the cinema’s affi nities with the rhetoric, practices,

and experiences of theatrical magic tricks Th e second involves rethinking

the role of the magician in the cinema as more than providing

4 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

third involves using the fi gure of the magician to understand precisely what

it is that compels audiences, even in the twenty-fi rst century, to think and talk about the cinema as a form of magic

My guide in pursuing these goals is the idea that the pleasures and possibilities of discovering the techniques behind cinematic illusions are reflected in one of the most familiar questions that magicians pose

to their audiences: “Are you watching closely?” The question is an tation to the spectator to become a detective and attempt to demystify the wonder that the magician is about to perform The game of per-ception that ensues is premised on the spectator’s search for techniques that the skilled magician obscures with deft hands and calculated uses

invi-of misdirection Ultimately, it is the spectator’s failure to detect the secret even while watching closely that maintains the wondrousness of the trick being performed Such viewing practices are usually latent in our everyday experience of the cinema, but they do surface prominently when we are compelled by new, curious, or baffling spectacles to won-der at the medium’s capacity for producing illusions By exploring how this wonder response is as much about enchantment and entertainment

as it is about demystification and discovery, I hope to renew how we see the shared history of magic and the cinema

Magic and the Cinema

the cinema and in the popular cinematic imagination Early intersections between magicians and motion pictures, for example, continue to provide

fi lm scholars with profound avenues of insight into the media fantasies, courses on perception, and regimes of belief that shape the landscape of the cinematic experience Moreover, in addition to infl ecting central questions

dis-in a variety of domadis-ins, dis-includdis-ing fi lm theory and animation studies, ries and theories of magic have been employed to signifi cantly reframe and expand the study of fi lm history to include centuries-old practices and tech-nologies that comprise the fi eld of so-called pre- or proto-cinema In popu-lar culture, the association of magic with the cinema is so ubiquitous and

histo-multifarious that the invocation of the word magic threatens to obscure as

much as it promises to illuminate the phenomenon being described What

precisely is meant by commonplace references to “movie magic” and “the

magic of special eff ects,” for example?

Th e fi rst decade of the cinema has drawn the most att ention with regard

to these kinds of invocations, in part because it harbors some of the richest,

liveliest, and most visible encounters between magicians and the cinema

who is frequently celebrated as a central pioneer and “father” of the trick

fi lm Trick fi lms typically featured magicians producing fantastic spectacles

with the aid of novel cinematic trick techniques, like substitutions,

super-impositions, and dissolves, which were adapted from nineteenth-century

theatrical illusions and sleight-of-hand practices Méliès is certainly and

inescapably a point of reference in any account of magic’s relationship with

the cinema, including the one explored in the pages to follow His

omni-presence in the history of the early twentieth-century French theatrical

magic and fi lm cultures is undeniable, and his contributions to innovations

in early cinematic special eff ects have provided for an invaluable site of

research that continues to bear the promise of new knowledge about the

wonders the cinema can produce

Because of Méliès’s popularity and his productivity, however, the

his-tory of magic and the cinema tends to focus on the rise and fall of the

trick fi lm Matt hew Solomon has demonstrated comprehensively that the

union of magic and early cinema “fl ourished  .  when stage magic and trick

fi lms were fundamentally linked both in the popular imagination as well as

through concrete practices of production and exhibition.”6 With the

stabili-zation of nickelodeons around 1908 and more permanent movie theaters in

the 1910s and 1920s, the cinema was drawn out of its prominent place in the

magic and vaudeville theaters where the association of trickery and motion

picture technologies was initially fortifi ed In conjunction with the end

of the cinema’s novelty period, the visible magic of early trick fi lms began

to morph into special eff ects and more obscure(d) forms of magic—such

as classical narrative strategies and “invisible” editing techniques

Eventu-ally, magicians and their tricks disappeared behind the scenes of cinematic

illusionism

But histories of magic and the cinema extend well beyond the appearances

in early trick fi lms of magicians like Méliès and his contemporaries Gaston Velle

and Segundo de Chomón Harry Houdini starred in a series of fi lms in which

he performs magic acts and stunts: Th e Master Mystery (Grossman and King,

6 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

1919), Terror Island (Cruze, 1920), and Th e Man fr om Beyond (King, 1922)

Dur-ing the transition to synchronized sound, magicians resurfaced prominently in

fi lms like Th e Last Performance (Fejos, 1929) and Illusion (Mendes, 1929)—a

topic that, although it will not be broached here, is signifi cantly illuminated by the history detailed in this book.7 Stage magic also made some bizarre appear-

Gordon Lewis’s famous Th e Wizard of Gore (1970), both of which feature

magi-cians whose tricks are intimately wrapped up in acts of real violence and murder Some magicians are currently making and appearing in fi lms—for example,

Tim’s Vermeer (2013), by Raymond Teller of Penn and Teller, and Th e Magic tory of Cinema (Garrett and Sutt on, 2015), a documentary about the enduring

His-affi nities between magicians and motion picture technologies Houdini also returned in a couple of dramatic interpretations of the magician’s life and work:

Gillian Armstrong’s fi lm Death Defying Acts (2007) and the History Channel’s television miniseries Houdini (2014) Magicians and their tricks are the center- pieces of fi lms like Th e Prestige (Nolan, 2006), Th e Illusionist (Burger, 2006), and Now You See Me (Leterrier, 2013) Even Méliès’s fantastic world was brought

back to life in Martin Scorsese’s digital 3-D fi lm about magic and early cinema,

Hugo (2011).

Th e release of these more recent fi lms coincided with a renewed est in the fact that digital technologies continue to pose diffi cult ques-tions about how moving images work, about our (in)ability to distinguish between what is real and what is fake in the cinema, about why the impulse

inter-to make this distinction is such an important part of the cinematic ence, and about the changing landscapes of fi lm theory, history, and his-toriography Since the early 2000s, cinema scholars like Angela Ndalianis, Michele Pierson, and Dan North, among others, have looked to the domain

experi-of nineteenth-century theatrical magic practices for insights into how

as Ndalianis explains, the object of this interest in the magic that defi ned the early cinema period is the uncanny ability of digital technologies to

“further [blur] the line between reality and illusion.”9 Th is line refers to our increasing inability to determine with our naked eye whether what appears before us on the cinema screen was photographed by a camera or created artifi cially with the aid of digital tricks Th e diffi culty of determining what

is real and what is fake is particularly curious because it applies not only

to “realistic” cinematic spectacles but also to fantastic and obviously unreal

ones, which CGI is capable of making look and feel so real that we fi nd ourselves

surprisingly uncertain about phenomena that we know do not “really” exist

Scholarship in this area is unifi ed by the use of fi n-de-siècle stage magic

and the trick fi lm genre as models for talking about special eff ects illusions,

broadly construed Pierson’s seminal analysis of eff ects “connoisseurship,”

in which spectators take pleasure in gathering knowledge about special

eff ects, begins with a study of similar viewing practices that were

domi-nant in magic cultures prior to the emergence of the cinema.10 Building on

Pierson’s book, North, to whom my project is greatly indebted, has

insight-fully linked these practices in the nineteenth-century magic theater to the

way in which special eff ects invite “inquisitive, critically engaged and

discern-ing responses to the new media technologies” that have shaped cinematic

trick practices throughout fi lm history.11 Such scholarship is important both

because it helped historicize digital eff ects and because it paved the way for

developing nuanced theories of fi lmgoing practices, particularly with regard

to science fi ction and fantasy fi lms that tend to support an otherwise superfi

-cial view of spectators as passive consumers of entertaining spectacles

and talking about the wonders of the cinema in our contemporary moment

was confi rmed at two notable events At the end of 2011, the Museum of the

Moving Image in Astoria, New York, hosted a series of events collectively

titled “Magicians on Screen.” For about a month the museum screened a

collection of fi lms and television specials featuring stage magicians from

the late nineteenth century to the present Like a variety show, the

screen-ings were launched with a lecture by Matt hew Solomon and then integrated

was to promote popular awareness of and interest in an expanded view of

magic and the cinema Such a view, which this book also promotes, was

intended to challenge the idea that magicians disappeared from the

cul-tural landscape shortly aft er the emergence of the cinema As the museum’s

description of the series explains, “Ironically, although the invention of the

moving image may have ended one chapter in the history of magic, it gave

magicians new life on-screen.”12

A similar interest in reanimating the domain of magic and the cinema

was at the center of a recent and quite illuminating conference held at the

of Special Eff ects: Cinema, Technology, Reception”—hosted almost one

8 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

hundred presenters (myself included) who looked through the lens of trickery at everything from proto-cinematic optical devices, early cinema, and classical special eff ects to virtual actors, computer soft ware programs, sound technologies, and theories of movement, animation, and even

“magic” itself Th e incredible range of approaches to the topic testifi ed to the almost overwhelming pervasiveness of magic as a category that audi-ences and scholars alike draw upon in order to understand the many lay-ers of the cinematic experience It also confi rmed the need for specifi city

in invoking magic in this way, lest it become unwieldy Ultimately, the all interest in magic as a unifying discourse in cinema and media studies was a powerful reminder of how the experience of wondering at old and new techniques and technologies of illusion continues to be shaped by the kinds of inquiries and investigations that magicians have been inspiring for centuries

over-Th is book is very much in dialogue with the study of the so-called magic

of special eff ects, but it moves in a diff erent register and has a diff erent goal Most good scholarship on the experience of wonder in the cinema tends

to move outward from the early intersection of magicians and motion tures to more generalized considerations of the aesthetic, phenomenologi-cal, and historical dimensions of cinematic spectacles But what precisely does it mean to call special eff ects “tricks”? And what makes the cinema

pic-“magical”? Rather than theorizing special eff ects or the experience thereof, this book roots these questions and the enduring invocation of “magic”

in a specifi c constellation of trick techniques and practices that comprise the shared history of magic and the cinema Doing this means shift ing our att ention away from a broad theoretical discourse on moving-image illu-sions toward a related question about the history of the cinema: How and

to what extent do the tricks of digital technologies resonate with the ual and mechanical magic of early cinema?

man-Understanding what unifi es the long history of magic and the cinema from this perspective is a project that has signifi cant implications for how

we see and think about techniques and technologies of illusion in the ema My primary goal is to use this history to show how the fi gure of the magician remains crucial to our understanding of what it means to wonder

cin-at the cinema, particularly in the context of digital technologies Bringing the history of wonder, trickery, and early cinema into the contemporary moment does not challenge, say, the centrality of Méliès, the trick fi lm, or

special eff ects to how we see the wonders the cinema can perform; rather

it changes the lens through which we view the relationship between magic

and the cinema as a device of wonder

Devices of Wonder:

The Cinema and Its Double

By referring to the cinema as a “device of wonder,” I mean to invoke the

broad domain of optical devices—the magic lantern, the camera obscura,

and philosophical toys, among others—that has been mined for

dramati-cally expanding the history of the cinema For hundreds of years prior to

the emergence of the cinema, these devices moved signifi cantly between

the cultures of theatrical magic, philosophy, science, rational recreation,

and educational entertainment Many have been designated “wonderful”

because, as technologies of illusion, their spectacles pit the evidence of the

senses against the evidence of the mind and generate the kind of

uncer-tainty that we might associate with the magician’s tricks or the realm of the

uncanny Such uncertainty is signifi cant because it can lead to intellectual

curiosity—an interest in explaining what the wonder is or how it works

My concern with devices of wonder in this book is thus closely aligned with

the kind of work done by historians, artists, and curators, like Barbara Maria

Staff ord, Werner Nekes, and Frances Terpak, who have made signifi cant

con-tributions to expanding the intermedial and interdisciplinary study of fi lm and

related media With regard to a 2001–2002 exhibition at the Gett y Museum

titled “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen,”

which inspired my early research in this area, Staff ord captures an infl uential

idea when she claims: “Understanding that instruments belong to a broader

technological system and are integral to connective theories and practices

of visual communication allows us to situate them within a more inclusive

endeavor, where art and science do not so much rival each other as intermingle

and branch.”13 Placing the cinema in the longue durée of wonder and technology

in this way opens the study of magic and the cinema to a variety of new

perspec-tives circulating in media studies as well as in art history, philosophy, and the

history of science and technology

Th e enduring popular interest in magic refl ects an almost intuitive but

surprisingly underdeveloped idea that, guided by Staff ord’s claim about

1 0 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

the confl uence of art and science, will serve as a unifying thread out this book: the cinema is literally a magician Orson Welles’s 1974 fi lm

through-F for through-Fake captures this idea most succinctly through-F for through-Fake is a fi lm about a

real person, an art forger named Elmyr de Hory Welles plays the part of

a magician who addresses the audience directly throughout the fi lm using

an extended monologue A self-proclaimed charlatan and trickster, Welles

introduces F for Fake by inviting the audience to participate in a complex

game of perception “Ladies and gentlemen,” he claims, “this is a fi lm about trickery, fraud, about lies .    During the next hour everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.” Th e line between fact and fi c-tion, truth and lies, is immediately obscured when Welles performs a seem-ingly unending series of rhetorical sleights of hand For the duration of the

fi lm the magician artfully weaves a web of playful contradictions so tightly that it becomes impossible for the audience to determine whether the story

of Elmyr (like a good forgery) is real or fake Th e fi lm, Welles confesses, is simply that: a fi lm about magic, deception, and wonder, but also a fake, a trick about trickery, the object of which, of course, is the cinema itself.Welles stages the cinema as a trick largely through a self-refl exive motif that punctuates the fi lm Intercut with the story of Elmyr are sequences

of Welles fi lming F for Fake and editing it on a machine called a Moviola

Th ese peeks behind the scenes are also part of the magician’s game of ception Th e editing table, for example, contains a screen on which Welles

per-is viewing the fi lm as he per-is craft ing it (Th is gesture to the manual labor behind cinematic tricks is mirrored in remarkably similar sequences in

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera [1929] and Scorsese’s Hugo, which

will both be discussed later in this book) Th e revelation of the techniques

the cinemagician uses to create his trick (F for Fake) thus takes the form of

a mise en abyme, an endless play of illusions As if in a hall of mirrors, the

spectator is forced into a relentless oscillation between viewing the fi lm and being conscious of the act of viewing, of playing the magician’s game As the mediator of this oscillation, Welles not only displays the cinema as a device of wonder, a technology the magician uses to perform illusions By

inviting us to experience the fi lm as a trick, he also invites us to wonder at

the nature of viewing any fi lm created by a technology that is, at its most basic level, capable of performing illusions

Welles’s play on the trickery of the cinema speaks more broadly to how the persistence of magic and the magician’s illusions beyond the scope of

directed by Orson Welles ( Janus Film, 1974), DVD.

1 2 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

the trick fi lm stems in part from the fact that the magician functions as the cinema’s double, an embodiment of the cinema’s enduring nature as a form of trickery Th e cinema, we might say, is a mechanical magician that is always acquiring new powers with innovations in motion picture technolo-gies As an automated version of its human counterpart (like an automa-ton), the cinema compels us at times to question anew how we see, know, and imagine the world and the technologies we use to represent it

To be precise, although it takes the fi gure of the magician as its object,

this book is not a history in the vein of Erik Barnouw’s Th e Magician and the Cinema (1981), a seminal work on the infl uence of fi n-de-siècle stage magic

on the emergence of motion pictures Rather it is an exploration of the long history of the cinema as a magician and the ways in which audiences learn

about techniques and technologies of the moving image through trickery

With a resemblance to the cinema’s early relationship with modernity, atrical magic has for centuries provided a forum for shaping how audiences perceive the changing landscape of the world in which they exist In the shared history of magic and the cinema, I argue, the magician and “trick-

the-ery” more broadly function as something like spaces for mediating media,

that is, for helping audiences periodically (re)discover what the cinema is

Th is idea is admitt edly exploratory, at least in spirit, but it is braced by a vast and underexplored constellation of historical practices and discourses that shines a new light on how we understand the relationship between magic and the cinema

As we will see, the cinema emerged in a culture of wonder, trickery, and display that was shaped prominently by theatrical magic prior to the 1890s Beginning in the 1700s, modern or secular (rather than occult) magicians began to present the wonders of science and technology as tricks in such a way that the magician’s game of perception—the invitation to the specta-tor to investigate and discover “how it’s done”—developed as an opportu-nity of learning about the novel and the unknown Th roughout fi lm history, magicians have made their home in the popular imagination by creat-ing similar opportunities for audiences to investigate and understand the nature, habits, and limits of the human eye, as well as the wonders of the cinema’s mechanical eye; to contemplate the machinery behind everything from the most basic illusion of cinematic motion to the imperceptible elec-tronic magic of computer-generated imagery; and to see how ideas about the nature of cinematic trickery are changing within a landscape populated

by devices of wonder that span centuries Th e potential for magicians to

mediate, shape, and renew perceptions of the cinematic experience along

these lines is att ributed in large part to the distinct mode of trickery they

represent

Trickery

every-thing from apparently supernatural phenomena and sleight-of-hand tricks

to generally astonishing spectacles and the actual experience or feeling of

wonder Although the fl uidity of the term makes it a powerful one, I mean

to invoke it here in relation to a particular kind of trick practice Th e

won-der response—“I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless”—

is bound up in a self-conscious mode of trickery that diff ers from what

we would categorize as spectacles of the supernatural or fantastic variety,

as well as from what we sometimes mean by illusionism: the deception of

a spectator or the use of techniques to create illusions that conceal

them-selves because they are not meant to be seen as illusions.

To clarify this, consider the opening sequence of Louis Leterrier’s Now

You See Me A magician ( Jesse Eisenberg) performs a trick in which he asks

a woman to pick a card from a deck of playing cards that he holds in his

hand Th e “trick” is that the magician is able to identify the card without

brief and very simple, but the magician stages it as part of a complex game

of perception In asking the woman to pick a card, the magician invites her

to look closely as he fl ips through the deck But not too closely, he explains,

because “the closer you look, the less you see.” Th e invitation makes the

inevitably surprising eff ect—the magician succeeds in choosing the

wom-an’s card—the result of a competition between the magiciwom-an’s artful sleight

of hand and the spectator’s att empt to detect the technique with which the

trick is accomplished Th e competition suggests that the object of the trick

is as much the magician choosing the right card as it is the act of playing the

magician’s game

conscious-ness of and interest in the mechanics of perceiving a trick—which is not

typical of our experience of other forms of illusion, including, to an extent,

1 4 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

our everyday experience of the cinema Richard Allen captures this tinction when he describes the cinematic experience as an experience of

dis-“projective illusion.” By this he means to emphasize how, as a spectator,

“you lose awareness of the fact that you are seeing a fi lm, that is, watching

a recorded event that is staged before the camera.”14 Th is loss of awareness, the experience of losing oneself or of being immersed in the world created

by a fi lm, supports a view of the cinema as a transparent form of illusion,

one that does not draw att ention to itself as an illusion.

Allen’s point is well taken because it speaks to how, on an important level, the cinema and the magician can address and engage spectators dif-ferently Particularly in the context of fi ction fi lm, the immersive eff ects of narrative and world building tend not to invite or provoke the kind of skep-ticism on which magicians base the success of their tricks Put diff erently,

we might say that “generally” the act of viewing fi ction fi lms is shaped erfully by the idea that audiences “suspend disbelief ” in order to take plea-sure in the stories the fi lms tell Precisely how and to what extent disbelief is actually suspended is a matt er beyond the scope of this book However, the idea that something like this happens all the time when we watch fi lms is undeniable By contrast, as Peter Lamont claims, taking pleasure in a magi-cian’s trick “requires disbelief (that it can happen) based on a conviction (that, in these conditions, it is impossible) in order for the eff ect (but it just

Granting the inarguable fact that our experiences of fi ction fi lms do not typically involve wondering at the cinema as a trick, it is equally inarguable that the matt er is much more complex than the invocation of the idea of suspension of disbelief allows Even within the context of narrative cinema, the experience of being immersed in a story world is itself embedded in lay-ers of awareness and skepticism, wonderment and play, which are not easily separable from the “spell” under which we frequently fi nd ourselves in the cinema In dialogue with Stephen Prince’s important scholarship on digi-tal visual eff ects, for example, Kristen Whissel has insightfully mapped the ways in which, rather than undermining the immersive eff ects of storytell-ing, spectacular digital eff ects and the wonder responses they generate can have crucial narrative functions.16

Th is constellation of immersion, wonder, and skepticism is central to the shared history of magic and the cinema explored in the pages that follow In addition to magicians’ encounters with nonfi ction fi lm and media, many of the

examples discussed in this book are fi ction fi lms that reveal how the cinematic

experience is periodically renewed, made unfamiliar, when the cinema declares

itself as a device of wonder Without disregarding the importance of narrative

and “projective illusion,” I focus specifi cally on the ways in which onscreen

appearances of magicians and their tricks have renewed and defamiliarized

how spectators see the cinema by inviting them to engage with the cinema

as one might engage with the magician’s game of perception In what follows,

therefore, “trickery” refers to a context in which the cinema’s audience, as Tom

Gunning puts it, occupies “a position inside the illusion that not only

acknowl-edges deception but also possesses an awareness of its means.”17 Th is position is

an underexplored but potentially illuminating one in that it can promote both

an interest in the unnoticed or imperceptible machinery (or means) behind

cinematic tricks and an awareness of otherwise unconscious habits of

percep-tion in the cinema

Moreover, although elements of supernatural and occult forms of magic

play signifi cant roles in our conception of the cinema as an illusion,

rep-resentations of stage magicians and their tricks address spectators in ways

that are more immediately relevant to a central premise of this book:

cin-ema audiences always know that they are beholding a trick that can be

explained Excluded from my account, therefore, are those kinds of

fantas-tic creatures, worlds, or spectacles that populate, say, the Lord of the Rings

(2001–2003) and Harry Pott er (2001–2011) fi lms, which represent magic in

the vein of sorcery rather than theatrical magic Th is exclusion is based on

the fact that such spectacles do not provide the same pleasures or promote

the same acute interest in discovering “how it’s done” that magic tricks do

Th is is not to say that the supernatural is irrelevant to the shared history of

magic and the cinema explored here Very fi ne scholarship has been (and

continues to be) done on fi lm and the supernatural—namely by Rachel

Moore and Murray Leeder—and the overlap of this topic with my own will

be clarifi ed when necessary.18

Particularly in the context of digital cinema culture, the potential for

trickery to renew or shape how audiences perceive the cinema has

mani-fested notably in the light of fi lms about explaining how magicians’ tricks

are done In Now You See Me, for example, the FBI investigates a troupe of

magicians because it appears that one of their tricks is tied to a series of

bank heists Explaining how the trick works becomes the means by which

the FBI hopes to solve the crimes Released within a month of each other,

1 6 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

Christopher Nolan’s Th e Prestige and Neil Burger’s Th e Illusionist employ

similar narratives about fi ctional nineteenth-century stage magicians and

how they perform their illusions In Th e Illusionist a detective is

investi-gating a magician whose ghostly apparition tricks persistently elude the

grasp of rational explanation In Th e Prestige two rival magicians att empt to

demystify each other’s tricks in a series of investigations that reveal how one

of the magicians has harnessed a new form of “electronic” magic (not cidentally reminiscent of the digital “magic” of CGI) that seems to trouble the very idea of trickery itself

coin-Martin Scorsese’s Hugo maps this interest in “how it’s done” onto a

fi lm’s centerpiece is one of Georges Méliès’s most recognizable trick fi lms,

A Trip to the Moon (1902), which is framed as the object of a fi ctional

inves-tigation by a young boy—aided by a fi lm historian—into the infl uence of nineteenth-century stage magic practices on the emergence of the cinema and subsequent innovations in cinematic special eff ects By using twenty-

fi rst-century computer animation and 3-D technologies to represent the

shared history of fi n-de-siècle stage and screen practices, Hugo off ers its

audiences the opportunity to virtually experience the wonders of early ema As we will see, this “fantastic voyage” into the cinema’s past has sig-nifi cant implications for how we envision and write the long history of the cinema as a device of wonder

cin-In no way should these recent cases be seen as evidence of a trend that

mani-fested in the proliferation of early trick fi lms Whereas the early union of magic and the cinema was shaped by fi n-de-siècle theatrical magic cultures, our experience of the cinema as a device of wonder in the twenty-fi rst cen-tury has been radically transformed by the “new” media landscape in which the cinema now exists Given that fi lms are available for viewing in spaces

as awe-inspiring as an IMAX theater and on devices as small as a cell phone,

it is diffi cult and arguably useless to talk about a singular or unifi ed ematic experience.” Th e scale and variety of contexts in which an individual

“cin-fi lm can be viewed, as well as the changes in circulation and access brought about by digital technologies, demand that we acknowledge that even the idea of a cinematic experience has changed

Because “cinema” is, in a sense, everywhere, our immersion in a ture pervaded by moving-image media means that we wonder at fi lms

cul-diff erently than early cinema audiences wondered at them Th is obvious

fact is nonetheless important because it raises diffi cult questions: Does the

cinema still cause us to wonder in the way that wondering can be a deeply

moving experience? Does our familiarity with the cinema undermine its

power as a device of wonder? If not, what specifi cally makes the cinema

wonderful in the twenty-fi rst century? Or, rather, what does the experience

of wonder look like more than a century aft er the emergence of the cinema?

Th e premise of this book is that the enduring affi nity between magic and

motion pictures throughout fi lm history confi rms that these questions are

central to our contemporary moment, and that the domain of “magic” is a

most valuable guide in seeking answers

In an important way, the history of magic and the cinema resembles

the history of wonder, which, in Wonders and the Order of Nature (2001),

Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have shown to be a historically

vari-able term, idea, and response Of utmost importance here is the idea that

the similarities and diff erences between what it means to wonder at the

cin-ema as a form of magic now and what it meant at the end of the nineteenth

century are crucial to our understanding of how the relationship between

magic, wonder, and the cinema has changed over the course of the

twen-tieth century Equally important, the contemporary interest in theatrical

magic speaks to a profound ability of magicians and their tricks to incite

audiences to wonder at the cinema as a medium that has resonated strongly

with the techniques and technologies of magical practice for more than a

century

Cinema, Magic, Archaeology

In order to bring the study of magic in early cinema fi rmly into the

contem-porary moment, this book makes its home in both cinema studies and the

developing fi eld of media archaeology According to Erkki Huhtamo and

Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is a method of studying fi lm and related

media that emphasizes the longue durée in order “to construct alternate

his-tories of suppressed, neglected, and forgott en media that do not point

tele-ologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection.’”19

Scholars like Laurent Mannoni, Siegfried Zielinski, and Tom Gunning

have looked through this lens at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual

18 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

cultures to show how the emergence of the cinema in the 1890s was not a culmination of technological “advancements” in audiovisual media but was rather one innovation in a broader landscape of optical devices and trick

André Gaudreault, and Matt hew Solomon have done similar foundational work to trace the intermedial development of early cinema by and against established media cultures that formed the context for the introduction of motion pictures.21

By focusing on the “long” shared history of magic and the cinema, I mean to invoke, reanimate, and elaborate the kind of seminal work Musser

did with his “history of screen practice” and Mannoni did in Th e Great Art

of Light and Shadow (2000) Animated by Mannoni’s spirit as an archivist,

collector, curator, and historian, Th e Great Art expands the early history

of the cinema to include a constellation of technologies and practices that

both in the sense that it is full of wondrous devices, spectacles, and tices and in the sense that, at the time the book was published, it dramati-cally renewed how the history of the cinema was perceived Mannoni, for example, ventured into relatively uncharted territory in scholarship on the cinema—the margins of canonical fi lm histories—and mapped the cine-ma’s kinship with old and arcane media and practices, like Giovanni Batt ista della Porta’s sixteenth-century natural magic and camera obscura shows

“archaeology of the cinema.”

Although Th e Great Art is not without its teleological impulses,22 one of Mannoni’s major contributions to reimagining the origins of the cinema is the idea that looking back beyond late nineteenth-century visual culture leads to the discovery of complex genealogies of proto-cinematic media that intersect and overlap with great density and diversity Here “geneal-ogy” should be taken in the Foucauldian sense of “an unstable assemblage

of faults, fi ssures, and heterogeneous layers,” not an “unbroken ity” that marks a lineage traceable to some ancestral origin.23 Zielinski has described this in similar archaeological and geological terms to emphasize how the histories of fi lm and related media consist of layers like the strata

continu-of the earth’s surface, which he calls the “deep time continu-of media.” Gunning tures the “deep time” model when he commends Mannoni’s archaeology of the cinema for revealing how “the device we recognize as motion pictures,

cap-when traced backwards, fragments and multiplies, unraveling a skein of

infl uences and practices that move back into centuries-thick layers of

cul-ture and history.”24

Balancing fi lm analysis with archival research, this book takes up a

similar project of unraveling the long history of the cinema as a device of

wonder Its object is a constellation of “old” and “new” discourses,

exhibi-tion and recepexhibi-tion practices, regimes of belief, and epistemic systems with

which magicians and (proto-)cinematic technologies have interacted from

the eighteenth century to the present With a resemblance to the

interme-diality of early cinema, for example, digital cinema is part of a visual culture

in which computer-based trickery proliferates, not simply in motion

pic-tures but also on the Internet and in television, video games, amusement

parks, and museums Carefully describing this constellation involves being

very specifi c about what “magic” has meant to cinema audiences in a

vari-ety of contexts—historical ones but also genre-related ones, including

sci-ence and nonfi ction fi lms, animated fi lms, and special eff ects fi lms It also

demands a mode of “thick description” that, as Lisa Gitelman and Geoff rey

Pingree have shown, roots the diff erences and similarities between old and

new media in their historical contexts.25

By bringing these methods and perspectives to bear on the study of

magic and the cinema, we can begin to rediscover what it means to

won-der at motion pictures To do this we must make our way into the realm of

secrecy that Orson Welles, like all magicians, reserves only for other

magi-cians who seek to discover “how it’s done.” Th e cinema’s ability to cause us

to wonder is sustained partly by this promise of the possibility of discovery,

and partly by our persistent interest in uncovering the secrets of the cinema

As in the magician’s game of perception, the cinema constantly invites us to

investigate these secrets with the promise that our uncertainties about the

medium will no doubt be renewed by the cinema’s capacity for producing

ever-new enchantments But by becoming detectives and playing the game,

we will also have our eyes opened in new and unexpected ways to the magic

of the cinema As Welles would have it, the reader proceeds at magic’s risk

Th e Wonder Response and the

Emergence of the Cinema

All incitation to inquiry is born of the novel, the uncommon, and the imperfectly understood

—Ernst Mach, “Th e Propensity toward the Marvelous”

An early scene in Ingmar Bergman’s fi lm Th e Magician (Ansiktet,

1958) foregrounds a curious and distinctive dimension of modern stage magic: the impulse to investigate the techniques behind magicians’ tricks

Th e fi lm centers on an itinerant magic troupe known as Vogler’s Magnetic

nineteenth-century Stockholm and escorted to the house of the city trate Th e motivation for the troupe’s arrest at the border is the deeply trou-bling question of whether the leading magician, Vogler (Max von Sydow), possesses supernatural powers or whether his magic is the result of puzzling but rationally explicable tricks only cloaked in the guise of the supernatural

of hypnotizing spectators and controlling their minds, a claim that has also

hinges on the possibility of explaining this Mind Control trick, because a completely rational answer for “how it’s done” will position Vogler’s illu-sions on the benevolent side of wonder rather than on the dark, potentially malevolent side of the inexplicable

Th e centrality of rationalism and explanation in trickery surfaces when

Vogler’s assistant and manager, Tubal (Åke Fridell), urges the cohort to be

careful when speaking to the city’s offi cials Tubal is particularly concerned

to caution Vogler’s grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), a supposed witch

whose mysterious antics have caused serious problems with audiences in

the past, some of which put the troupe in mortal danger Chiding the old

lady for apparently exercising occult powers at previous performances,

which it is suggested involved conjuring ghosts, turning tables (in the

Spiri-tualist tradition), and creating magical potions, Tubal claims: “Granny’s

tricks are out of date Th ey’re not amusing, as they can’t be explained.”

Although his remark is delivered lightly, the implied problem with this

“old” magic is quite profound By skirting the possibility of demystifi cation

altogether, Granny’s “tricks” might expose the limits of spectators’

capaci-ties for explaining wondrous phenomena, as well as spectators’

powerless-ness over their perceptions Losing control in this way would undermine

the playfulness that makes magicians’ tricks so pleasurable; it would also

compromise a sense of reality as something that can be mastered through

vision and rational thought

Th e Magician positions Vogler’s magic somewhere between Granny’s old

magic and a kind of harmless and superfi cial trickery Th e story is organized

around a rigorous investigation by a scientist, the Royal Medical Adviser,

Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), into the techniques behind Vogler’s

illu-sions Vergerus embodies the unwavering skepticism one would expect of a

man of science confronted with rumors of supernatural powers By means

of questioning and close observation, he tries to determine how the Mind

Control trick works Th e scientist’s goal is to expose the magician as a fraud

because, as Vergerus explains, if Vogler’s tricks were truly inexplicable, the

modern scientifi c enterprise would crumble, along with Vergerus’s faith

that “everything can be explained.”

Early in the interrogation, Vogler’s wife (Ingrid Th ulin), disguised as

his apprentice, Mr Aman, quickly disavows supernaturalism and claims

that Vogler’s tricks can be traced to the clever but harmless use of “devices,

mirrors, and projections.” Vergerus is not interested in what he considers

to be the obviously dubious “hocus pocus” of magic What unsett les him

is the very possibility that the illusions he witnesses cannot be explained

For the duration of the fi lm, the troupe is detained at the magistrate’s

house, where they are forced to perform their act under Vergerus’s scrutiny

22 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

However, try as he might Vergerus cannot fi nd a way to explain the Mind Control trick, and the scientifi c investigation of Vogler’s tricks is ultimately inconclusive Neither Vergerus nor the fi lmgoer ever fi nds out whether or not the magician possesses supernatural powers

By pitt ing Vogler against Vergerus, Th e Magician stages a game of

percep-tion that has animated the experience of wondering at magicians’ tricks for centuries Th is game is played by what I call the “magic professor” and the

“spectator detective,” competing fi gures whose respective goals are to

con-ceal and to detect how a trick works In Th e Magician, for example, Vergerus

(the detective) ultimately loses the game to Vogler (the professor) who manages to thwart the expert’s att empts at discovering the magician’s secret techniques In the history of secular stage magic, the interplay between concealment and detection has taken shape largely as a game because its object is not so much deceit as it is a kind of playing with the boundaries between authenticity and fakery, reality and unreality

At least since the eighteenth century, audiences have taken great sure in competing with the virtuosity of magicians who perfected a form of self-conscious trickery that was premised simultaneously on astonishment and the possibility of demystifi cation By gesturing at once symbolically to the supernatural and technically to the explanatory powers of science and reason, “modern” magicians made the experience of wonder inseparable

did the magician do it?” was wedded to the purposive search for a tory answer

satisfac-Th e pleasure of this game, to be precise, is not necessarily in the ery of “how it’s done” but in the act of playing the game, that is, the expe-rience of trying and almost always failing to thwart the magician’s tricks

discov-Th e affi nity between intellectual curiosity and such a self-conscious form

of trickery challenges a pervasive view of stage magic as simply a forum for displaying deluding or amusing spectacles With a resemblance to the pop-ular science demonstrations and philosophical toys that proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stage magic developed not as a voyage beyond knowledge into the inexplicable but as an occasion for contemplat-ing and learning about the obscure and the unknown

Stage magic’s dramatic affi nity for the extraordinary, the unknown, and the supernatural was thus largely mediated by the question that lay at the heart of Tubal’s critique of Granny: What is the att raction of a trick that

can be explained rationally, as opposed to one that invokes the supernatural

and thus refuses reason altogether? As we will see, this question was

cen-tral to the dominant themes, regimes of belief, and scientifi c-technological

innovations that shaped and distinguished the culture of eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century stage magic as a complex form of educational

entertain-ment It is also central to our familiar experience of the cinema as a device

of wonder, that is, as a kind of “mechanical magician” whose techniques of

trickery are at work behind everything from the illusion of movement itself

to the wonders of computer-generated imagery (CGI) In fact, the pursuit

and discovery of knowledge through illusions are at the heart of the

won-der associated with beholding the eff ects of the innovative techniques and

technologies that have changed (and continue to change) how we see and

experience the cinema

Between Witchcraft and Science

By sett ing Th e Magician in the nineteenth century, Bergman invokes a very

specifi c tradition of magical practices that resonated profoundly with the

emergence of the cinema in the 1890s Vergerus explains that Vogler’s magic

is of “scientifi c interest” because his tricks appear to waver between

mes-merism and the occult, on the one hand, and science and entertainment,

on the other Explaining the magician’s tricks would affi rm the power of

sci-ence over the irrational But Vergerus has no doubt that he will succeed in

this, and the investigation becomes an opportunity to pit his skills as a

sci-entist against Vogler’s skills as a magician Th roughout the fi lm, moreover,

Vogler is referred to interchangeably as a magician, a conjuror, a fraud, a

doctor, and a scientist, and his illusions are claimed to be the apparently

supernatural eff ects of otherwise simple “devices, mirrors, and projections.”

Early in the fi lm, for example, Vogler is accused of harboring occult powers

because he is rumored to be able to “evoke stimulating and terrible visions”

during his performances It is later revealed, however, that the magician has

been touring with a magic lantern, a mechanical device of wonder that has

become a centerpiece in the shared histories of magic, science, and the fi eld

of proto-cinema

As a dialectical and highly ambiguous fi gure, Vogler represents a

his-torical opposition between old (occult) and new (secular) magics that was

2 4 H i d d en i n P l a i n Sight

fueled by two developments: modern stage magic’s emergence within the context of Enlightenment critiques of the occult, and nineteenth-century proclamations of the death of the supernatural at the hands of modern sci-ence In his introduction to a seminal fi n-de-siècle treatise on magical prac-tice Henry Ridgely Evans announced, “Science has laughed away sorcery, witchcraft , and necromancy.”1 What was left of magic, once the laughter had quieted, was a form of trickery performed by magicians whose coiled rela-tionship with science, spectacle, and investigation remains a largely unexca-vated site of media-related inquiry (partly because modern magic is oft en treated merely as a source of delightful entertainment, partly because of magic’s own principles of secrecy, misinformation, and deceit) Stage mag-ic’s profound cultural relevance as a project of the Enlightenment is also usually upstaged by the misleadingly showy fi gure of the magician, whose entertaining tricks simply follow suit

Figure 2 Vogler the magician (in the background) operating a magic lantern while the “ghost” of an actor (in the foreground) marvels at the device’s projected image

Reproduced from Th e Magician (Ansiktet), directed by Ingmar Bergman (Svensk

Filmindustri, 1958), DVD.

But if we take seriously the idea that trickery is as much about

entertain-ment and deception as it is about the possibility of investigation and

dis-covery, then we can begin to see the magician’s affi nities with the cinema

in a new light Prior to the 1890s, modern magic was widely presented as

a harbinger of progress because it appealed to modern science rather than

religion and superstition.2 In the nineteenth century, stage magicians like

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, John Henry Anderson, John Nevil Maskelyne,

and George Albert Cooke turned away from the realm of fear, beguilement,

and the supernatural and reorganized magic around the performance of

“miracles” in the name of scientifi c discovery With a resemblance to early

cinema’s middle-class appeal as a safeguard against the social deviance and

immorality associated with nickelodeons, modern magicians, particularly

under the infl uence of the preeminent French mechanic, inventor, and

pres-tidigitator Robert-Houdin, sought “to establish the conjuror as a

‘respect-able’ kind of entertainer.”3

question in the nineteenth century was whether the illusions of sorcery,

witchcraft , and necromancy could be made acceptable as forms of rational

theatrical entertainment for polite society Secular stage magic was thus

conceived as an intricate critique of the supernatural Against the

aesthet-ics and rhetoric of occult séances, for example, Robert-Houdin off ered his

audiences magic performances that were stripped down and scientifi c in

tone and appearance When he debuted his tricks at the Soirées fantastiques

in a small theater at the Parisian Palais-Royal in 1845, Robert-Houdin used

no atmospheric objects to cultivate an air of the supernatural, no full-length

tablecloths to blatantly conceal the operations of sleight-of-hand tricks He

also opted for the evening dress of polite society and engaged his audiences

with plain speech that appealed to the intellect rather than to credulity His

performances were presented as “experiments,” which he claimed were

“divested of all charlatanism, and possess[ed] no other resources than those

off ered by skillful manipulation, and the infl uence of illusions.”4

Th is pursuit of respectability was more than a superfi cial reform of the

presentation of illusions, however According to Simon During,

“Robert-Houdin negated the triviality and cultural nullity of magic by bringing to

the stage the prestige of the inventor and scientist.”5 Th e Soirées fantastiques

featured not only performances of mysterious levitations and

disappear-ances but also trick automata, electromagnetism, and optical conjuring, or