Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema 9780813572567

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HIDDEN IN PL AIN SIGHT An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema

Colin W illi a mson

Rutger s Un iv er sit y Press New 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 effects— History. 3. Magic tricks in motion pictures. I. Title. TR858.W63 2015 777—dc23 2014046208 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. 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 written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

HIDDEN IN PL AIN SIGHT

Volumes in the Techniques of the Moving Image series explore the relationship between what we see onscreen and the technical achievements undertaken in filmmaking to make this possible. Books explore some defined aspect of cinema—work from a particular era, work in a particular genre, work by a particular filmmaker or team, work from a particular studio, or work on a particular 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 Pomerance Series Editor

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism

For my parents, Jim and Diane, and my wife, Ariel

CONTENTS

1 2 3 4 5 6

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Watching Closely

1

(De)Mystifying Tricks: The Wonder Response and the Emergence of the Cinema

20

Quicker than the Eye: Science, Cinema, and the Question of Vision

46

Second Sight: Time Lapse and the Cinema as Seer

70

The Enchanted Screen: Performing the Cinema’s Illusion of Life

100

Digital Prestidigitation: The Eclipse of the Cinema’s Mechanical Magic

129

Through Digital Eyes: Reanimating Early Cinema

155

Conclusion: Other Obscurities and Illuminations

185

Notes Index

195 223

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began when I was an undergraduate student in film studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where I developed an interest in the cinema’s relationship with animation, science, and technology. That interest has changed in ways that continue not only to surprise me but also to remind me how much I owe to a group of people whose encouragements, insights, and criticisms 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 influential as a benchmark for the kind of balanced and careful scholarship I have pursued here. Very early on, Miriam Hansen, Edward Branigan, Jennifer Wild, and Judy Hoffman 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 offered illuminating commentary and edits on drafts of several chapters, and Matthew Solomon at the University 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 final drafts 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 benefited tremendously from the spirit and rigor these individuals 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 ix

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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. The majority of the writing that went into this book was made possible by a postdoctoral research fellowship I was awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in conjunction with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. The fellowship provided me with a unique opportunity to workshop various drafts of my project with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Through seminars, presentations, and conversations in this context I was able to navigate the many challenges 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 reflected strongly in the many pages that follow. I am grateful to Philippe Gauthier, Hannah Frank, Artemis Willis, Phil Kaffen, 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 offered very helpful criticism 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 effects was influenced 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 particular helped me rethink the relevance of Georges Méliès to my argument and gave me valuable insight into the afterlife of my project. Several of the chapters in this book also benefited 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

Acknowledgments

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Effects conference hosted by André Gaudreault, Martin Lefebvre, and Viva Paci in Montreal (2013), and the Thirteenth International Domitor Conference (2014). A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as “Quicker Than the Eye? Sleight of Hand and Cinemas of Scientific Discovery from Chronophotography to Cognitive Film Theory,” Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology (doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_00810), print publication forthcoming in 2016. An early version of chapter 4 appeared as “The Blow 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 Getty 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 Buffin and India Osborne-Buffin of BUF Compagnie for their comprehensive feedback on my research questions. The 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 Sciences, 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

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indebted to John Garner for the good conversations and philosophical debates, to Deb Peck and Scout for their much-needed support in the final 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. The Appelbaums have been exceptionally generous in the many years that I have known them. Their warmth and kindness in this and countless other respects has carried me a long way. To my parents, Jim and Diane, and my brothers, Brendan and Conner, I am forever grateful. Thank you for your 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. Thank you for never letting me forget what a wonderful thing it is to love the movies. In undertaking this project I could not have asked for a better friend.

HIDDEN IN PL AIN SIGHT

INTRODUCTION Watching Closely

The reader proceeds at magic’s risk. —Orson Welles

When the “cinemagician” Orson Welles wrote these words for Bruce Elliott’s 1958 handbook of performing magic, he was in the midst of a heartfelt lament. Once considered a coveted and transformative form of entertainment, by the mid-twentieth century “modern” or “secular” stage magic had “fallen into decadence.” According to Welles, stage magicians 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 This game is one in which the magician 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 nonetheless.”2 It is a game audiences take great pleasure in playing and losing, 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 astonish 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 1

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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 see again with wondering eyes.3 A similar interplay between wonder and rediscovery weaves through the shared history of magic and the cinema. The cinema has been prominently associated with the domain of magic since its emergence in the 1890s, when stage magicians appropriated the new medium and explored its potential as a form of mechanical magic. In our everyday experience of motion pictures, however, particularly in the twenty-first 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 effects can shock us into an awareness of the cinema’s capacity for trickery.4 But even beyond the scope of special effects, cinemagoers have long been fascinated with the power of moving-image technologies, like the magician, to enchant and astonish, to baffle and awe. This fascination has flickered 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 film and related media. This book explores how cinematic tricks can transform the everyday experience of motion pictures by compelling audiences to wonder anew at the cinema. Throughout film history the cinema has been inseparable from the figure 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. The 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 effects. The art of magic, we might say, is the art of obscurity crafted 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 . . .?”

Introduction

3

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 possibility. 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), scientific discoveries, and baffling natural and artificial phenomena. It is precisely this complementarity of trickery and demystification 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 unified significantly by a “desire” for knowledge, an impulse to explain “how it’s done.” Granted, many spectators beholding stage or cinematic tricks undoubtedly 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 phenomenon that we experience as wonderful defines our sense of being tricked and not credulous. Indeed, the fact that we wonder at the cinema rather than flee in terror from it confirms 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 discourses and scholarship on magic and the cinema. The first involves expanding the history of the cinema’s affinities with the rhetoric, practices, and experiences of theatrical magic tricks. The second involves rethinking the role of the magician in the cinema as more than providing entertainment and reflecting the wondrousness of motion picture technologies. The

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third involves using the figure of the magician to understand precisely what it is that compels audiences, even in the twenty-first 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 invitation to the spectator to become a detective and attempt to demystify the wonder that the magician is about to perform. The game of perception that ensues is premised on the spectator’s search for techniques that the skilled magician obscures with deft hands and calculated uses 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 wonder 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 figure of the magician holds a prominent place both in the study of the cinema and in the popular cinematic imagination. Early intersections between magicians and motion pictures, for example, continue to provide film scholars with profound avenues of insight into the media fantasies, discourses on perception, and regimes of belief that shape the landscape of the cinematic experience. Moreover, in addition to inflecting central questions in a variety of domains, including film theory and animation studies, histories and theories of magic have been employed to significantly reframe and expand the study of film history to include centuries-old practices and technologies that comprise the field of so-called pre- or proto-cinema. In popular culture, the association of magic with the cinema is so ubiquitous and multifarious that the invocation of the word magic threatens to obscure as much as it promises to illuminate the phenomenon being described. What

Introduction

5

precisely is meant by commonplace references to “movie magic” and “the magic of special effects,” for example? The first decade of the cinema has drawn the most attention 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. These encounters were largely animated by the figure of Georges Méliès, who is frequently celebrated as a central pioneer and “father” of the trick film. Trick films typically featured magicians producing fantastic spectacles with the aid of novel cinematic trick techniques, like substitutions, superimpositions, 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 omnipresence in the history of the early twentieth-century French theatrical magic and film cultures is undeniable, and his contributions to innovations in early cinematic special effects 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 history of magic and the cinema tends to focus on the rise and fall of the trick film. Matthew Solomon has demonstrated comprehensively that the union of magic and early cinema “flourished . . . when stage magic and trick films were fundamentally linked both in the popular imagination as well as through concrete practices of production and exhibition.”6 With the stabilization 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 fortified. In conjunction with the end of the cinema’s novelty period, the visible magic of early trick films began to morph into special effects and more obscure(d) forms of magic—such as classical narrative strategies and “invisible” editing techniques. Eventually, 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 films of magicians like Méliès and his contemporaries Gaston Velle and Segundo de Chomón. Harry Houdini starred in a series of films in which he performs magic acts and stunts: The Master Mystery (Grossman and King,

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1919), Terror Island (Cruze, 1920), and The Man from Beyond (King, 1922). During the transition to synchronized sound, magicians resurfaced prominently in films like The Last Performance (Fejos, 1929) and Illusion (Mendes, 1929)—a topic that, although it will not be broached here, is significantly illuminated by the history detailed in this book.7 Stage magic also made some bizarre appearances in horror films like The Mad Magician (Brahm, 1954) and Herschell Gordon Lewis’s famous The Wizard of Gore (1970), both of which feature magicians whose tricks are intimately wrapped up in acts of real violence and murder. Some magicians are currently making and appearing in films—for example, Tim’s Vermeer (2013), by Raymond Teller of Penn and Teller, and The Magic History of Cinema (Garrett and Sutton, 2015), a documentary about the enduring affinities 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 film Death Defying Acts (2007) and the History Channel’s television miniseries Houdini (2014). Magicians and their tricks are the centerpieces of films like The Prestige (Nolan, 2006), The 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 film about magic and early cinema, Hugo (2011). The release of these more recent films coincided with a renewed interest in the fact that digital technologies continue to pose difficult questions 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 to make this distinction is such an important part of the cinematic experience, and about the changing landscapes of film theory, history, and historiography. Since the early 2000s, cinema scholars like Angela Ndalianis, Michele Pierson, and Dan North, among others, have looked to the domain of nineteenth-century theatrical magic practices for insights into how computer-generated imagery (CGI) works as a form of trickery.8 Broadly, as Ndalianis explains, the object of this interest in the magic that defined the early cinema period is the uncanny ability of digital technologies to “further [blur] the line between reality and illusion.”9 This 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 artificially with the aid of digital tricks. The difficulty 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

Introduction

7

ones, which CGI is capable of making look and feel so real that we find ourselves surprisingly uncertain about phenomena that we know do not “really” exist. Scholarship in this area is unified by the use of fin-de-siècle stage magic and the trick film genre as models for talking about special effects illusions, broadly construed. Pierson’s seminal analysis of effects “connoisseurship,” in which spectators take pleasure in gathering knowledge about special effects, begins with a study of similar viewing practices that were dominant 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 insightfully linked these practices in the nineteenth-century magic theater to the way in which special effects invite “inquisitive, critically engaged and discerning responses to the new media technologies” that have shaped cinematic trick practices throughout film history.11 Such scholarship is important both because it helped historicize digital effects and because it paved the way for developing nuanced theories of filmgoing practices, particularly with regard to science fiction and fantasy films that tend to support an otherwise superficial view of spectators as passive consumers of entertaining spectacles. The potential for the domain of magic to promote new ways of thinking and talking about the wonders of the cinema in our contemporary moment was confirmed 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 films and television specials featuring stage magicians from the late nineteenth century to the present. Like a variety show, the screenings were launched with a lecture by Matthew Solomon and then integrated with live performances by magicians. The point of “Magicians on Screen” 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 cultural landscape shortly after 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 Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal. The conference—“The Magic of Special Effects: Cinema, Technology, Reception”—hosted almost one

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hundred presenters (myself included) who looked through the lens of trickery at everything from proto-cinematic optical devices, early cinema, and classical special effects to virtual actors, computer software programs, sound technologies, and theories of movement, animation, and even “magic” itself. The incredible range of approaches to the topic testified to the almost overwhelming pervasiveness of magic as a category that audiences and scholars alike draw upon in order to understand the many layers of the cinematic experience. It also confirmed the need for specificity in invoking magic in this way, lest it become unwieldy. Ultimately, the overall 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. This book is very much in dialogue with the study of the so-called magic of special effects, but it moves in a different register and has a different goal. Most good scholarship on the experience of wonder in the cinema tends to move outward from the early intersection of magicians and motion pictures to more generalized considerations of the aesthetic, phenomenological, and historical dimensions of cinematic spectacles. But what precisely does it mean to call special effects “tricks”? And what makes the cinema “magical”? Rather than theorizing special effects or the experience thereof, this book roots these questions and the enduring invocation of “magic” in a specific constellation of trick techniques and practices that comprise the shared history of magic and the cinema. Doing this means shifting our attention away from a broad theoretical discourse on moving-image illusions toward a related question about the history of the cinema: How and to what extent do the tricks of digital technologies resonate with the manual and mechanical magic of early cinema? Understanding what unifies the long history of magic and the cinema from this perspective is a project that has significant implications for how we see and think about techniques and technologies of illusion in the cinema. My primary goal is to use this history to show how the figure of the magician remains crucial to our understanding of what it means to wonder 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 film, or

Introduction

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special effects 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 dramatically expanding the history of the cinema. For hundreds of years prior to the emergence of the cinema, these devices moved significantly 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 uncertainty that we might associate with the magician’s tricks or the realm of the uncanny. Such uncertainty is significant 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 Stafford, Werner Nekes, and Frances Terpak, who have made significant contributions to expanding the intermedial and interdisciplinary study of film and related media. With regard to a 2001–2002 exhibition at the Getty Museum titled “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen,” which inspired my early research in this area, Stafford captures an influential 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 perspectives circulating in media studies as well as in art history, philosophy, and the history of science and technology. The enduring popular interest in magic reflects an almost intuitive but surprisingly underdeveloped idea that, guided by Stafford’s claim about

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the confluence of art and science, will serve as a unifying thread throughout this book: the cinema is literally a magician. Orson Welles’s 1974 film F for Fake captures this idea most succinctly. F for Fake is a film 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 film 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 film about trickery, fraud, about lies. .  .  . During the next hour everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.” The line between fact and fiction, truth and lies, is immediately obscured when Welles performs a seemingly unending series of rhetorical sleights of hand. For the duration of the film 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. The film, Welles confesses, is simply that: a film 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-reflexive motif that punctuates the film. Intercut with the story of Elmyr are sequences of Welles filming F for Fake and editing it on a machine called a Moviola. These peeks behind the scenes are also part of the magician’s game of perception. The editing table, for example, contains a screen on which Welles is viewing the film as he is crafting it. (This 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). The 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 film 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 film as a trick, he also invites us to wonder at the nature of viewing any film 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

Figure 1. Orson Welles editing F for Fake on a Moviola. Reproduced from F for Fake,

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

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the trick film 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. The cinema, we might say, is a mechanical magician that is always acquiring new powers with innovations in motion picture technologies. As an automated version of its human counterpart (like an automaton), 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 figure of the magician as its object, this book is not a history in the vein of Erik Barnouw’s The Magician and the Cinema (1981), a seminal work on the influence of fin-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, theatrical 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 “trickery” more broadly function as something like spaces for mediating media, that is, for helping audiences periodically (re)discover what the cinema is. This idea is admittedly 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 spectator to investigate and discover “how it’s done”—developed as an opportunity of learning about the novel and the unknown. Throughout film history, magicians have made their home in the popular imagination by creating 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 electronic magic of computer-generated imagery; and to see how ideas about the nature of cinematic trickery are changing within a landscape populated

Introduction

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by devices of wonder that span centuries. The potential for magicians to mediate, shape, and renew perceptions of the cinematic experience along these lines is attributed in large part to the distinct mode of trickery they represent.

Trickery The term magic conjures a wide range of associations that includes everything from apparently supernatural phenomena and sleight-of-hand tricks to generally astonishing spectacles and the actual experience or feeling of wonder. Although the fluidity of the term makes it a powerful one, I mean to invoke it here in relation to a particular kind of trick practice. The wonder response—“I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless”— is bound up in a self-conscious mode of trickery that differs 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 themselves 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. The “trick” is that the magician is able to identify the card without having previously seen which one the woman chose. The sleight of hand is 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 flips through the deck. But not too closely, he explains, because “the closer you look, the less you see.” The invitation makes the inevitably surprising effect—the magician succeeds in choosing the woman’s card—the result of a competition between the magician’s artful sleight of hand and the spectator’s attempt to detect the technique with which the trick is accomplished. The 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. This game presupposes an investigative viewing practice—a consciousness 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,

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our everyday experience of the cinema. Richard Allen captures this distinction when he describes the cinematic experience as an experience of “projective illusion.” By this he means to emphasize how, as a spectator, “you lose awareness of the fact that you are seeing a film, that is, watching a recorded event that is staged before the camera.”14 This loss of awareness, the experience of losing oneself or of being immersed in the world created by a film, supports a view of the cinema as a transparent form of illusion, one that does not draw attention 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 differently. Particularly in the context of fiction film, the immersive effects of narrative and world building tend not to invite or provoke the kind of skepticism on which magicians base the success of their tricks. Put differently, we might say that “generally” the act of viewing fiction films is shaped powerfully by the idea that audiences “suspend disbelief ” in order to take pleasure in the stories the films tell. Precisely how and to what extent disbelief is actually suspended is a matter beyond the scope of this book. However, the idea that something like this happens all the time when we watch films is undeniable. By contrast, as Peter Lamont claims, taking pleasure in a magician’s trick “requires disbelief (that it can happen) based on a conviction (that, in these conditions, it is impossible) in order for the effect (but it just happened) to produce the experience.”15 Granting the inarguable fact that our experiences of fiction films do not typically involve wondering at the cinema as a trick, it is equally inarguable that the matter 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 layers of awareness and skepticism, wonderment and play, which are not easily separable from the “spell” under which we frequently find ourselves in the cinema. In dialogue with Stephen Prince’s important scholarship on digital visual effects, for example, Kristen Whissel has insightfully mapped the ways in which, rather than undermining the immersive effects of storytelling, spectacular digital effects and the wonder responses they generate can have crucial narrative functions.16 This 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 nonfiction film and media, many of the

Introduction

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examples discussed in this book are fiction films 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 specifically 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 acknowledges deception but also possesses an awareness of its means.”17 This 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 perception in the cinema. Moreover, although elements of supernatural and occult forms of magic play significant roles in our conception of the cinema as an illusion, representations of stage magicians and their tricks address spectators in ways that are more immediately relevant to a central premise of this book: cinema audiences always know that they are beholding a trick that can be explained. Excluded from my account, therefore, are those kinds of fantastic creatures, worlds, or spectacles that populate, say, the Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and Harry Potter (2001–2011) films, which represent magic in the vein of sorcery rather than theatrical magic. This 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. This is not to say that the supernatural is irrelevant to the shared history of magic and the cinema explored here. Very fine scholarship has been (and continues to be) done on film and the supernatural—namely by Rachel Moore and Murray Leeder—and the overlap of this topic with my own will be clarified 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 manifested notably in the light of films 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,

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Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist employ similar narratives about fictional nineteenth-century stage magicians and how they perform their illusions. In The Illusionist a detective is investigating a magician whose ghostly apparition tricks persistently elude the grasp of rational explanation. In The Prestige two rival magicians attempt 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 coincidentally reminiscent of the digital “magic” of CGI) that seems to trouble the very idea of trickery itself. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo maps this interest in “how it’s done” onto a similar detective story about the early history of magic and the cinema. The film’s centerpiece is one of Georges Méliès’s most recognizable trick films, A Trip to the Moon (1902), which is framed as the object of a fictional investigation by a young boy—aided by a film historian—into the influence of nineteenth-century stage magic practices on the emergence of the cinema and subsequent innovations in cinematic special effects. By using twentyfirst-century computer animation and 3-D technologies to represent the shared history of fin-de-siècle stage and screen practices, Hugo offers its audiences the opportunity to virtually experience the wonders of early cinema. As we will see, this “fantastic voyage” into the cinema’s past has significant implications for how we envision and write the long history of the cinema as a device of wonder. In no way should these recent cases be seen as evidence of a trend that resembles the strong affinity between magic and the cinema that manifested in the proliferation of early trick films. Whereas the early union of magic and the cinema was shaped by fin-de-siècle theatrical magic cultures, our experience of the cinema as a device of wonder in the twenty-first century has been radically transformed by the “new” media landscape in which the cinema now exists. Given that films are available for viewing in spaces as awe-inspiring as an IMAX theater and on devices as small as a cell phone, it is difficult and arguably useless to talk about a singular or unified “cinematic experience.” The scale and variety of contexts in which an individual film 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 culture pervaded by moving-image media means that we wonder at films

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differently than early cinema audiences wondered at them. This obvious fact is nonetheless important because it raises difficult 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 specifically makes the cinema wonderful in the twenty-first century? Or, rather, what does the experience of wonder look like more than a century after the emergence of the cinema? The premise of this book is that the enduring affinity between magic and motion pictures throughout film history confirms 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 variable term, idea, and response. Of utmost importance here is the idea that the similarities and differences between what it means to wonder at the cinema 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 twentieth 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 firmly into the contemporary moment, this book makes its home in both cinema studies and the developing field of media archaeology. According to Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is a method of studying film and related media that emphasizes the longue durée in order “to construct alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically 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

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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 practices, what Gunning has called a “cultural optics.”20 Charles Musser, André Gaudreault, and Matthew 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 The Great Art of Light and Shadow (2000). Animated by Mannoni’s spirit as an archivist, collector, curator, and historian, The Great Art expands the early history of the cinema to include a constellation of technologies and practices that spans centuries. The history that Mannoni conjures is notably wonderful, both in the sense that it is full of wondrous devices, spectacles, and practices and in the sense that, at the time the book was published, it dramatically 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 film histories—and mapped the cinema’s kinship with old and arcane media and practices, like Giovanni Battista della Porta’s sixteenth-century natural magic and camera obscura shows. The long histories of these media comprise what Mannoni refers to as his “archaeology of the cinema.” Although The 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 “genealogy” should be taken in the Foucauldian sense of “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers,” not an “unbroken continuity” 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 film and related media consist of layers like the strata of the earth’s surface, which he calls the “deep time of media.” Gunning captures the “deep time” model when he commends Mannoni’s archaeology of the cinema for revealing how “the device we recognize as motion pictures,

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when traced backwards, fragments and multiplies, unraveling a skein of influences and practices that move back into centuries-thick layers of culture and history.”24 Balancing film 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, exhibition and reception 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 intermediality of early cinema, for example, digital cinema is part of a visual culture in which computer-based trickery proliferates, not simply in motion pictures but also on the Internet and in television, video games, amusement parks, and museums. Carefully describing this constellation involves being very specific about what “magic” has meant to cinema audiences in a variety of contexts—historical ones but also genre-related ones, including science and nonfiction films, animated films, and special effects films. It also demands a mode of “thick description” that, as Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree have shown, roots the differences 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 wonder 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 magicians who seek to discover “how it’s done.” The 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.

1 • (DE)MYSTIFYING TRICKS The 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, “The Propensity toward the Marvelous”

An early scene in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Magician (Ansiktet, 1958) foregrounds a curious and distinctive dimension of modern stage magic: the impulse to investigate the techniques behind magicians’ tricks. The film centers on an itinerant magic troupe known as Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater, which has been stopped by the police on the outskirts of nineteenth-century Stockholm and escorted to the house of the city magistrate. The motivation for the troupe’s arrest at the border is the deeply troubling 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. The uncertainty stems from the fact that Vogler is rumored to be capable of hypnotizing spectators and controlling their minds, a claim that has also been advanced for the cinema. The safe passage of the troupe ultimately hinges on the possibility of explaining this Mind Control trick, because a completely rational answer for “how it’s done” will position Vogler’s illusions on the benevolent side of wonder rather than on the dark, potentially malevolent side of the inexplicable. 20

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The 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 officials. 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 Spiritualist tradition), and creating magical potions, Tubal claims: “Granny’s tricks are out of date. They’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 demystification altogether, Granny’s “tricks” might expose the limits of spectators’ capacities for explaining wondrous phenomena, as well as spectators’ powerlessness 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. The Magician positions Vogler’s magic somewhere between Granny’s old magic and a kind of harmless and superficial trickery. The story is organized around a rigorous investigation by a scientist, the Royal Medical Adviser, Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), into the techniques behind Vogler’s illusions. 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. The scientist’s goal is to expose the magician as a fraud because, as Vergerus explains, if Vogler’s tricks were truly inexplicable, the modern scientific enterprise would crumble, along with Vergerus’s faith that “everything can be explained.” Early in the interrogation, Vogler’s wife (Ingrid Thulin), 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 unsettles him is the very possibility that the illusions he witnesses cannot be explained. For the duration of the film, the troupe is detained at the magistrate’s house, where they are forced to perform their act under Vergerus’s scrutiny.

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However, try as he might Vergerus cannot find a way to explain the Mind Control trick, and the scientific investigation of Vogler’s tricks is ultimately inconclusive. Neither Vergerus nor the filmgoer ever finds out whether or not the magician possesses supernatural powers. By pitting Vogler against Vergerus, The Magician stages a game of perception that has animated the experience of wondering at magicians’ tricks for centuries. This game is played by what I call the “magic professor” and the “spectator detective,” competing figures whose respective goals are to conceal and to detect how a trick works. In The Magician, for example, Vergerus (the detective) ultimately loses the game to Vogler (the professor) who manages to thwart the expert’s attempts 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 pleasure 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 demystification. 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 from an impulse toward detection and knowledge. The wondrous “How did the magician do it?” was wedded to the purposive search for a satisfactory answer. The pleasure of this game, to be precise, is not necessarily in the discovery of “how it’s done” but in the act of playing the game, that is, the experience of trying and almost always failing to thwart the magician’s tricks. The affinity 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 popular 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 contemplating and learning about the obscure and the unknown. Stage magic’s dramatic affinity 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 attraction of a trick that

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can be explained rationally, as opposed to one that invokes the supernatural and thus refuses reason altogether? As we will see, this question was central to the dominant themes, regimes of belief, and scientific-technological innovations that shaped and distinguished the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage magic as a complex form of educational entertainment. 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 wonder associated with beholding the effects 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 setting The Magician in the nineteenth century, Bergman invokes a very specific tradition of magical practices that resonated profoundly with the emergence of the cinema in the 1890s. Vergerus explains that Vogler’s magic is of “scientific interest” because his tricks appear to waver between mesmerism and the occult, on the one hand, and science and entertainment, on the other. Explaining the magician’s tricks would affirm the power of science 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 scientist against Vogler’s skills as a magician. Throughout the film, 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 effects of otherwise simple “devices, mirrors, and projections.” Early in the film, 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 field of proto-cinema. As a dialectical and highly ambiguous figure, Vogler represents a historical opposition between old (occult) and new (secular) magics that was

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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 The Magician (Ansiktet), directed by Ingmar Bergman (Svensk Filmindustri, 1958), DVD.

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 science. In his introduction to a seminal fin-de-siècle treatise on magical practice 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 relationship with science, spectacle, and investigation remains a largely unexcavated site of media-related inquiry (partly because modern magic is often treated merely as a source of delightful entertainment, partly because of magic’s own principles of secrecy, misinformation, and deceit). Stage magic’s profound cultural relevance as a project of the Enlightenment is also usually upstaged by the misleadingly showy figure of the magician, whose entertaining tricks simply follow suit.

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But if we take seriously the idea that trickery is as much about entertainment and deception as it is about the possibility of investigation and discovery, then we can begin to see the magician’s affinities 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 scientific 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 influence of the preeminent French mechanic, inventor, and prestidigitator Robert-Houdin, sought “to establish the conjuror as a ‘respectable’ kind of entertainer.”3 As the investigation of Vogler’s tricks in The Magician suggests, the 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 aesthetics and rhetoric of occult séances, for example, Robert-Houdin offered his audiences magic performances that were stripped down and scientific 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 offered by skillful manipulation, and the influence of illusions.”4 This pursuit of respectability was more than a superficial reform of the presentation of illusions, however. According to Simon During, “RobertHoudin negated the triviality and cultural nullity of magic by bringing to the stage the prestige of the inventor and scientist.”5 The Soirées fantastiques featured not only performances of mysterious levitations and disappearances but also trick automata, electromagnetism, and optical conjuring, or

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the use of mirrors to render opaque objects translucent or invisible. While performing these illusions, Robert-Houdin often assumed the role of a lecturer or demonstrator by accompanying his tricks with pseudo-scientific patter and plausible (albeit partial) explanations. The proliferation of books on the history and theory of magic prior to and during the emergence of the cinema is dominated by a preoccupation with mapping these distinctions between old and new magics. Nineteenthand early twentieth-century accounts of modern magic (including those by magicians like Robert-Houdin, Maskelyne, and David Devant) defined the function of the “new” art as mediating an opposition, Janus-like, between the wonders of modern science and the deceptions of “primitive,” “savage,” or “pre-scientific” forms of magic. Scientific magic was noble, forward-reaching, and good; “savage” magic was antiquated, corrupting, and debased. Charles Musser makes a similar distinction in charting what he calls the “history of screen practice,” which locates the cinema in a broader history of the magic lantern and its rationalist uses. According to Musser, this history begins with Athanasius Kircher’s treatise on catoptrics, dioptrics, and astronomy, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), in which the magic lantern’s seventeenth-century use is highlighted as being different from an “old” set of cultural practices that promoted the device as a supernatural medium and a source of fear. With Kircher, whose status as a “natural” magician makes him (like Vogler) more of a transitional or intermediary figure than a “modern” magician, the magic lantern becomes central to an emerging mode of exhibition that privileges enchantment as well as enlightenment and demystification. In Kircher’s approach to studying and teaching the science of optics, the magic lantern figured largely as an aid to popular scientific demonstrations and was visibly integrated as part of his lecture format. But, in the history of screen practice, the magic lantern was not simply put on display as a technology to be admired and observed for the scientific principles it could demonstrate and the entertaining spectacles it could produce. According to Musser, “The revelation of the technical base of projection to the audience was a necessary condition of screen entertainment” (emphasis added).6 Relative transparency about the lantern’s wondrous techniques of projection was necessary because, in order to be entertaining and pleasurable, the spectacle of projection needed to be acknowledged as scientifically explainable.

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Modern magic was similarly involved in a critique of superstition and fraudulent or deluding spectacles, upon which “real” magics like witchcraft and sorcery, and arts of deception like juggling and charlatanism, relied for their beguiling effects. The practices of sleight-of-hand artists operating within a culture of false miracles exposed and exploited the manipulability of the relationship between sense experience and the rational judgments of the mind. Vision in particular proved to be dangerously unreliable, as magicians demonstrated an uncanny ability to misdirect and manipulate spectators with feats of manual dexterity. The rational interpretation of visible phenomena was thus compromised by apparently inexplicable transformations that asserted themselves as impossible facts of the spectator’s world. That magicians could make objects seamlessly appear and disappear “into thin air” with the flick of a wrist called into question the acuity and reliability of human perception. The deftness with which magicians accomplished these feats was often treated as evidence of their communication with the realm of the occult. The magic lantern was similarly used by conjurors and priests to simulate apparitions and divine appearances, which were deemed supernatural in origin because the lantern and the techniques it used to project ghostly images were neither visible nor alluded to. The Enlightenment’s critical relationship with this form of magic spectacle unfolded in the light of what During calls “a conspiracy theory of superstition.”7 For Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes, superstition was a primary source of social, religious, and political corruption and oppression. Hume, for example, located superstition in the service of the kind of “priestly power” that “renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery.” He considered superstition to be a form of bondage that theocracies and institutions like the Catholic Church cultivated and exploited by claiming an authoritative communion with the realm of the divine or supernatural in order to control an ignorant public.8 Religious magic was thus condemned as a form of cheap but potent deception that preyed on the fears of an unenlightened public to cultivate “a blind and terrified credulity.”9 Catholicism in particular was widely attacked for what some considered the miracle-mongering of priests. Enchantments often appeared as theurgical spectacles in which priests claimed the power to converse with, and even command, divine forces by means of “optical trickery and miracles performed through hidden mechanical techniques.”10 In the tradition of

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witchcraft and sorcery, the concealment of the techniques behind these counterfeit miracles promoted fear, superstition, and astonishment among an ignorant public. Hence the residual sense of the truly miraculous in the seventeenth-century designation of the magic lantern as a “thaumaturgical lamp”—thaumaturgy being the practice of working miracles. In The Magician, for example, part of Vergerus’s interest in Vogler stems from a rumor that the magician has been performing “ghost shows” accompanied by the haunting sounds of a glass harmonica. This is no doubt a reference to the early nineteenth-century phantasmagoria, a performance which involved the use of a concealed magic lantern and other special effects (discussed later in this chapter) to create the illusion that spirits of the dead could be conjured in the form of ghostly images. Musser points to this deluding use of optical devices as part of the history of the “prescreen,” in which the mystification of how illusions work was a dominant practical mode. Religious spectacle was often equated in principle and effect with the art of legerdemain (literally, “quickness or nimbleness of hand”), which also came under attack during the Enlightenment as a system of fraud. Unsuspecting spectators were swindled by magicians, charlatans, and quacks who demonstrated unbelievable feats of dexterity. Reginald Scot captures the stakes of this in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) when he argues: “If we yield that to be divine, supernaturall, and miraculous, which we cannot comprehend; a witch, a papist, a conjuror, a cousener, and a juggler may make us believe they are gods.”11 During the Enlightenment, these kinds of magic practices were figured as the dark side to the light of reason. This was in part because they involved the exploitation by imposters of “mere beholding,” as Barbara Maria Stafford calls it, an abject sensory indulgence of exceptionally convincing illusions that could lead spectators to be taken in by sleight-of-hand artists.12 The modern magic performance, by contrast, presupposed and encouraged the kind of curious and skeptical mode of viewing embodied by the figure of Vergerus, who, as a scientist, functions in The Magician like a hyperbolic version of the stage magician’s (and, I will argue, the cinema’s) audience. For modern magicians, the rhetoric of occult magics was unnecessarily misleading. Illusions could be not only enlightened—that is, aligned with reason rather than superstition—but potentially enlightening. Tricks premised on the wonders of modern science and technology were

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privileged not because they pointed beyond the limits of our ability to know the world but rather precisely because they were worldly rather than supernatural. According to Maskelyne and Devant, who in 1911 jointly theorized modern magic in the important text Our Magic, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had produced (at least in the Western world) an audience that could no longer attend to natural phenomena presented as miracles with the same degree of credulity and superstition that characterized so-called less or unenlightened cultures. The authors conclude, “The only meaning [magic] can now possess must relate to the apparent, not actual defiance of natural laws”(emphasis in original).13 To redefine magic’s methods of captivating audiences, the magician was thus compelled to work within a scientific worldview. As modern magicians distinguished their craft from “older” magics, which were still very prominent in nineteenth-century Western magic cultures, the alignment of their “new” magic with the progressive ideals of modern science was centralized and put on display. The stage of RobertHoudin’s theater at the Palais-Royal, for example, was modeled on a Louis XV drawing room, and his presentations resembled the popular demonstration lectures of the late eighteenth century, which revolved mainly around the exhibition rather than the analysis of curious scientific experiments and natural wonders.14 One reviewer of the similar performances of John Nevil Maskelyne and George Albert Cooke at London’s Egyptian Hall in 1876 observed further: “All is honestly represented as being what it really is—conjuring, or more majestically expressed, experiments based on the known properties of matter and the known principles of science, without any appeal to spiritual or supernatural influences.”15 During the nineteenth century, we might say, modern magicians secularized magic and transformed it into a form of popular science.

The Magic Professor Jean-Jacques Rousseau captures an emerging popular scientific dimension of trickery in his treatise on education, Émile (1762), when he presents the magic performance as an object lesson. While attending a fair, young Émile and his tutor witness a conjuror leading a wax duck around a tub of water

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by holding a piece of bread in front of its bill. The trick inspires Émile and his tutor to investigate the operations behind the mysterious movement of the duck by replicating the performance with an experiment in magnetism. Émile discovers that by running a magnetized needle through the wax he can cause the duck to follow his hand in which he holds a metal key. Although the conjuror makes no pedagogical claims—“I earn my pay by doing my tricks, not by teaching them”—the tutor sees in this child’s interaction with magic the cultivation of a will to know how magnetism works. The tutor praises the magic performance as “an opportunity of learning” and calls the magician “Socrates, the conjuror,” a reference that highlights how magic and its experimentation can inspire critical thinking much more effectively than the scientist’s lab, whose “scientific atmosphere destroys science.”16 The prominent figure of the “magic professor,” which early cinemagicians like Georges Méliès eventually embodied when they displayed cinematic tricks as devices of wonder, clarifies this affinity between trickery, science, and discovery. Although the title of professor was certainly a product of modern magic’s pursuit of the respectability of the scientific and academic communities, it was not simply nominal. In addition to being popular entertainers, modern magicians were harbingers of progress and mediators of scientific discoveries. One of the more famous magicians in this tradition was Robert-Houdin’s contemporary the Scottish-born John Henry Anderson, who was billed widely as “Professor Anderson,” the “Modern Faustus,” and the “Great Wizard of the North.” Anderson was celebrated in the popular press as a “Philosopher,” a “Scientist,” and a “Professor of Natural Philosophy.” He also actively presented himself as a distinguished man of science surrounded by the most modern apparatuses and tools of scientific knowledge. An advertisement for one of Anderson’s acts in 1843–1844, for example, promoted the magician’s demonstration of “Astonishing Wonders of Natural Magic and Experimental Philosophy.” As the advertisement explains, “His Wonders are Wonders of Science; he produces his Delusions from the knowledge of the Sciences: the Mechanist, Chemist, and all who understand Electricity, Magnetism, Galvanism, and Hydraulics, will be delighted with the Philosophical Wonders of the Great Wizard of the North!”17 Magicians like Anderson targeted both the popular audiences who would delight in the pleasures of beholding wonders and the educated elite who

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would find in the magician’s tricks the essence of modern science—that is, the confrontation of anomalies and the possibility of mastery through rational explanation. An 1846 newspaper review of one of Anderson’s performances in England makes claims along these lines: “A more scientific entertainment we never witnessed than the feats of the Wizard, where we find experiments accomplished by chemistry, mechanism, electricity, hydraulics—which baffle even professors.”18 (We see this articulated in The Magician in the competition between Vergerus, the scientific expert, and Vogler, the master of artful deception). Although Anderson’s status as an inventor was limited and more rhetorical than actual (he was, after all, a showman), he shares with Robert-Houdin and other modern magicians the exploitation of a common ground between stage magic and the progressive ethos of modern science. This common ground was prominently shaped by the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London during the mid-nineteenth century. Established in 1838, the Polytechnic was organized “to afford to the inquirer the means of obtaining a general knowledge of the processes by which the wonders of art and of manufacture are produced, and to place before the public, in a popular form, each new scientific fact that may arise.”19 In the same vein as world’s fairs and modern museums, the Polytechnic made little distinction between amusement and instruction. Broadly, it provided wondrous object lessons in the form of exhibits, models, and demonstrations (involving popular lectures) of everything from industrial processes like weaving and mining to natural processes like the movement of waves and the erosion of the earth; from the mechanics of steam- and electrically powered technologies to experiments in chemistry, biology, acoustics, and optics. The centrality of magical illusion to the Polytechnic’s educational project was typified by the performances of figures like James Matthews, who “presented ‘Illusions of Modern Magic’ as ‘experiments in recreative philosophy’” and “would perform the tricks and then explain how they worked, although without necessarily revealing all of the secrets.”20 Between 1840 and 1890, the Polytechnic actively pursued the integration along these lines of popular science and magicians’ tricks, many of which have prominent roles in the history of cinematic special effects. One such illusion, known as the Sphinx, was developed in 1865 by the Polytechnic lecturer Thomas Tobin and the English magician Colonel Stodare. It featured a living,

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disembodied, sometimes talking head resting on a table and was accomplished using mirrors positioned beneath the table that concealed an actor’s body by reflecting the stage walls surrounding the table, leaving only the head visible to the audience. The basic lesson was, in Jim Steinmeyer’s words, that “something could be hidden by the use of a reflection.”21 This form of optical conjuring became a staple of late nineteenth-century performance magic, particularly at Robert-Houdin’s theater in Paris. The illusion also featured prominently in early trick films like Georges Méliès’s The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), where a man inflates a disembodied head on a table using a bellows, and R. W. Paul’s Artistic Creation (1901), where an artist brings drawn pieces of a woman’s body to life, initially by placing her head on a table, as well as in contemporary digital effects films like Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006), where a late nineteenth-century stage magician conjures the head of a spirit on a table in front of a live audience. (The significance of the use of CGI to represent nineteenth-century stage magic will be expanded later in this book.) At the heart of the Polytechnic’s educational program in which these kinds of tricks were developed was John Henry Pepper, who became the director of the institution in 1854. Known as Professor Pepper, he was a regular lecturer at the Polytechnic, where he performed popular experiments in chemistry, acoustics, and optics (to mention just three subjects), many of which involved the use of optical devices and philosophical toys for demonstrating various properties of light, vision, and perception. Pepper’s most famous demonstration took the form of a show known as the Ghost Lecture, which, as subsequent chapters will show, has returned prominently in the cinema as a point of reference for thinking about the spectrality of computer-generated images, that is, the immaterial quality of CGI that stems from the fact that its techniques are electronic rather than manual or mechanical. The lecture featured an illusion developed by the English inventor Henry Dircks and eventually marketed as Pepper’s Ghost. Objects and actors were made to appear, vanish, and interact in the form of ghostly apparitions with apparently live actors and sets on a stage. The illusion worked by reflecting the image of an actor, positioned below the front of the stage and out of view, onto a large plate of glass angled 45 degrees toward the audience. The actor performed in a black chamber in which all objects draped in black velvet disappeared, leaving visible only the materials illuminated, most often by a magic lantern.

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Figure 3. Pepper’s Ghost Illusion. Reproduced from “Illusions optique,” Le Magasin Pittoresque (1869): 284.

The Sphinx had a similar effect. In a typical London Times article from 1865 describing a version of the Sphinx being performed by Colonel Stodare at the Egyptian Hall, one reviewer was struck by the fact that the “decapitated” head responded to questions from audience members. “How is a head to be contrived,” he asked, “which, being detached from anything like a body, confined in a case, which it completely fills, and placed on a barelegged table, will accompany a speech, that apparently proceeds from its lips, with a strictly appropriate movement of the mouth, and a play of the countenance that is the reverse of mechanical?”22 The reviewer speculates that voices could be “transmitted” through pipes from an adjacent room, and then goes on to loosely entertain the idea that a living head can survive for some time after being severed from its body. Nathan Juran’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), in which a doctor keeps a severed head alive, is a later iteration of this. The technique used in Pepper’s Ghost was the Black Velvet Art method, which manifested curiously in the geometric chronophotographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey in the late nineteenth century

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(and which finds some reference in the early matte photography techniques developed by Norman O. Dawn and others for producing visual effects). What the audience perceives in Pepper’s Ghost is the actor’s reflection superimposed onto a scene staged behind the glass plate that “act[s] simultaneously as reflector and as a transparent medium.”23 The technique makes a specter of the offstage actor, who is present on the stage only through a reflection. In describing the strikingly similar dialectical presence and absence of the screen actor in the cinema, the early film theorist and critic André Bazin observed that film “is a mirror with a delayed reflection.”24 Dircks considered Pepper’s Ghost to be a “philosophical instrument” in the tradition of natural magic. Drawing on the Enlightenment critique of superstition, he claims that “concave mirrors, magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, and similar optical instruments, afford ample illustration of the happy tendency of modern investigation over the once degrading employment of superior knowledge only to impose on rather than enlighten the ignorant.”25 When the Ghost Lecture debuted at the Polytechnic on December 24, 1862, integrated into an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man (1848), it made use of the plate glass system to populate scenes with “real ghosts.” The play was the entertaining vehicle for a science-based lecture by Pepper that thinly addressed the various optical and catoptrical principles of the illusion. Although the secrets behind such illusions were commonly masked or revealed only partially by their presenters, the Polytechnic did make a determined effort to move audiences through the wonders of science toward a general understanding of how things work. The combination of secrecy and the potential demystification of the Polytechnic’s wonders by lecturers like Pepper was likely a marketing ploy aimed to catch the curiosity of potential patrons. It was also a provocation that inspired viewers’ will to know how illusions worked, which promoted a corresponding culture of speculation and investigation that positioned the spectator, as Tony Bennett argues of the mid-nineteenth-century modern museumgoer, “like the reader in a detective novel.”26 The Polytechnic’s popular science “professor” is a useful model for understanding the relationship between trickery and investigative practices that could lead to discovery and demystification. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, magic showmen like Paul de Philipsthal and ÉtienneGaspard Robertson began to play with the pedagogical value of magic

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under the tutelage of modern science. Between 1792 and around 1803, Philipsthal and Robertson performed early versions of the Polytechnic’s “ghost shows” in the form of a spectacle known as the phantasmagoria. The phantasmagoria used a magic lantern and a rear-projection system to throw slide images onto a translucent screen or onto smoke. Only the images and not the mechanics of the illusion were visible to the audience. The impression was that the images manifested mysteriously in a darkened room upon being invoked by a lecturer. As Erik Barnouw explains further, “The area around the image was totally blacked out, so that a projected figure had no environment of its own. It seemed to hang in air.”27 The phantasmagoria’s ghostly apparitions usually took the form of devils, Death, and other terrific or monstrous figures, which no doubt inspired a form of astonishment akin to that attributed to early film audiences. In fact, the phantasmagoria was sometimes rigged with a mobile projector that allowed images to be given the effect of rushing toward the audience, much like the figure of the oncoming train in the Lumière brothers’ screening at the Grand Café in 1895, around which Tom Gunning has theorized early cinema’s “aesthetic of astonishment.”28 But the occult atmosphere of the phantasmagoria was combined with the rhetoric of the science demonstration lecture. Philipsthal’s performances at the Lyceum Theater in London during the early 1800s were billed frequently as “The Magia Naturalis; or, Phantasmagoria” and “The Phantasmagoria; or, Grand Cabinet of Optical and Mechanical Curiosities.”29 An 1803 advertisement elaborates: “M. De Philipsthal will by his Skill in Physics, produce the Phantoms or Apparitions of the Dead or Absent; and thus enable the attentive Observer to form a just Idea of the Artifice by which certain pretended Magicians and Exorcists have, in this and former Ages, imposed on the Credulous and Superstitious.”30 With regard to Robertson’s phantasmagoria, a contemporary reviewer wrote similarly in the Philadelphia Port Folio: “How much has not the cause of reason been assisted by Robertson’s phantasmagoria! an exhibition that might be rendered still more marvellous and awful. Nothing is better adapted than this kind of exhibition for destroying superstition, dissipating vain prejudices and idle terrors, and establishing the reign of reason and science.”31 The potential for the phantasmagoria to be enlightening as well as thrilling was also emphasized during the performance of the illusion. For example, in 1793 a phantasmagoria operator named Philidor—who Laurent

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Mannoni speculates is the same person known as Philipsthal—claimed that he introduced his performances with a lecture that began with the confession: “I am neither priest nor magician; I do not wish to deceive you; but I will astonish you. It is not up to me to create illusions; I prefer to serve education.”32 Robertson echoes this position in his Mémoires when he describes the phantasmagoria as being “made for the man who thinks” and as “a spectacle which man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of the imagination.”33 It is unclear precisely what knowledge audiences would have garnered during the shows themselves, aside from a general understanding of the manipulability of the senses, the impressionability of the mind, and the capacity of science to simulate and debunk apparently supernatural phenomena. The phantasmagoria’s affinity for enlightenment stemmed from the experience of wonder and the investigative enterprise that such “modern” displays of magic inspired. This investigative enterprise consists of attempts to demystify magicians’ tricks in popular, academic, and scientific discourses. The nineteenth century in particular produced a tremendous amount of “behind-the-scenes” literature ranging from newspaper reviews and trade journal articles to books and even magic performances that explained the methods of modern magicians as well as of the “old” magics of earlier eras. In the history of conjuring literature this period is defined by such seminal texts as White Magic Revealed (Decremps, 1788), Natural Magic (Halle, 1788–1802), The Lives of the Conjurors (Frost, 1876), Secrets of Stage Conjuring (RobertHoudin, 1881), and The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (Houdini, 1906). To this we could add P. T. Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World (1866). The fact that Robertson’s phantasmagoria endured a fairly dramatic public series of exposures related to a battle between Robertson and his competitors over patent infringement is a version of this.34 The Magician, along with many of the cases to be discussed in this book, works this enterprise into a detective narrative that models spectators’ experiences of wondering at the cinema. Modern magic was thus defined from the outset by an impulse toward discovering “how it’s done.” This interest in knowing about the techniques behind illusions manifested similarly in the twentieth-century proliferation of trade journals, documentaries, and home entertainment media dedicated to showing how cinematic effects are accomplished. At a basic level, the idea that tricks are like opportunities of learning is shaped by a principle of uncertainty. Unlike the charlatan appealing

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to the credulity of superstitious spectators, the modern magician pitted the evidence of the senses against the evidence of reason in an appeal to the problem-solving faculties of rational audiences. As Tom Gunning explains, “The magician’s vow . . . to never reveal the trick does more than preserve a guild or a professional secret. It maintains an attitude of uncertainty and wonder on the part of the spectator who must always wrestle with what she saw and what she thinks she saw, with both uncertainty and the power of perception.”35 Tzvetan Todorov and Max Milner invoke similar experiences in their analyses of the “fantastic” in, respectively, literature and optical illusions.36 Neil Harris has pointed out further that P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century hoaxes were “a form of intellectual exercise, stimulating even when literal truth could not be determined,” because they were aimed at pushing on the boundaries of established scientific thought.37 To be precise, the mechanism behind modern magic’s inseparability from a kind of pleasurable demystification was a dialectic of uncertainty captured by the response “I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless.” The figure of the magic professor was thus complemented by the figure of the spectator detective, whose viewing practices are defined by a search for evidence of how tricks work. This figure stands as an alternative to the bewildered and purely pleasure-seeking spectator of magic. By being “incited to inquiry,” the spectator detective carries out the investigative enterprise that modern magic sets in motion. In contrast to the “mere beholding” that defines the figure of the passive spectator, modern magic presupposes a certain visual technique, an intentional and discerning mode of viewing. Of course, the pleasures of watching a magician perform tricks are not contingent on the act of watching closely to detect how they are done. The search for and discovery of the magician’s techniques does not minimize the importance of magic’s attraction simply in terms of its entertainment value. However, the fact that an intricate game of perception is always present during the magic performance demands that we account for how this game shapes the experience of wonder as an opportunity of learning about the novel and unknown phenomena with which magicians work. For it is precisely by encouraging the spectator to wonder at “how it’s done” that modern magic derives its cultural power and, ultimately, its role in the history of the cinema.

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Early Cinema, Wonder, and the Operational Aesthetic The history of magic prior to the emergence of the cinema suggests that, for spectators, one of the pleasures of beholding a magical spectacle comes as and when they attempt to detect and explain the techniques behind it. But what place does this pleasure have in the history of the cinema, and precisely what does it mean to wonder at the cinema as one might wonder at a magician? These questions return us to the one with which I opened this chapter: What is the attraction of a magic trick that can be explained rationally as opposed to one that invokes the supernatural and thus refuses reason altogether? The attraction is precisely the trick’s explainability, its promise of the possibility of knowledge about the obscure and the unknown, its open incitement to wonder. The term wonder, rather than astonishment or amazement, is particularly useful in this regard because of its multivalence. In his book Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Philip Fisher observes that wonder connotes “intellectual curiosity” in the sense “of interrogation, where wonder is a verb (‘I wonder why . . .’). The sum of the many questions, ‘I wonder why . . .?’ makes up the activity of science.”38 It is also significant, as Fisher notes, that wonder harbors a close affinity for the word admire, which means “to be astonished at”— that is, a reaction we associate with the word miracle, the common root being mira—but also, by way of the Latin verb rimari, “to pry into, search, examine, explore.” We can see this investigative dimension of wonder being acted out in the previously mentioned detective narrative of The Magician. The experience of wonder can also be productive. According to René Descartes, for example, wonder is “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.” Its only object, Descartes adds, is “knowledge of the thing wondered at.”39 Francis Bacon claims similarly in The Advancement of Learning (1605) that wonder “is the seed of knowledge.”40 The product of wonder, however, is not simply the learning that attends the search for the answer to the questions “I wonder why . . .?” and “How is it done?” Wonder can also have the effect of challenging the mind to reestablish the equilibrium of the world that reason functions to maintain.

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It is important to note that this richness of the wonder response derives in part from its fluidity, which supports a pervasive tendency to de-historicize the term. But, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park point out in Wonders and the Order of Nature, rather than being a stable response wonder is nuanced, complex, and deeply historical. Along with the objects and phenomena that audiences consider to be wonderful, precisely what it means to wonder changes over time and varies depending on the context. Although it might seem obvious, for example, that the experience of wondering at early cinematic technologies is not equivalent to wondering at the cinema in the twenty-first century, understanding the differences and the continuities between such wonder responses requires a careful attention to the cultural landscapes in which they occur. Particularly in the history of secular stage magic, for wonder to set the viewer on the path to knowledge, the phenomenon being wondered at must afford the possibility of explanation. If it does not, or if the choice to follow a path to explanation is precluded, as when the charlatan beguiles with appeals to superstition, the surprise that leads to the pleasure of wonder may carve out a path to fear. Of course, fear does not constitute a default mode in this scenario; it occupies what Caroline Bynum calls a “range of responses” and has significantly been isolated for criticism in discourses on the history and experience of wonder.41 Granting this, the modern magician’s disavowal of supernatural powers and the cultivation of an investigative mode of spectatorship are what allow a magic trick to assume the form of an object lesson rather than an object of fear. The relation between modern magic and wonder as the “incitation to inquiry,” to borrow Ernst Mach’s words, is clarified by another of Descartes’s passions that has been invoked in film studies, particularly in the fields of early cinema and visual effects: astonishment. In what is closest to our contemporary sense of the word—the “loss of physical sensation, insensibility; paralysis, numbness, deadness”—Descartes calls astonishment “an excess of wonder.” The “sudden surprise” that defines the initial moment of wonder is so powerful that it overwhelms the spectator’s faculties of perception altogether.42 For Tom Gunning, the astonishment of early cinema was conditioned by the spectator’s awareness rather than ignorance of the cinematic apparatus as a device of wonder. Rather than causing audiences to lapse into fear and credulity, the surprise elicited by the novelty of the cinema’s motion

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pictures was balanced by the audience’s knowledge that they were being presented with a trick. “As in the magic theatre,” Gunning argues, “the apparent realism of the image makes it a successful illusion, but one understood as an illusion nonetheless.”43 Of course, because of their significant affinities with spectacle and surprise, magicians’ tricks have not been taken seriously as models of the same kind of densely layered experience we might associate with “wonder” as just defined. Fisher, for example, reinforces a general sense that stage magic is a form of entertainment, nothing more. In an attempt to distinguish wonder from spectacles that merely delight the senses and the mind, he claims, “Astonishment is the pleasure we take in the face of the magician’s tricks. It never leads to explanation or even thought. Astonishment is a technique for the enjoyment of not knowing how, or why.”44 As we have seen, the history of modern magic tells a different story, and finding new ways to mine magic’s relevance to the study of technologies of illusion, like the cinema, requires a more nuanced account of the wondrousness of magicians’ tricks than Fisher allows. John Onians provides a useful approach in his analysis of the relationship between amazement, astonishment, and wonder when he argues, “Always amazement leads to learning. There are thus three stages of astonishment: (1) a striking experience, usually visual, but sometimes aural; (2) a consequent physical paralysis; and (3) a mental reaction which results in something being learned which may be followed by (4) a new action.”45 The attracting power of magic tricks that can be explained derives precisely from the possibility of a kind of mastery afforded by this model. This is not to say that no pleasure derives from novel sensory experiences that can be admired simply for their novelty. Rather, the pleasure of beholding an apparently inexplicable phenomenon like a magic trick is necessarily conditioned in the case of wonder by the possibility of explanation. Neil Harris describes such a situation when he relates the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe to the attraction of the curiosities and hoaxes that P.  T. Barnum staged at his American Museum in New York during the 1840s. In both cases, deception and exposure are dialectically woven into viewers’ pleasure as they attempt to explain away the uncertainty of a mystery.46 Harris roots this pleasure in what he calls an “operational aesthetic,” in which the techniques used to produce something extraordinary are alluded to and integrated as part of the appeal. Barnum, for example,

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presented audiences with as much detailed description of the constitution, origins, and incredibility of his wonders as he could without disclosing all of the information necessary to explain their existence.47 “The objects inside [Barnum’s] museum, and Barnum’s [promotional] activities outside, focused attention on their own structures and operations, were empirically testable, and enabled—or at least invited—audiences and participants to learn how they worked.”48 This invitation inspired a tremendous amount of debate regarding the truth or falsity of Barnum’s wonders and the techniques of deception behind them. This “overt game of popular cultural sleuthing,” as James Cook puts it, is the basis of modern magic’s form of trickery, which has resonated so profoundly with the cinema.49 Throughout film history, magicians have brought the operational aesthetic—their self-conscious mode of trickery— to bear on the cinematic experience. In the 1890s, stage magic and motion pictures initially intersected because magicians offered a “stage” on which the wondrous techniques of the new cinematic apparatus could be displayed as a new form of modern magic. Scholarship on early cinema has consistently emphasized how the so-called illusion of motion invoked the dialectic of uncertainty that most audiences would have associated with the nineteenth-century magic theater. The reality effect of motion pictures was apparently so astonishing that it opened a significant gap between the senses and the mind. This gap created what Lauren Rabinovitz calls a “confusion of visual knowledge” in which the information gathered visually could not be corroborated rationally and thus promoted epistemological uncertainty, the “I know, but yet I see” attitude Gunning relates to the audiences who beheld the cinema’s motion pictures for the first time.50 This is one very important feature of Maxim Gorky’s familiar account of attending an early Lumière brothers screening. Gorky structures his 1896 review of the cinematograph by acknowledging the apparent inexplicability of motion pictures: “The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances.” Gorky is hard-pressed to explain his encounter, but he immediately follows this uncertainty with “However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals.” Gorky’s subsequent account is defined by a hesitation between the overwhelming experience of the liveliness of moving images and the obviousness of the trick—for example, the projection lacked color and sound, and the cinematograph was displayed as an integral part of the demonstration

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in the tradition of Musser’s “screen practice.” Gorky’s famous response—“It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows”—is a striking variation of the response to modern magicians’ tricks, “I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless.”51 Modern magicians held such a prominent place in early film history in part because nineteenth-century stage magic offered a most natural point of reference for contemplating the uncertainty of motion pictures in the cinema. Beginning around 1896, cinemagicians like Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón drew directly on stage magic traditions in their production of trick films. These films typically featured magicians producing fantastic spectacles with the aid of novel cinematic trick techniques. Méliès in particular often appeared in his films on the pretense of inviting audiences to watch closely the cinema’s apparently inexplicable effects and to wonder at the machine’s capacities for performing illusions like substitutions, superimpositions, and dissolves. As in the history of magic, these wonders of early cinema were courted by copious amounts of popular press aimed at explaining the techniques cinemagicians used to achieve their effects. Since the mid-nineteenth century the popular science periodical Scientific American (like its French counterpart, La Nature) featured regular articles on the demystification of magicians’ illusions alongside reviews of technological innovations in, for example, the automobile, railroad, and aeronautics industries. Many of these articles made their way into Albert Hopkins and Henry Ridgely Evans’s late nineteenth-century book Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, which also drew directly from La Nature. At the end of the nineteenth century, Scientific American naturally identified the cinema as part of its popular science education project and explored everything from experimentation in synchronous sound and color cinematography technologies to the mechanics of cinematic visual effects. These articles are highly technical but aimed nonetheless at popular audiences on the assumption that uninformed spectators would benefit from having the wonders of the cinema balanced by an understanding of the cinema’s techniques for creating illusions.52 When the novelty of the cinema faded, so did the trick film. With it went the investigative enterprise trick films inspired, as well as the onscreen presence of stage magicians, whose displays of the cinema as a device of wonder virtually disappeared by around 1910.53 Étienne Souriau has linked the

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disappearance of the magician in the landscape of early motion pictures to a change in the experience of wondering at the cinema. “All the trick effects (superimposition, etc.) that were at first intended . . . to provoke astonishment as to how they were accomplished,” he says, “slowly evolved from trickery to ‘special effects,’ becoming .  .  . technical processes which the spectator does not need to worry about: only the result matters.”54 By the mid-twentieth century when Souriau was writing, the once ubiquitous figure of the onscreen magician who made a business of showcasing novel cinematic tricks had become a thing of the past, an artifact in the archive of the cinema’s early union with the magic theater. This vanishing act did not occur, however, without leaving traces.

Uncanny Magician, Uncanny Cinema Against Souriau’s assessment of the loss of the wonder once embodied by early trick films, The Magician speaks to a history of magic and the cinema that is recursive and much longer. In addition to modeling the investigative practices that nineteenth-century magicians incited, the film is also ultimately about the cinema’s endurance as a kind of mechanical magician— the double of its virtuoso human counterpart. Bergman, for example, considered the cinematic apparatus to be a “conjuring set,” an association he established by experimenting as a child with his own movie projector and the haunting images of a magic lantern.55 This personal history is no doubt mirrored in the invocation of Vogler’s lantern in the film. It also inflects the larger narrative of Vergerus’s struggle to demystify Vogler’s magic, which can be seen as a reminder that the cinema, far from being a machine whose trick techniques we need not worry about, has haunted the popular imagination as a powerful device of wonder well beyond the early twentieth century. Vergerus’s uncertainty about how Vogler’s illusions work culminates in a bizarre sequence of events toward the end of the film. While performing a series of illusions for the city officials, Vogler subjects a reluctant stableman named Antonsson (Oscar Ljung) to the mysterious Mind Control trick. As part of the performance Antonsson’s hands and feet are apparently bound with an “invisible chain,” which the stableman cannot break no matter how hard he struggles to free himself. Because Antonsson’s hands are not really

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bound by anything at all—Vogler’s wife simply mimes the action of binding them—the suggestion is that the magician is preventing the man’s escape through mental manipulation. Upon realizing that he is inexplicably helpless, Antonsson panics and lashes out violently, choking and killing Vogler onstage. The death of the magician is later “confirmed” when Vergerus performs an autopsy and finds the magician’s body to be completely ordinary. Vergerus claims that the discovery is evidence of Vogler’s lack of supernatural powers and concludes that his tricks were thus “temporary and . . . meaningless.” It is actually Vergerus’s “demystification” that is only temporary, however. Not only does the scientist fail to explain the Mind Control trick but, in a curious twist on magicians’ familiar vanishing tricks, following the autopsy Vogler inexplicably returns, first as a reflection in a mirror and subsequently in corporeal form. Restored to his former self, without any evidence of having been dissected on an operating table, the magician menaces and threatens to kill Vergerus, who cannot believe his eyes. The doctor’s life is ultimately spared, and Vogler’s death is explained as a “cheap trick”: the magician claims to have substituted the dead body of an actor for his own. But the explanation is implausible—it is implied that Vogler “lent the actor his face,” by which he means a prosthetic beard—and the magician’s return renews the uncertainty that his death apparently dispelled. The uncanny magician who disappears and reappears, who “dies” and returns from the dead, mirrors the experience of wonder as the laying to rest and the renewal of once apparently inexplicable phenomena. By demystifying the magician’s tricks, Vergerus performs the kind of wonder response that audiences tend to have to new technologies of illusion, like the cinema or its ancestor, the magic lantern. The explanations audiences offer to rationalize the extraordinary experiences such technologies can produce have the potential to discursively integrate those technologies into the fabric of ordinary life. By renewing Vergerus’s questions about both what he has witnessed and the work he has done to make Vogler’s magic ordinary, the magician’s return points to how uncertainty can haunt wondrous phenomena even after they are no longer “new.” Tom Gunning has argued convincingly along these lines that “the cycle from wonder to habit [or familiarity] need not run only one way. The reception of technology allows re-enchantment through aesthetic de-familiarization, the traumatic surfacing of allayed fears and anxieties, as well as the uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking.”56

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The history of magic and the cinema is a history of this (re)cycling of the experience of wondering at technologies of illusion. For more than a century the figure of the magician has flickered in and out of focus, sometimes surfacing onscreen and sometimes moving like a shadow in the popular imagination, but always renewing the uncertainty of what we think we know about the cinema. As the following chapters demonstrate, investigations of the cinema as a device of wonder have taken many forms, but this dynamic of wonder and intellectual curiosity, demystification and renewal, mediated by the figure of the magician, is a powerful force that has animated audiences’ perceptions of the cinema throughout film history.

2 • QUICKER THAN THE EYE Science, Cinema, and the Question of Vision

A Jugler by an handsome sleight of hand, will put a compleat lie upon the very sight. —Roger Bacon, Friar Bacon: His Discovery of the Miracles of Art, Nature, and Magick, 1659

If nineteenth-century stage magic resonated so powerfully with early cinema culture, it was not only because the magician’s tricks reflected the wondrousness and uncertainty of novel motion picture technologies. It was also because the magician’s game of perception—framed by the simultaneous appeals to enchantment, science, and demystification— offered audiences an opportunity to take pleasure in the fallibility of sight. Whether performed by a magician or by the cinema, optical tricks are premised on the spectator’s (in)ability to visually detect the techniques with which those tricks are produced. The human eye is a natural impediment to successfully detecting how a trick works, because it can betray the spectator by providing evidence that contradicts the rational judgments of the mind. The resulting dissonance between the eye and the mind shapes the dialectic of uncertainty associated with the experience of wonder: “I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless.” In the shared history of magic and the cinema, the wonder response and the investigative practices it can entail are thus inseparable from the question of vision. 46

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The cinema seems to have always been embedded in a discourse of trickery organized around exposing, playing with, and delighting in the nature and habits of the human eye. As early as the 1890s, for example, trick films reflected the dialectical nature of cinematic images—that is, as both still and moving, discontinuous and continuous—by transforming magicians’ quick-change techniques into cinematic sleights of hand, such as instantaneous substitutions and disappearances. Indeed, at its most basic technical and phenomenological levels, the cinema, like a magic trick, is as much about visibility as it is about obscurity, the interplay of illuminated still images and the dark intervals between them being the animating force behind the illusion of cinematic motion.1 Christian Metz spoke to this broadly in the 1970s when he famously proclaimed that the “cinema in entirety is . . . a vast trucage [or trick].”2 Sleight of hand holds a prominent place in the popular cinematic imagination because of the sense that magicians’ techniques, like the techniques of the moving image, are executed with such deftness that they cannot be detected by the human eye. The related assertion that the magician’s hand is “quicker than the eye” is probably the most pervasive refrain in descriptions of the wonders magicians can perform. In the history of the cinema, similar assertions have been made with reference, for example, to still images being projected so quickly in succession that the human eye cannot detect them as such and to the camera’s eye being quicker than the spectator’s because it can catch details of reality that escape human perception. Albeit rich and appropriate, however, this notion of quickness is ultimately misplaced, another misperception shaped by the magician’s ability to cause us to wonder. (A similar “misperception” has been linked to the socalled myth of persistence of vision in the cinema.3) Sleight-of-hand magic— also known as juggling, legerdemain, and prestidigitation—developed as the art of manually concealing and revealing an object, usually a playing card, a ball, a coin, or some other trinket. The intended effect of these manipulations is the false impression that the object can be caused to appear or vanish at will, can be transported impossibly from one place to another, or can be transformed from one object into another. The assumption that the magician’s hands are moving so fast that they are impossible to see actually results from the magician’s ability to conceal highly calculated, often very slow and not necessarily undetectable actions by the use of verbal and physical misdirection.4

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It is not surprising that cinematic technologies would eventually become part of this discourse on the quick change and the manipulation of sight. The cinema distinguished itself quite naturally as the mechanical art of sleight of hand. Tom Gunning has pointed out that the magician’s techniques—for example, the ability to produce wonders with the “flick of a wrist”—have strong affinities with the way in which movies were identified almost immediately as “flickers” and “flicks” because the light from the projector and the imperceptible changes between frames imbued early motion pictures with a distinctive flickering quality.5 With such intensely dialectical properties—stillness and motion, light and shadow—the cinema’s flickering illusion of motion tapped into something distinctly modern about the intersection of science, technology, and magic in the nineteenth century. Consider that the “flicker” is also a salient emblem of what the French film critic and theorist Jean-Louis Comolli calls the “frenzy of the visible” that characterized the landscape of modern life in which the cinema emerged. The rapid proliferation in the nineteenth century of media, including newspapers, prints, photographs, and eventually motion pictures, produced an overwhelming variety of sights and ways of seeing the world. On the one hand, this profound expansion of the range of visibility was liberating. Travel images offered views of exotic and never-before-seen worlds, for example, as did scientific photographic studies of animal locomotion. On the other, technologies of vision were a significant source of anxiety because they challenged the human eye’s capacity to make sense of a rapidly changing world. “Decentred, in panic, thrown into confusion by all this new magic of the visible,” Comolli explains, “the human eye finds itself affected with a series of limits and doubts.”6 The duality of the “new magic of the visible” is reflected in the pervasive sense that optical devices like photographic and cinematic cameras harbor an uncanny potential to de-familiarize both what and how we see. Such devices offer alternative ways of seeing that pose their own epistemological challenges because the novel views of reality they produce are essentially virtual. Particularly in the history of science and technology, innovations in microscopy and instantaneous photography have long been celebrated for providing visual evidence of phenomena that are otherwise either imperceptible or entirely invisible to the human eye. These phenomena do not exist visibly, independently of the mediated act of seeing with and through various technologies. Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman have noted

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that, beginning in the seventeenth century, “the use of philosophical instruments in demonstration had both a positive and a negative side. By going beyond common experience, they allowed the natural philosophers to demonstrate something new; simultaneously, however, they exceeded the ability of the senses to validate the results.”7 As is the case with the modern magician’s tricks, the cinema has the potential to open a gap of imperceptibility that makes the act of seeing with it truly wonderful, in the sense of being both illuminating and apparently inexplicable. This is no more prominent than in the history of scientific and popular scientific uses of cinematic technologies. The general uncertainty that motion pictures can produce is deepened by the fact that, in the context of scientific investigation, the cinema usually makes visible a world that already occupies the observer’s field of view. The early French filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein gestures to this in his essay “Photogénie and the Imponderable” when he describes the worlds revealed by slow-motion and time-lapse photography. “Not without some anxiety,” he claims, “man finds himself before that chaos which he has covered up, denied, forgotten, or thought was tamed.”8 This uncanny experience of discovering phenomena that are “hidden in plain sight” shadows a relatively unexplored convergence of magic and science around the question of vision.

Chronophotography and Prestidigitation Although the idea that the magician’s game of perception resembles perception in the cinema is not new, it is significantly renewed by the fact that cinematic technologies occupy a long history of scientific investigations of magic and vision. In the archives of INSEP (Institut national du sport, de l’expertise et de la performance) in Paris, France, there is a small collection of obscure serial photographs of fin-de-siècle magicians performing sleightof-hand tricks. The photographs are arranged in sequence and resemble the frames of a filmstrip. The magicians appear in a variety of framings, from close-ups to full views, and each series of photographs appears to depict a single trick from start to finish, as in the case of a magician named EdouardJoseph Raynaly who appears to cause a ball to vanish from his fingertips. In contrast to early trick films, the setting in these images is surprisingly sterile: the magicians appear against a blank backdrop rather than on a stage or in

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some fantastic world. Some of the frames retain a remarkable clarity, but for the most part the photographs are faded and deteriorating, giving the magicians a ghostly quality that is augmented by the fact that the tricks, which obviously look to have been performed very rapidly, are not quite legible as a series of still images. These undeniably strange images are the photographic remains of a fascinating investigation conducted in the early 1890s by the French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet. Binet’s goal was to better understand vision and processes like memory and attention, which he pursued by studying the relationship between the evidence of the senses and the judgments of the mind in the perception of illusions. The focus of the study was sleightof-hand magic, which Binet used as a model for explaining how normal perceptual errors affect the production of knowledge about the visible world. A key element of Binet’s investigation was the use of a form of serial photography known as chronophotography, which produced instantaneous still images in sequence using principles and technologies that would later be adapted for the production of early motion pictures. For this, Binet enlisted Étienne-Jules Marey’s associate, Georges Demenÿ, to photograph several Parisian magicians while they performed sleight-of-hand tricks in a laboratory at the Sorbonne. A total of five magicians (reportedly including Georges Méliès) were involved in Binet’s research, but only two consented to being recorded: Raynaly and the mononymous Arnould. Of seven tricks that Binet mentions were photographed, a record of at least five sequences survives.9 As a form of mechanical vision, the chronophotographic camera (or chronophotograph) offered a novel technique for revealing how magicians’ tricks work, both technically and on the level of perception. All of Demenÿ’s photographs are thus taken from roughly the perspective of the magician’s audience on the premise that because the scientist and the camera both saw independently, the results of their perceptions of the same phenomenon could be compared. One series of photographs in particular pointed Binet to an intriguing revelation. The series depicts Raynaly performing a trick in which a playing card buried in a deck appears on top with the flick of the magician’s wrist. The camera revealed a crucial and apparently imperceptible movement of Raynaly’s hand between the card and the spectator’s eye. The movement obscured the fact that the magician’s other hand was very quickly splitting and shuffling the deck so that the card was on top. The ability to record this

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dexterous manual technique, which escaped initial detection by the human eye, provided Binet with the visual evidence needed to explain precisely how the quick change was produced. However, Binet noted, in addition to revealing how it was done to an outside observer like himself, the camera unseated and enlightened the magician: when he looked at the pictures, Raynaly was surprised to see that the movement of his hand between the deck of cards and the spectator’s eye worked precisely as it did.10 In this intersection between modern science and modern magic, chronophotography exposes the limits of “naked” human perception and causes the magician to wonder at his own trick. It is almost as if the camera is revealing that Raynaly had achieved such complete physical mastery of the necessary sleights of hand that even he did not perceive the automatic and wonderful movements of his body. Resembling early medical training films and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s “cyclegraphic” studies of surgeons, the view provided by the mechanical eye of the camera here educates the “expert eye” of the practitioner, who in Binet’s case happens to be a magician.11 The revelation thus positions chronophotography beyond human ocular vision in such a way that it verges, like the magician, on being the perfect medium. The optical device does not simply reveal the secret operations behind the game of perception that structures the performance and perception of a trick. By transcending the magician’s control over the explanation of “how it’s done,” chronophotography adds a third term in the form of a kind of deviant mechanical vision that undoes the very fabric of the magician’s game of perception. An important value of Binet’s study, from this perspective, is that it represents an early cinematic-scientific interpretation of modern magic’s investigative enterprise—that is, the actual search for evidence of “how it’s done” that magic tricks can compel. In addition to being resonant with more recent studies of spectatorship in the cinema, which will be explored later in this chapter, Binet’s case suggests that the eye of modern magic’s spectator detective found a natural ally in the lenses of optical devices, which mechanized the act of watching closely to detect how tricks are done. At first glance, the encounter between magicians and chronophotography might appear anomalous or strange, particularly because the magician is not a familiar figure in the archive of scientific research images. The scientific value of chronophotography has been well documented with regard to prominent figures like Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies

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of human and animal locomotion pervade accounts of the cinema’s “prehistory” and of the documentary uses of photography. Less familiar are the motion studies produced by figures like Jean-Martin Charcot and Albert Londe, who used photography and film to analyze neurological pathologies in patients at the Salpêtrière, and the French physician Félix-Louis Regnault, who used chronophotography to analyze the movements of ethnographic subjects. Binet’s scientific investigation of magicians is by far one of the most obscure episodes in this history, although Sofie Lachapelle has done great work to orient Binet’s study in relation to psychology’s interest in supernatural phenomena.12 This obscurity is partly a condition of the scale of Binet’s chronophotographic collection, which is small in comparison with the proliferation of images by people who are more prominent in cinema and media studies. (Demenÿ only produced a handful of chronophotographic sequences of magicians.) It is also partly due to modern magic’s marginalization in the cinema beyond the immediate scope of the trick film, which has become the primary archive of magic in the cinema because it was so prolific. However, the lack of scholarship on the cinematic values of Binet’s study should not lead us to think that its obscurity is warranted.13 In fact, the chronophotographic investigation of magic is an important bridge between the history of nineteenth-century science and the history of magic in early cinema. In addition to being well established in the landscape of fin-de-siècle science and psychology, Binet’s study harbored strong, natural affinities with the proto-cinematic field of chronophotographic research. Itis not difficult to see the analysis of a magician’s elusive sleights of hand as an extension of Marey and Demenÿ’s fascination in the 1880s with photographing the fluttering wings of a bird in flight. Prior to Binet’s study, Marey and Demenÿ also used chronophotography to analyze the movements of the hand as part of a larger study of human physiology. Moreover, given the example of Raynaly wondering at the mechanics of his own performance, the collaboration between Binet and Demenÿ aligns with chronophotography’s contributions to the science of labor, which focused on investigating the automatisms of the body (especially the hands) performing work in the context of modernity.14 Binet’s experiment was also not singular.15 In 1896 the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow used a variety of scientific apparatuses to test the

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dexterity of two modern magicians: Alexander “Professor” Herrmann and Harry Kellar. Jastrow’s goal was to determine whether the men were in fact able to perform more quickly, accurately, and efficiently than the average human being. Jastrow measured the magicians’ levels of tactile sensitivity and physical coordination, auditory reaction times, and capacities for visual apprehension, rapid recall, and rapid movement. Despite the pervasive popular image of the magician as a superior “device” of wonder—a kind of apparatus capable of superhuman feats—Jastrow found that Hermann and Kellar performed predominantly with average speeds. For Jastrow, the experiment provided an important scientific basis for debunking the myth that the magician is quicker than the eye.16 Binet’s experiment cannot be separated from this fascination with the power of the magician over the spectator’s eye, a power and a myth that itself has a long history. Prior to the eighteenth century, the magician’s misleading impressions caused sleight of hand to be condemned as a form of fraud and social deviance. Reginald Scot captured this in 1584 when he claimed that magicians’ wonders were nothing more than the art of cheats, charlatans, and counterfeiters, “the endevor and drift of jugglers [being] onlie to abuse mens eies and judgements.”17 In the early eighteenth century, emerging modern magicians like the Englishman Isaac Fawkes promoted sleight-of-hand illusions openly as tricks that were admired for the performer’s virtuosity and the wonder that manual dexterity could provoke. One contemporary author writing in 1726 explained, “When you first saw the famous Fawkes perform his Dexterity of Hand, I doubt not but it appear’d wonderful, that a Man’s Actions should be quicker than your Eyes, and yet . . . you will soon become Master of these seeming Mysteries.”18 Binet offered a modern scientific response to this enduring fascination with the magician’s ability to expose and play with the nature and habits of sight. In the nineteenth century, related experiments with visual and cognitive illusions proliferated with the expansion of scientific interest in what Jastrow called “the illusory nature of the knowledge furnished by the senses.”19 Many of these experiments were in dialogue with advances in the science of physiology and sought to explain the relation between the human sensorium and the critical faculties of the mind. Studies of the perception of illusions in the mid-nineteenth century by J. J. Oppel, August Kundt, and Hermann von Helmholtz, among others, form the most recognizable face of this history. Notable examples include the duck-rabbit illusion, in which

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the spectator oscillates between seeing the figure of a duck and that of a rabbit in the same illustration, and the Necker cube, in which the orientation of a cube switches over the course of the spectator’s perceptual engagement with the figure. These kinds of illusions were important for demonstrating how uncertain sensory experiences, like those related to a magic performance, can lead the mind to supply information that results in alternating and divergent perceptions of a single phenomenon.20 In a nuanced articulation of modern magic’s investigative enterprise, Binet’s interest in magic stemmed from the fact that discovering how sleight-of-hand tricks work naturally provides insight into how visual perception works. The link between studying magic and studying the mind was modern magic’s dialectic of uncertainty. As Binet explained, “The [magician’s] illusion exists, we can say, only for the sense of sight; reason contradicts it.”21 The experience of wondering at the magician offered a potent basis for visualizing and understanding the nature of the activities between sense experiences and cognitive processes—namely those related to spectators’ expectations and habits of vision and attention. Magicians are able to hide their techniques in plain sight by using certain behavioral and verbal cues—for example, a glance, a false movement of the hand, or a phrase: watch closely “here” or “there”—to focus the spectator’s attention on something that appears significant because it catches the eye. By manipulating the spectator’s tendency to respond to these cues automatically or habitually, the magician can move secretly in the shadows of actions that are falsely emphasized. The primary mechanisms behind magicians’ deceptions are thus the spectator’s susceptibility to suggestion and misdirection, as well as the spectator’s propensity to err in describing perceptions. As though foretelling Hugo Münsterberg’s research on the psychology of cinematic spectatorship several decades later, Jastrow explained along these lines: “It is in the negative field of attention that deception effects its purpose.”22 From this perspective, one would think that, in order to guarantee the success of an illusion, a magician would simply not take the risk of inviting a spectator to discover techniques that only work if they are not detected. The early cinemagician Georges Méliès captures this risk succinctly when he claims, “In prestidigitation, one operates in view of an attentive audience that will notice any false move. You are all alone, and their eyes never leave you.”23 However, in addition to staging modern magic as a game of

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perception, the invitation itself is a highly calculated misdirection. By challenging the spectator to assume a position of focused attention, the magician is actually promoting the spectator’s involuntary inattention to an expanded field of what can be hidden in plain sight. The figure of the spectator detective is ultimately conditioned to see with and without mastery, with and without acuity, simultaneously. Binet replaced the human eye with chronophotography in an attempt to extract vision from this dialectical experience. Because the passive (or, more accurately, nonhuman) eye of the camera “reflects without discernment all the details of the reality” that appears before it, the view chronophotography offered contained no negative field of attention.24 This mechanical view of magic was privileged in part because Binet himself could not avoid being tricked in the act of watching closely. While observing Raynaly hold a card in his hand and instantly transform it into another card, Binet noticed that without the use of any apparatus even an expert such as himself could not detect or explain how the trick worked.25 Binet attributes this to the quickness of Raynaly’s manipulation of the cards, which took approximately fifteen hundredths of a second, and to the difficulty the mind encounters in grasping how the transformation occurs. Because the techniques behind a trick are not readily apparent, it takes more time to grasp “how it’s done” than the duration of the trick allows. The resulting gap between what the eye sees and what the mind can process during the act of seeing ensures the spectator’s failure to explain the trick, allowing the experience of wonder to unfold. With chronophotography Binet was able to avoid this gap altogether because the problem of visual mastery was mediated with an optical device that could not be tricked. Interestingly, in the late nineteenth century the modern magician Alexander Herrmann claimed to harbor a comparable acuity of vision that allowed him to accurately discern large amounts of information “at a glance.” This conceit was quickly dispelled in the laboratory test Jastrow conducted in 1896, but Herrmann’s latent (and I believe unintended) analogy between his eye and the mechanical eye of a camera sheds light on an unexplored dimension of Binet’s study.26 Although for Binet chronophotography was primarily a useful scientific tool, his experiment is largely, if not essentially, animated by the fact that the magician and the camera figure as competing devices of wonder. We have already seen how chronophotography revealed in Raynaly’s performance details of which the magician

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himself was unaware. But the camera’s capacity for revelation was tinged with an uncertainty that calls to mind the magician’s ability to cause us to wonder. Although using the camera had the desired effect of providing visual evidence of precisely how magicians performed their tricks, mechanizing the act of watching closely was not a simple act of overcoming the limitations of the scientist’s corporeal eye. That the camera exceeded the expert visual acuity of both the magician and the scientist suggests that the kind of vision it offered realized a fantasy reflected (not coincidentally) in the figure of the magician. As a source of Binet’s knowledge about how visual perception works, the magician figures in his experiment as a medium or technique of scientific discovery: it is through magic that the scientist learns about the human. The fact that chronophotography was capable of teaching even the magician suggests that the camera had become something like an expert magician itself. In the few paragraphs Binet devotes to the use of chronophotography in his article “Psychology of Prestidigitation,” the camera is not discussed in light of a scientific discourse on mechanical objectivity, most likely because this was something of a given in late nineteenth-century scientific applications of photography. Rather, chronophotography appears through the lens of an almost independent discourse of wonder. Reflecting on the choice to photograph magicians in his laboratory, for example, Binet explains that “to see everything it is not sufficient to open the eyes” wide; one must go out of the body.27 Like a magician, chronophotography accomplished this by transporting the human eye to a wondrous plane of perceptual experience on which previously imperceptible and unseen phenomena became newly visible. Binet’s encounter with this mechanical mode of observation closely resembles the spectator’s encounter with a magician. Photographing magicians was valued primarily because the scientist no longer had to compete with the limited duration of a trick in order to accurately discern how it was done. The camera introduced an unprecedented stillness into the frenzy of the visible that defines the magician’s game of perception. This stillness allowed Binet to recover the act of watching closely, which he then transformed into contemplative scientific investigation. The process of photographically demystifying the trick became a curious trade-off in which the trick was rendered “invisible.” Binet responded to the photographs of the

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card trick that caused Raynaly to wonder at his own performance by claiming that, in grasping the reality of the trick “as it really is,” the quick change cannot be perceived simultaneously with the eye and with the mind as the same phenomenon.28 The camera’s reality is necessarily of another visual order that bears a strong resemblance to what Jean Epstein called “that chaos which [man] has covered up, denied, forgotten, or thought was tamed.” Analyzing a series of photographs of Raynaly performing a vanishing trick in which the magician feigns an egg’s transfer from one hand to the other, Binet was astonished to find that “in none of the images have the hands the natural movement they should have in grasping an object.”29 That the camera produced such an “unnatural” view was nothing new. By the 1890s instantaneous photography and serial photography had been well established as techniques for discovering other worlds within reality, such as the imperceptible positions of the wings of birds in flight or the contours of splashing drops in liquids. As cinema scholars like Comolli and Tom Gunning, among others, have observed, these worlds often appeared uncanny because they could not be reconciled with nature as seen without the aid of optical devices.30 Walter Benjamin, in “Little History of Photography,” famously refers to such uncanny realities made visible by the camera’s mechanical vision as the domain of the “optical unconscious.”31 In Binet’s case, the camera’s ability to reveal what was invisible or hidden in plain sight not only foregrounded the questionability of unaided human vision—how can we trust our own eyes if we fail to notice details in our field of view that are so readily apparent in a photograph? It also provided visual evidence that could not be attended by any certainty outside of what was garnered by a faith in the camera to see faithfully. Although chronophotography revealed magicians’ techniques that were “imperceptible” rather than “invisible,” the sense of wonder that defines Binet’s account is not so different from the wonder provoked by the kind of vision afforded by telescopes and microscopes. Lisa Cartwright has pointed out that the accuracy of images produced by such optical devices “cannot be confirmed against the human eye’s view of its object” because human vision itself does not change, only the conditions of a phenomenon’s visibility. When we look through the lens of a microscope, for example, we see a wonderful world made visible through a process of magnification, but we cannot see this world in this way without the microscope. This impasse

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perpetuates the uncertainty of knowledge about phenomena that optical devices bring to perception because human vision is exceeded virtually: what becomes visible exists visibly only through the device being used; it cannot be seen directly by the human eye.32 Given that Binet’s reflections on chronophotography are concerned primarily with the wondrousness of how the camera sees the magician, it is likely that the role of the camera in the scientific investigation of magic was not strictly scientific. Binet gestures to this when he claims that the camera’s visual acuity added an “interesting” layer to a scientific response to the magician’s invitation to watch closely in order to detect “how it’s done.”33 This is not to question the value of chronophotography to Binet’s experiment. The camera lent a significant degree of mechanical “objectivity” and precision to the investigation of an art that derives its power from the manipulation of human subjectivity.34 However, the scientific utility of chronophotography should be viewed in light of the fact that Binet’s study is largely animated by the educational potential of encounters between magicians and optical devices. From a cinema studies perspective, it is easy to see how magic stages chronophotography as something to be wondered at for the way it, like the magician, reveals the world we think we know to be a site of profound epistemic uncertainty. Given the nature of this confluence of science, technology, and magic, we can also see how Binet’s experiment prefigures what has recently become a scientific approach to visualizing the activities of the eye related to the experience of wonder.

Seeing Vision: From Binet to Neuromagic In the last decade, this proto-cinematic interest in magic has returned prominently in scientific studies of visual cognition that employ a variety of “new” media—namely digital imaging technologies—to visualize the operations of the visual system. Although Binet’s experiment is more of a specter than a point of engagement in this research, there are several significant analogs that reveal how the domain of magic and science continues to be animated by magicians who mediate the experience of seeing with devices of wonder. A recent event staged the acute resemblance between the return of magic in the twenty-first century and the fin-de-siècle constellation of

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magic, science, and technology: the Science of Magic project held at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in London on July 25, 2005. The Science of Magic was a small-scale event that coincided with the centenary of the famous Magic Circle, a society of magicians dedicated to preserving the history of magic and to educating and entertaining the public by offering audiences access to a museum and live performances. The 2005 event combined magicians’ tricks with a public lecture on the science of magic by the British magician-psychologist Richard Wiseman. This lecture-performance format is strikingly reminiscent of the nineteenth-century magic demonstrations at London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution. It also stands out as a literal articulation of the magic professor’s educative potential, in that the magician’s tricks were used to teach audiences about how vision and the mind work. Binet’s experiment was highlighted to contextualize the enduring relevance of sleight-of-hand magic to psychology.35 In a kind of mediaarchaeological gesture, Wiseman digitized and animated Demenÿ’s photographs of Raynaly performing a vanishing-ball trick.36 The purpose of the reanimation was to historicize the recent scientific interest in magic and to restore the magician’s original sleight of hand for contemporary audiences— that is, to breathe new life into a historical artifact. The transformation of Binet’s research images into a short motion picture also represents an attempt to bring the early convergence of magicians, scientists, and optical devices up to date in the light of contemporary scientific research. Although Wiseman does not seem to have been deeply interested in the scientific or historical value of Binet’s images to his own work, the continuity between the old and the new is nonetheless prominent and on display. As a variation of Raynaly wondering through chronophotography at the mechanics of his performance, recent research has been conducted by psychologists like Wiseman who are placing their backgrounds as magicians in the service of scientific inquiry. These magician-psychologists have made prominent use of specialized cameras to study habits of vision and attention that are foregrounded in watching sleight-of-hand magic. In the early 2000s, one of Wiseman’s colleagues, Gustav Kuhn, conducted a series of experiments in which participants were asked to watch videos of him performing various tricks. One of the videos depicted an illusion in which the magician, after tossing a ball in the air twice, causes it to vanish during a third toss. According to Kuhn, despite the fact that the ball is

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not actually present in the final toss, a large percentage of the participants reported that they saw the ball appear in the air and then vanish near the magician’s head.37 To account for how participants arrived at this description of their experience, Kuhn collaborated with a neurobiologist, Michael Land, and used an eye-tracking camera to plot the eye movements of spectators as they watched the video of the magician. The camera was originally designed by Land to test the points at which the saccadic movements of the eye of a person driving a car fixate on landmarks at an intersection.38 The most recent versions of this technology consist of video-based camera systems and the use of infrared light to reflect and measure the movements of a spectator’s pupils. The information gathered in the process is interpreted using a computer, which produces a visual map of where the pupils move. This map usually contains moving images seen by the spectator overlaid with a moving dot, circle, or some other marker that corresponds with the precise location of the spectator’s gaze throughout the viewing experience. The eye-tracking footage of Kuhn’s vanishing-ball experiment consists of moving images of the trick overlaid with moving white markers that map the precise paths of spectators’ gazes. The images revealed that during the false third toss, spectators typically focused on the magician’s gaze, which was directed at the implied movement of the ball. It was concluded from this that the magician’s ability to astonish audiences is largely determined by the influence of expectations and social cues, like the magician’s gaze, which shape perceptions of phenomena that may or may not have corresponding real-world referents. By providing an analyzable view of the spectator detective’s investigation of magic, the camera revealed that the eye itself was not tricked during the performance. The misperception of the phenomenon was ultimately due to a “dissociation” between the activity of the eye, which by itself is fairly accurate, and perception, which is largely influenced by expectations and suggestions rather than the supposed folly of the eye.39 Kuhn’s work is part of a larger body of research that uses these techniques to visualize the spectator’s “attentional spotlight” or “focus of suspicion.”40 This is demonstrated by Kuhn’s image study of a similar vanishing trick in which the spectator’s attention to certain details within the visual field causes other, more significant details to fall out of the metaphorical spotlight of what is consciously perceived. Along with Kuhn’s eye-tracking

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Figure 4. These frames show multiple spectators’ fixation points plotted in white on stills from video footage of Gustav Kuhn performing a vanishing ball trick. The frames A, B, and C represent the magician gazing at the ball’s “false” position; D, E, and F represent the same trick with this misdirection being replaced by the magician gazing at his hand. Reprinted from Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land, “There’s More to Magic than Meets the Eye,” Current Biology 16, no. 22 (November 2006): R951, copyright November 2006, reprinted with permission from Elsevier.

footage, these images conjure a significantly new dimension from the scientific vision that chronophotography afforded Binet. With the use of optical devices to analyze magicians’ techniques and to visualize and record the act of watching closely, the spectator’s vision is literally projected, thrown forth like an image from a movie projector and made visible. This layering of perceptions—that is, the spectator’s view of the magician superimposed on the camera’s view of the magician—allows the scientist to “see vision” in the context of the spectator’s encounter with moving images of magicians. The scientists John Henderson and Tim Smith have expanded this research to include studies of spectatorship in moving-image culture, broadly construed. As part of their Dynamic Images and Eye Movements (DIEM) project, Henderson and Smith have produced some fascinating empirical demonstrations of how vision and attention work while watching

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a film.41 A recent example, which has garnered the interest of the cinema scholar David Bordwell, is the use of infrared eye-tracking cameras to visualize the behaviors of spectators’ eyes as they watched a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s narrative film There Will Be Blood (2007). An analysis of the scene is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the technical aspects of the study are relevant. In a moving image of the combined eye-tracking data for eleven spectators, circles representing the movements of the eyes grow in size relative to the length of time a detail in the image holds the attention. Smith has interpreted this data using “dynamic heat maps,” which transform the eye-tracking images into zones of attention (represented by warmer colors) and inattention (represented by cooler colors and black). In both cases optical devices revealed that, as in the perception of tricks, shifts in spectators’ “attentional spotlights” corresponded strongly with cues given by actors’ movements and gazes.42 To be precise, what is being measured is the behavior of the human eye, which Smith and Bordwell see as useful for developing a better understanding of how spectators experience film and for scientifically “testing” cognitive film theory. Smith’s analyses generated visual evidence of how techniques of staging—for example, the positioning and framing of actors, the timing and objects of actors’ gazes—guide the spectator’s attention to the most important story information and, ultimately, “direct” the interpretation of a film. As with the ability of the magician to manipulate vision and attention, visual cues were revealed to be strikingly powerful; the eye movements of the eleven spectators watching the scene were mostly “synchronized” by where the actors were looking.43 Much of the current research on the cognitive dimensions of cinematic spectatorship is exploring how these kinds of mechanisms provide scientific insight into the role of onscreen movements, gazes, and gestures in determining spectators’ interpretations of narrative films.44 DIEM research, for example, has been extended to the study of classical continuity (or  “invisible”) editing techniques.45 Scientists have used eye-tracking cameras to analyze the related phenomenon of “change blindness,” which refers to our potential failure to notice significant changes that occur within the field of vision if those changes are “obscured,” occur in the span of a very brief interruption, or do not draw our attention.46 A relevant case is Richard Wiseman’s experiment in which he performs a card trick while his shirt changes colors along with the tablecloth and the backdrop of the

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“set” on which the trick is performed. Despite being in plain view, the color changes apparently went undetected by the spectators because they were attending to the card trick. Change blindness is a natural part of our visual experience—that is, it occurs in our everyday experience of the world around us—but it is also a rich point of contact between scientific studies of magic and perception, on the one hand, and cinema studies and cognitive film theory, on the other. For example, Henderson and Smith link change blindness with the phenomenon of “edit blindness” in the cinema; that is, the spectator’s failure to detect cuts or notice changes between shots if the changes are not disorienting and do not “violate expectations.”47 Because classical continuity edits—like Georges Méliès’s seamless use of splicing techniques in some of his trick films—promote the impression of continuity but are never undetectable, Smith has noted the resemblance between how these edits work and the magician’s ability to manipulate the spectator’s gaze and attention away from the labor involved in performing a trick.48 The crucial differences are that in continuity editing the transitions between shots remain hidden in plain sight, and the goal, unlike in the magic performance, is not to cause spectators to wonder at how continuity is achieved. Because the DIEM project is still relatively new, it has yet to make its way fully and systematically into the study of audiovisual media. But this kind of research offers a potent means of reevaluating cognitive film theory, phenomenology, and theories of immersion in the light of related histories and theories of illusion and trickery that are being explored mainly in the sciences. Pursuing this line of inquiry further would create new points of dialogue between cinema and media studies and the kind of scholarship on cognitive neuroscience in the arts that Barbara Maria Stafford has recently pursued in Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images and A Field Guide to a New Meta-field: Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide and that John Onians and others have offered in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science. Interestingly, related neuroscientific studies of magic—or “neuromagic”— are aiming the gaze of imaging technologies inward to visualize the brain activities associated with the experience of watching tricks. Along with the scientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Kuhn and his colleagues have been exploring how magicians’ violations of expectations about cause-and-effect relations affect the brain. In one experiment

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participants were studied with fMRI technology as they watched video clips of magic tricks. The resulting neuroimages were used to develop a “neurobiology of disbelief ”—an account of those parts of the brain that are activated by the conflict magicians stage between the evidence of the senses and the evidence of reason.49 As a poignant variation on the idea that the magician is a kind of popular science “professor,” the scientists claim that this investigation of magic provides insight into both the brain’s rapid negotiation of uncertain visual phenomena and the processes related to “learning from novel/unexpected events.”50

Nontheatrical Media and Magic Although the relationship between modern science, optical devices, and the status of vision in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been explored thoroughly, the history of magic’s encounters with cinemas of scientific discovery along these lines has not. Such encounters offer a rich point of access for bringing this history within the purview of cinema and media studies. Because of the scientific rather than entertainment uses of optical devices in early and contemporary investigations of magic, at most the images these devices produced occupy the margins of histories of magic and the cinema, which are written primarily with an eye to genre and the history and aesthetics of visual effects. Scientific views of magicians like Raynaly and Kuhn are admittedly less wonderful in appearance than the popular image of the magician performing fantastic cinematic illusions. However, these “nontheatrical” research images have tremendous potential to expand the study of magic’s relation to the cinema in new and unexpected ways. Recent attempts to theorize the mind through magic do signal an exciting new phase in a long genealogy of which Binet’s case is only a part, but the cinematic value of these cases warrants further consideration. There remains the question of the fact that optical devices like eye-tracking cameras have consistently been used to study the wonder response to “representations” of magicians rather than to “live” performances of magic. Whether the distinction is relevant from a scientific perspective is unclear, but it definitely confirms that these cases occupy an important if underexplored place in the landscape of cinema and media studies.

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Even though the distinction between live and represented magic is less relevant to Binet’s case, for example, because the scientist was not studying spectators’ experiences of serial photographs of magicians, his experiment is permeated by the scientist’s own sense of wonder at the encounter between magic and chronophotography. This is evidenced by the fact that the images Demenÿ produced represent Binet’s own wonder response to sleight-of-hand tricks; that is, chronophotography provided a scientific basis for mediating the uncertainty of optical illusions. It is not insignificant that only a few years after his experiment, Binet’s response to rediscovering magic through the lens of chronophotography was mirrored in audiences’ responses to seeing stage magicians onscreen performing the new magic of the cinema. As subsequent chapters of this book will demonstrate, the phenomenological differences between seeing magic live and seeing it on a cinema screen continue to shape questions about how cinematic trickery has changed with innovations in mechanical and digital technologies. The relationship between magic and the developing field of cognitive film theory is exciting in this regard, but the value specifically of the magician to understanding the dynamics of cinematic spectatorship might be limited. This is in part because long-standing discourses on optical illusions (not just magic tricks) have established a strong basis of knowledge for theorizing the mind. What is more intriguing is the fact that the images that have come out of scientific studies of magic—particularly in the case of experiments with eye-tracking cameras—are profound visualizations of the mechanisms behind the wonder response to moving-image representations of magic. This fact makes the history of magic’s intersections with cinemas of scientific discovery a unique site for exploring how cinematic technologies themselves can provide insight into how audiences experience representations of magicians in early trick films, for example, and, as we will see, into what it means to wonder at visual effects. Additionally, the fact that optical devices continue to mediate the relationship between science and magic suggests that the study of this field has much to contribute to the pursuit of understanding the human through representational technologies. This project has been fundamental to developments in cinematic technologies for more than a century. The domain of nontheatrical film and media has been particularly concerned with questions about how humans come to know the world and themselves through

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optical devices, as well as about how the cinema works as a medium of visual education. That the theme of “educational entertainment” unifies this nontheatrical domain and the domain of magic compels us to see how scientific-cinematic investigations of magicians promise something in addition to new knowledge about human psychology. For example, although the images produced by Binet and Demenÿ, and now by cognitive scientists, are technically “research” images and not “educational” in the way we understand educational films to be, they teach us about the kind of knowledge afforded by new technologies and techniques of vision. In these cases, the magician figures both as a source of scientific knowledge and as a medium of discovery whose potential for enlightenment mirrors that of the optical devices used to investigate and represent him. Without denying the scientific values of investigating magic, this is to say that an equally rich dimension is the potential for this constellation of science, magic, and technology to greatly expand the field of magic and the cinema. Whereas the film historian Jacques Deslandes identified Demenÿ’s serial photographs as being among the first trick films ever made, Richard Wiseman has claimed of an animated version of one of these sequences: “Although only a few seconds long, the film is the earliest known moving image of a magician—and unlike almost all films of entertainers from this period, it is based on images created for scientific research rather than public enjoyment.”51 From Wiseman’s perspective, Binet’s images and their twenty-first-century analogs harbor a strong affinity for what Matthew Solomon has called “films of tricks.” Films of tricks dating back to 1896 are distinguished by the fact that, unlike trick films, they do not use the magic performance to display novel cinematic trick techniques. Rather they preserve magic tricks as attractions in and of themselves by representing the magician in the mode of an actuality.52 Although the preservation of sleight of hand as an attraction is not the objective in scientific studies of magic, considering them to be part of a genealogy of films of tricks is a fruitful basis for exploring other histories of magic in the cinema, namely nontheatrical and documentary representations of modern magic that reveal the many layers of magic’s affinities with science, investigation, and discovery. Binet’s case is particularly relevant because it makes its home in between science and art, education and entertainment, nontheatrical and theatrical cinemas. This in-between-ness imbues the encounter between the camera and the magician with a richness

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that is easily overlooked. For example, the affinity between Binet’s images and films of tricks does not diminish or contradict the fact that the chronophotographic representations of magicians harbor a strong affinity for the representations of magicians in early trick films. Although Binet’s images and early trick films are radically different in appearance—for example, the former are sterilized and “scientific,” whereas the latter deal in enchantment and fantasy—the figure of the magician stages the chronophotograph as a device of wonder, much like Méliès’s familiar use of stage magic to explore the wondrous properties of the cinema. Finally, the significance of scientists’ uses of optical devices to perform the kind of inquiry that magicians can compel ultimately resides in the way that trickery is not simply the object of investigation but also the method or technique of revelation. In each encounter between the optical devices and sleight-of-hand tricks discussed here, the representation of the magic performance provides the spectator detective with access to otherwise imperceptible phenomena—that is, including the secret operations of the tricks being performed and the processes of visual perception and cognition that tricks rely upon for their wondrous effects. These exchanges between magic tricks and the optical devices used to represent them demonstrate that (proto-)cinematic representations of magicians are, in a sense, media of discovery. What we might call the “revelatory potential of trickery” is clarified by a brief and admittedly oblique example. In the introduction to his Physiologie médicale de la circulation du sang, Étienne-Jules Marey discusses the difficulty of studying the pulsation of the human heart and the corresponding variations in the pressure of blood circulating through the arteries. These phenomena elude direct and accurate observation and contemplation because of their quickness and interiority. In response to this dilemma of visual acuity, Marey proposes, “The best means of rapidly improving this study of the external signs of a function consists of pushing back the limits of our senses, compensating for their restricted perception, or, by certain devices [or tricks], making visible or palpable phenomena which are not naturally so” [emphasis added].53 With the word devices Marey is referring to the use of an actual scientific apparatus, like his sphygmograph. This device was strapped to a subject’s wrist and, with the aid of a stylus mechanism that rested on the skin above an artery, inscribed the subject’s pulse in the graphic form of an undulating line.54

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But the French word that Marey uses for “devices” is artifices, which also connotes clever contrivance and trickery. The connotation suggests that the method of making the imperceptible or invisible visible begins with a trick, a mechanical or manual device that manipulates the “natural” conditions of a phenomenon’s visibility so as to make that phenomenon appear unnaturally. In the shared history of magic and the cinema, Marey’s point compels us not simply to think of media like chronophotography and eyetracking cameras as extraordinary techniques for representing real-world phenomena wonderfully. We can also begin thinking of representations of magicians’ tricks with cinematic technologies as means “of pushing back the limits of our senses,” that is, of facilitating the process of discovery. To see the history of magic and the cinema in this light means to reimagine “trickery” as both an art of deception or mystification and a site where the enduring question of vision crystallizes and leads to new knowledge. The cinema’s natural ability to trick the human eye is so familiar and essential to the experience of motion pictures that we rarely think about vision, let alone question, doubt, or wonder at it. And because the cinema established itself as a kind of mechanical magician from the outset, our experience of film has always been premised on the idea that the cinema is a trick, “a vast trucage,” as Metz put it. Associating magic with the cinema has become so intuitive that we rarely contemplate the cinema’s nature as a trick, that is, until we are incited to wonder. Consider that sleight of hand works in part because the magician manipulates natural perceptual processes in such a way that spectators are unaware of being manipulated until the moment of wonder, when the magician violates expectations about what is actually being seen. In a sleightof-hand performance, for example, a magician might give an audience the impression that an object—say, a ball—has been moved from one hand to the next and then contradict that impression by revealing that the object is not where it “should” be but indeed has vanished. For Binet and other scientists, the value of the magician’s ability to do this is in how the resulting experience of wonder promotes the spectator’s acute consciousness of otherwise habitual and normally unnoticed activities between the senses and the mind. The ultimate effect is that the magician transforms visual perception itself into an object of wonder. Encountering a trick, whether it is performed by the cinema or by a magician, can thus be like encountering the very nature and limitations

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of human perception. This is an encounter in which audiences take great pleasure, but it is also an opportunity of learning. As we have seen, and as the scientific interest in magic suggests, this dimension of trickery is not new. The art historian Barbara Maria Stafford has argued convincingly, for example, that, beginning with the secularization of magic in the Enlightenment, “conjuring was not just mindless spectacle but a force for visual education” because magicians’ wonders appealed to skepticism and intellectual curiosity rather than fear and credulity.55 The specific constellation of magic, science, and technology mapped in this chapter speaks more broadly to how encounters between magicians and the techniques and technologies of the cinema harbor tremendous potential to renew what and how we see, as well as how we understand the human eye’s capacities for seeing, both in the cinema and in reality.

3 • SECOND SIGHT Time Lapse and the Cinema as Seer

Discovery always means learning that objects are not as we had believed them to be; to know more, one must first abandon the most evident certainties of established knowledge. —Jean Epstein, “The Universe Head over Heels”

The magician’s ability to incite us to wonder about the nature of vision, to renew perception by forcing us out of the habits of ordinary, everyday ways of seeing, is reflected vividly in the idea that the cinema is like an enchanted eye. Throughout film history, but prominently in the first half of the twentieth century, audiences have invoked themes of revelation, clairvoyance, and telepathy to describe the cinema’s very real capacity to see phenomena that are invisible and imperceptible to the naked eye, to at once exceed and radically expand human vision. As the early filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac put it, “The cinema is an eye wide open on life, an eye more powerful than our own which sees things we cannot see.”1 With a resemblance to what magicians call second sight—the apparent ability to see the supersensible, to have “visions”—this power has inflected everything from nineteenth-century spirit photography to scientific applications of microscopy, slow motion, and time-lapse photography in the cinema. In the shared history of magic and cinematic technologies, we might say, the question of vision has been animated by the image of the cinema as a seer. Jean Epstein captures this remarkably in a scene from one of his most haunting films: Le tempestaire (1947). Set on the Brittany coast, the film

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centers on a group of fishermen who venture out to sea and are caught in a violent storm. Fearing for their lives, the fiancée of one of the fishermen seeks the aid of a magician, an old man who apparently has the power to control the forces of nature. After initially refusing her request, the magician retrieves a dark crystal ball from a cupboard and, gazing into it, sees storm clouds (rendered through a time-lapse technique) moving rapidly across the sky. Within the crystal ball appears a series of moving images of waves (rendered in slow motion) crashing violently against the rocks along the shore, no doubt a gesture to the fascination with the spectacle of movement in early films depicting seascapes. Holding the crystal ball in his hands, the magician blows on the images conjured in the glass until the violence of the waves (rendered in slow motion and now in reverse) subsides. The suggestion that the magician has thus brought the storm to an end is confirmed when the old man drops the crystal ball and it shatters on the ground just as the woman’s fiancé walks safely through the door, almost as if the storm had never happened. The interplay between the magician, nature, and cinematic tricks—that is, time lapse and slow motion—stages a rich discourse on the kind of vision the cinema, as a mechanical magician, can afford. The crystal ball is framed as a device of wonder through which moving images of reality are produced; like the cinematic apparatus, it also appears as a medium of revelation, discovery, and trickery. Through the “looking glass” the magician conjures an extraordinary vision of the natural world. The waves, for example, appear to move in ways that are only possible because of the unique animating properties of the cinema, which the magician, as the cinema’s double, reflects by manipulating time to create new forms of movement. In the process, the young woman is positioned like a cinematic spectator simultaneously removed from the world and immersed in it through the eye of the camera. As if captivated by the wonders of moving-image technologies, the young woman looks on in amazement as nature itself, in the hands of the magician, becomes uncanny. The display of time lapse and slow motion as techniques the magician uses to wield his power over the natural world speaks to a broader cultural fascination with something that at first glance could not appear to be more removed from the enchanting world of Le tempestaire: cinemas of scientific discovery. Epstein was both a mystic and, like modern magicians, a

Figure 5. The sorcerer controlling the storm using his crystal ball. Reproduced from The Storm Tamer (Le tempestaire), directed by Jean Epstein (1947), DVD.

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student of science (he attended medical school in France before becoming a filmmaker). Along with many early cinema audiences, including filmmakers and theorists like Dulac, he was captivated by popular science films that revealed phenomena that are otherwise imperceptible to the human eye. Time-lapse films showing the movements of plants, cells, and crystals held a particularly prominent place in the early cinematic imagination because the worlds they revealed had the appearance of being worldly and otherworldly, recognizable and unrecognizable, simultaneously. Epstein captured this when he claimed that, by revealing what the eye cannot see, time-lapse films “contradict and throw into confusion the sense of the order which we have established at great cost in our conception of the universe.”2 The affinity between magic and science that shadows Le tempestaire is rooted in the potential for the cinema (and specifically time lapse) to renew our perceptions of nature by compelling us to “abandon the most evident certainties of established knowledge.” Consider that in our unaided perception of plant growth, for example, the metamorphosis occurs at an imperceptible rate. When we observe a plant grow, because it is larger, broader, wider, brighter, it can only mean we are detecting that movement has occurred. But in time-lapse views of plants, our inability to see a plant growing is overcome by the camera’s supervisual ability to produce an image of continuous transformation. Continuity of movement is achieved by contracting the temporal gaps between changes in such a way that the imperceptible movement of the plant becomes visible on a different time scale. This mechanical view of movement replaces the normal appearance of the plant. With a resemblance to experiencing a magician’s trick, the wonder response to time-lapse films has largely been shaped by an ecstatic mode of observation that such films enable. “Ecstatic” captures less a state of heightened emotion, astonishment, or rapture that we might associate with mysticism or the trance and more an extraordinary but not irrational sense of “a going out of the body” or “a going out of a normal state” captured by the Greek ekstasis.3 The irrational is important in that it colors the experience of virtually traveling to imperceptible worlds through cinematic technologies. In this chapter it takes the specific form of the uncanny experience of being like a visionary or a seer through the wondrous eye of the scientific camera. Although it has long been a commonplace that the cinema sees things which the human eye cannot, this idea is significantly renewed by an

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underexplored history of time-lapse photography as a trick, a game of perception. As we will see, for more than a century, the pleasures and wonders of time-lapse films have been animated not simply by the uncanny views of reality the cinema can produce but by the innovative cinematic technologies and techniques that make these views possible. Beginning as early as the 1890s, the novel power of the cinema to visualize imperceptible phenomena was simultaneously shaped by scientific endeavor and by what Stephen Heath has called the “machine interest” of early cinema— a fascination with the wonderful mechanics of the cinema’s way of seeing the world.4 This interest is closely related to the investigative practices that magic tricks can compel and foregrounds how time lapse can be considered a site for wondering at the machinery of the cinema and the powers of vision it harbors as a technology of illusion.

Remote from Reality: The Magical Life of Plants Time-lapse views of plants growing are among the most pervasive and recognizable tropes in the field of documentary and nature filmmaking. In fact, the figure of the animated plant is so common in cinema culture that it has taken on the valence of what the media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo would call a topos in film and media history.5 Yet for all of our familiar associations with the sight of animated plants in the cinema (and the familiarities run deep), the sight itself never ceases to carry with it an unshakeable strangeness. This persistent uncanny quality of the cinema’s way of seeing nature compelled Siegfried Kracauer to remark in Theory of Film: “Pictures of stalks piercing the soil in the process of growing open up imaginary areas . . . patterns remote from reality.”6 The invocation of “imaginary areas” points to how time-lapse films can cause us to wonder at nature. But what is it precisely that makes this particular use of time lapse so strange that the spectacle of movement in these films appears “remote from reality”? As a way into answering this question, consider the remarkable “Nutcracker Suite” segment of Walt Disney’s animated musical Fantasia (1940). Changes in the seasons over the course of a year take the form of a fairy tale narrative in which woodland fairies fly from plant to plant and cause flowers to cycle through the processes of blooming and withering as

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spring and summer eventually transition to autumn and winter. The flowers appear to come to life—sometimes anthropomorphized as dancing plants literally, as Tchaikovsky would have had it, waltzing—when touched by the fairies’ wands, which function like the magical wand used by the sorcerer’s apprentice in the same film as devices of wonder that “tap” into the magical life of plants. The invocation of an animating spirit that brings flowers to life (and generally unifies the natural universe) is a relatively familiar motif in the domain of animated films. Disney, for example, also used the image of magically animated plants in various ways in his famous Silly Symphony short “Flowers and Trees” (1932) and in Alice in Wonderland (1951), where Alice is serenaded by a whole forest of plants that sing and dance. That plants “brought to life” show up repeatedly in Disney can be attributed in part to the fact that the motif reflects an affinity between animation and anthropomorphosis that holds a prominent place in the popular imagination. These animated views of flowers springing to life are also in profound dialogue with time-lapse films of plants growing. Broadly speaking, the animated sequences of flowers blooming in Disney’s films visualize a significant relationship between popular science films and the imperceptible movements of nature. Béla Balázs speaks to this when he claims, “Nothing could be more like fairy tales than the scientific films which show the growth of crystals.”7 In the light of Kracauer’s similar response to time-lapse films of nature, it is easy to see how the sense of the fantastic that Disney projected into the imaginary realm of drawn animation has equally strong roots in the ability of time-lapse photography to produce wonderful nonfiction views of flowers growing. The power of time lapse to provoke wonder along these lines accounts in part for the endurance throughout film history of the animated view of growing plants. This view is a staple subject of early popular science film series like Charles Urban’s Urban Science—for one example, Percy Smith’s The Birth of a Flower (1910)—and like Wardour Films’ Secrets of Nature, of which Mary Field’s Plant Magic (1927) and Percy Smith’s Magic Myxies (1931) are cases in point. Wondrously animated plants also played a major role in Disney’s famous documentary series True-Life Adventures—notably The Living Desert (1953) and Secrets of Life (1956)—and was revisited in the context of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the BBC/Discovery Channel series Life (2010), where the sight of plants growing was renewed

Figure 6. The “Nutcracker Suite” sequence from Fantasia. Reproduced from Fantasia, directed by James Algar et al. (1940; Walt Disney Studios, 2000), DVD.

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with high-definition cameras and digital effects techniques. Given that these images of magical plant life proliferate even beyond the handful of examples listed here, it would not be an overstatement to say that the history of popular science in the cinema has been animated by a fascination with seeing plants grow. It is not coincidental that the invocation of fairies in Fantasia and the invocation of wonder with respect to time-lapse photography are unified by a discourse of magic. A long history of modern magic’s relationship with (proto-)cinematic time-lapse techniques weaves like an animating spirit between these fantastic and scientific versions of the cinema’s ability to tap, like the fairies’ wands, into the secret, magical life of plants. Beginning most prominently during the Enlightenment, the figure of the metamorphic plant proliferated as part of a genealogy of magic tricks that includes everything from the production of flowers out of thin air to transformational and dissolving views of plants to the mysterious growth of flowers, fruit, and leaves on real and mechanical bushes and trees. These tricks have consistently been as much about the enchantments of animation as about the revelation of real but imperceptible worlds within nature. This specific genealogy has its own important place in the history of magic, but it has also manifested throughout histories of the cinema and related media, and not strictly in the ways that either Kracauer’s and Balázs’s responses or Disney’s fairies animating flowers are linked to magic. Magicians’ time-lapse tricks made literal appearances in early trick films featuring wondrous metamorphic plants, and audiences have made complementary associations between time-lapse films and popular magicians’ illusions. There is also the persistent, albeit sometimes latent, awareness that time-lapse photography is essentially a wonderful cinematic trick. Exploring these intersections between magic and science in the cinema reveals how time lapse has been framed throughout film history as both a technique of scientific discovery and a device of wonder. What emerges in considering the longue durée of time lapse as a trick technique in this vein is that a discourse of magic has mediated the wonders and uncertainties of how the cinema sees what the human eye cannot. The early history of time-lapse photography is a useful site for beginning to map the broader landscape in which science, technology, magic, and animation have merged. In the 1890s, time-lapse studies of plant growth were conducted at the Marey Institute in Paris using an automated, purpose-built

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camera designed by Lucien Bull. One of these studies shows the opening of a flower in fifteen sequential photographic images. Oliver Gaycken has pointed out that, although the small number of images produced makes this sequence unlikely to have been projected as a motion picture for large audiences, the time-lapse view nonetheless occupies a genealogy that extends from early popular science films back through the research of Wilhelm Pfeffer to Charles and Francis Darwin’s use of optical devices to visualize plant growth in the mid- to late nineteenth century.8 To this we could also add the fascinating case of the prominent English botanist Henderina Scott, who experimented in the early 1900s with a device known as a Kammatograph, which was a cinematic camera that registered serial photographs on a circular glass plate.9 The images produced by Lucien Bull’s camera also occupy the long genealogy of time lapse conceived as a trick in the shared history of modern magic and cinemas of scientific discovery. While contemplating Bull’s time-lapse view in 1913, for example, Frederick Talbot remarked: “These pictures .  .  . show the complete opening of the flower, the phases in the successive pictures blending so well together as to convey the impression that the pictures were taken at the normal speed.”10 For Talbot, the flower’s metamorphosis appears as if it were filmed live and on the spot in real time, that is, without the use of a trick. The impression of untouched continuity achieved by time-lapse photography obscures the use of the technique, and this to such an extent that the viewer’s tacit and almost intuitive knowledge of the artifice of the sequence comes up against the striking sense that the flower is really growing, exactly this way, before one’s very eyes. When Talbot points to the illusory nature of this sight, he hints that the scientific application of time lapse and the domain of magic and the uncanny have been very much coiled from the outset. This relationship between magic, time-lapse photography, and science is clarified by the often overlooked fact that time lapse is an animation technique. In the long history of modern magic, the wondrousness of metamorphic plant tricks has stemmed from the apparent ability of the magician, like the necromancer, to breathe life into an apparently inanimate object. Similarly, all animation in the cinema, including the illusion of motion itself, involves some form of transforming still images into moving ones. But rather than simply invoking the more familiar sense of animation as the endowment of the inanimate with life, time-lapse photography works

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according to a logic of revelation: it animates a realm that is already, but imperceptibly, animate. Like the fairies in Fantasia, time lapse makes plants move and dance with an uncanny life. These animated and revelatory views of nature are also entirely virtual, insofar as the movement that becomes visible exists as such only through the mediation of the camera. This virtual experience of watching plants grow is undoubtedly strange. Given that time-lapse views are usually of real phenomena and not of imaginary worlds, the question of their remoteness from reality has to do with the extraordinary rather than the supernatural or the miraculous. This is why Kracauer considers time lapse as a technique for providing visual access to “realit[ies] of another dimension.”11 In the light of modern magic’s relationship with devices of wonder, time lapse can be seen as a trick that reveals nature as a wonderland by adding another dimension to sight. In both timelapse photography and the magic performance, the spectator is offered an encounter with the natural world in which phenomena do not appear to abide by “the most evident certainties of established knowledge.” The sense of the imaginary attending these cinematic views derives precisely from this: the worlds viewed are no longer seen with certainty because they appear wonderfully through the mechanical eye of an optical device. Time lapse, in other words, is a trick through which the spectator rediscovers nature as a realm of the unknown and the apparently inexplicable, a kind of fairy tale that appears imaginary precisely because it subtends normal visual experience and comes into view in a wondrous way. The intersection between modern magic and time lapse in early cinema was organized around this capacity of tricks to reveal how the spectator and the cinema see the world differently. The early French filmmaker Abel Gance speaks to this in his essay “The Cinema of Tomorrow” (1929), when he writes: It is thanks, then, to some haphazard discoveries, to certain tricks of the camera [like time lapse], that the first film-makers were able to discern in the spectacle of ordinary life things which painters may have been dimly aware of in the past but which most of us have absolutely no knowledge of. . . . Cinema allows us to see or at least to glimpse . . . aspects of the great and immortal enchantment that is the real life of nature.12

Gance’s idea that cinematic tricks “allow us to see” resonates with the mode of “ecstatic observation” that characterizes cinemas of scientific

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discovery—the wondrous virtual experience of going beyond the seeing body through the use of optical devices. It also suggests that nature becomes wonderful or (re)enchanted by way of such visual techniques in a process that closely resembles how the magician facilitates the spectator’s discovery of the world as a site of sometimes profound uncertainty. In an account from 1910, Edfrid Bingham considers the limitations of unaided human vision relative to the view of plant growth in time-lapse films. He asks, “A plant is larger today than it was yesterday, but who has seen it grow? The bud of today is the rose of tomorrow, but though the wonder takes place under our eyes it is a mystery still.”13 Although the experience of wondering at cinematic views of plant growth might be familiar to us, the depth and complexity of this experience are renewed in unexpected ways by the long history of magicians’ mediations and displays of the magical life of plants.

A Genealogy of Supernatural Views In an early sequence from Neil Burger’s film The Illusionist (2006), the fictional nineteenth-century stage magician Eisenheim (Edward Norton) cuts an orange in half and extracts a seed, which he places in a pot of soil in front of an audience. In a matter of seconds, a miniature orange tree sprouts and grows in height while producing blossoms and then oranges, which Eisenheim plucks from the branches and tosses to audience members who confirm them to be real. According to Burger and the film’s cinematographer, Dick Pope, the image of the orange tree sprouting and rising from the pot while growing branches and leaves was achieved by filming a replica of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century automaton tree. The metamorphosis of this mechanical device was generated by an intricate system of gears, which actually moved the tree’s limbs and leaves to simulate the process of growing at an accelerated rate. Because the automaton was apparently prone to malfunctioning and posed challenges in filming the sequence, computer animation was used to render the tree’s production of fruit in the final stages of the trick.14 The layering of “old” and “new” tricks in this sequence suggests that the view of plant metamorphosis endures as a form of trickery that challenges the certainty of our knowledge of the (in)visible world. Eisenheim

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Figure 7. Eisenheim performing the Orange Tree trick in The Illusionist. Reproduced from The Illusionist, directed by Neil Burger (Yari Film Group, 2006), DVD.

introduces his performance of what is known in the history of magic as the Orange Tree trick with the following patter: “I would like to continue with an examination of time. From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mock it. We cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or slow it down. Or, can we?” Given the immediate resemblance between the growing-tree trick and the cinema’s long history of manipulating time, to which the magician in Le tempestaire also speaks, it is not difficult to see the cinema itself as the backdrop to Eisenheim’s question. Indeed, the use of computer-generated metamorphosis in this trick points to a deep relationship between animation and trickery that resonates strongly with our contemporary moment, which later sections in this chapter will illuminate more fully. It is significant that Eisenheim’s “examination” takes the form of a demonstration of the magician’s power—like the cinema’s—to reveal nature in such a way that spectators are led to question not only the spectacle they are beholding but also the trick’s imperceptible referent: the metamorphosis of real trees really growing in nature. Eisenheim’s growing tree is part of a long history in which these and related issues have been recycled across a range of practices, techniques, and technologies used in performing similar tricks. One of the earliest versions of this illusion is known as the Mango Tree trick, which is primarily associated with sleight-of-hand magicians and itinerant conjurors in India,

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where it gained in popularity during the seventeenth century.15 In this trick, a magician appears to grow a tree by covertly inserting graduated pieces of a real mango tree into a pot of soil. The illusion of growth from seed to fruitbearing tree is achieved by way of a technique comparable to the substitution splice of a trick film, which is the basis of time-lapse photography: a portion of the actual performance is cut from view to create the impression of a surprising transformation. The objective of this trick is the cultivation of astonishment at the magician’s apparently supernatural manipulation of a natural phenomenon. As Lee Siegel explains, “The trick was most often presented as an act of real magic, a display of the magician’s ability to modulate time.” A nineteenthcentury account of the Mango Tree trick being performed in the French East Indies notes further that “the magician explained that [the metamorphosis], like all magic, was performed by the pitrs—those spirits of deceased ancestors who are honored in rites by the pious. Entering into communication with them, the magician prompts them to reveal their numenous [sic] power.”16 As in the tradition of magical forms like witchcraft and sorcery, this particular trick is premised on the suggestion that the animation of the tree is supernatural in origin. In their modern or secular forms, growing-tree tricks were developed in the light of a mechanical worldview in which life is modeled on the operations of a machine. Modern magicians used mechanical apparatuses that simulated the continuous metamorphosis of plants without the substitution technique used in the Mango Tree trick. Magicians like Isaac Fawkes, Giovanni Pinetti, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Germain the Wizard, and the mononymous Cornillot performed illusions with automaton trees that employed pneumatic processes and complicated pulley, gear, and spring systems to produce mechanical movement. These automata were usually presented as science experiments and philosophical toys with the conceit that they offered an updated version of the trick’s so-called primitive origins. One of these “up-to-date” apparatuses peddled by the “Peasant of North Holland” between 1746 and 1747 was called the Philosophical Flower Pot, a title that aligned the automaton with other educational tools and devices of wonder that had roots in the Enlightenment.17 Many of these apparatuses cannot be considered “true” automata because they were typically operated by confederates—that is, magicians’

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accomplices—who would be hidden beyond the purview of the audience during the magic performance. A true automaton sustains its own metamorphosis by way of an engine like a clockwork motor built into the device’s mechanical structure, but these pseudo-automata only give the appearance of automation; they do not move independently of human intervention.18 The distinction of not being a true automaton frames the matter of the trick as an experience of wondering where human intervention ends and mechanical automation begins, a “line” that will return in the next chapter when we consider a long history of magic and animation in the cinema. The time-lapse sequences created by mechanical trees also forced audiences to grapple with an uncertainty about the distinction between the automaton’s capacity for simulating life and life itself. The appearance of life is reinforced by the fact that most automaton trees were exceptionally convincing mechanical specimens. Henry Ridgely Evans claims in this regard that part of the fascination with Robert-Houdin’s famous automaton orange tree was that the device “was so closely fashioned to resemble a plant that it was impossible to detect the difference.”19 This is not to suggest that automaton trees were actually confused with real trees. Among other things, their presentation as tricks, experiments, and virtuoso achievements of modern scientific ingenuity precludes this from the outset. Rather, the status of the automaton tree as a double aligns the apparatus with the domain of the uncanny. The spectator’s awareness of the artifice of the orange tree, for example, is colored by the unsettling way that the simulation of the real is accomplished so well that it verges on the realm of the living at the same time that it is farthest from being alive. As Jean Baudrillard has argued of automata, it cultivates a “dilemma of appearance and being” by forcing the spectator to confront the apparent liveliness of a lifeless object.20 The difficulty of visually detecting the techniques behind the tree’s metamorphosis compounds the kind of uncertainty Ernst Jentsch associates with the uncanniness of things that appear to occupy the space between the animate and the inanimate. This ambiguity is conditioned by the pursuit of “intellectual mastery,” which is part of modern magic’s investigative enterprise.21 The question of how the machine works is charged with a sense that the origins and sight of its wondrous metamorphosis signal something “other” subtending the perception of the performance. The invocation of

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spirit agency in the Mango Tree trick and the wondrousness of its pseudoautomated mechanical form stem precisely from this. In both cases the apparently inexplicable metamorphosis of the tree not only reveals an agency that is hard to place. It also stages a visual encounter in which the perception of the liveliness of something is difficult to account for in the act of viewing because the spectator cannot visually detect how the illusion of life is manually or mechanically produced. Albert A. Hopkins relates the excessive nature of this way of seeing in a description of a sleight-of-hand trick called Magic Flowers in which a magician grows a rosebush with flowers in a pot using a technique similar to that used in the Mango Tree trick. Even in the hands of the modern magician who makes no claims to the supernatural, he explains, the quick-change metamorphosis of a rosebush retains a sense of the numinous that structures “older” forms of the trick: “[The rosebush’s] buds are looked upon as a production of fairy land.”22

Animating the (In)Animate in Early Cinema Because our eyes do not see cinematically the way a camera does, a timelapse view of a plant cannot be reconciled with our unaided view of the plant in nature. This disconnect confronts the spectator with the uncertainty that Jean Epstein sees as being basic to the cinema as a medium of discovery—that is, an abandonment of “the most evident certainties of established knowledge,” which time lapse motivates by revealing that a plant is not as we know or perceive it to be. The preoccupation of early film theorists with time-lapse films of plants is largely influenced by how this ecstatic mode of observation provides visual access to a world hidden in plain sight. In his essay “Timeless Time,” Epstein thinks of the cinematic sight of a plant growing as the spectator’s liberation from time as we know it—that is, the worldly temporality of the body, of perception—and transportation to “a new universe.”23 This universe resonates with both Kracauer’s and Balázs’s senses of the otherworldly in time-lapse films. Its movements percolate beneath the surface of an otherwise visible world. As if writing with an eye to Georges Méliès’s fantastic trick films, Epstein calls the sight of plants growing in the cinema an “extraordinary voyage” through the vision of time lapse. The voyage is framed as an

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encounter with a living but not apparently animate organism that comes to life by way of a cinematic trick.24 The nature of animation in this case is quite curious. Time-lapse photography is technically and in principle aligned with the stop-motion technique of animation, which itself has practical roots in the use of substitution techniques in early trick films. However, the wondrousness of time lapse is not linked to the idea that an inanimate object is brought to life like the drawings given “movement” and “independence” in early animated films.25 The animation of a plant that appears in a time-lapse film is necessarily an exaggeration or amplification of that plant’s existing liveliness. At a basic level, time lapse in the cinema animates the already animate; it brings to perception the liveliness of something that is already alive. Writing in 1913, Frederick Talbot gestures to the uncanniness of this animation when he describes how errors or shortcomings in the production of time-lapse films can give plants the quality of a flickering vitality that we might associate with the animation of one of Marey’s or Muybridge’s chronophotographic sequences. “The timing [between photographs] is perhaps the most difficult part of the undertaking,” Talbot explains, “because if it is not gauged to a nicety the movement on the screen is apt to be unnatural, the growth taking place in a series of sudden jerks instead of proceeding slowly, steadily and gracefully.”26 Because his is a “how it’s done” book on the practice of filmmaking, Talbot is concerned primarily with explaining a proper execution of time-lapse photography, which is related to his earlier views on stop-motion animation techniques.27 It is curious, however, that Talbot assumes there is a “natural” rate at which the metamorphosis of a plant should appear. Granted, he is speaking technically about achieving the effect of continuous motion such that the time-lapse technique disappears from view. But this does not elide the fact that the movement that comes into view inherently appears unnatural because it is a plant moving. The revelatory gaze of time lapse is thus inseparable from a certain unease that stems both from the sight of a plant growing and from the experience of seeing with cinematic eyes. We are sharply aware that objects that do not appear to be alive are moving in plain view of our unseeing eye. The ability of time-lapse photography to unsettle—literally to make us feel strange and to disturb our knowledge of and familiarity with the world—is not simply a matter of making a plant unrecognizable. Since the very real world that comes to perception through time lapse is visually unverifiable

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by the human eye, it only ever exists visibly because of—as part of—the fantastic world of the cinema. Some early trick films reflected the affinity between time lapse, the new magic of the cinema, and the magician’s ability to apparently defy the laws of nature by displaying the manipulation of time as a device of wonder. The French cinemagician Gaston Velle explored the cinematic metamorphosis of plants in several collaborations with the famous trick filmmaker Segundo de Chomón. While working for Pathé, Velle directed a film called Animated Flowers (Les fleurs animées, 1906; also known as Living Flowers), in which a man destroys part of a garden when he is rejected by a woman after offering her a flower. With a resemblance to the fairies and dancing flowers in Fantasia, one of the remaining flowers in the garden grows in height and is transformed into the life-size figure of a woman who raises a number of other flowers from the ground in the same fashion. The flowers are brought to life by quick-change (stop-frame) substitutions of female actors dressed in floral costumes for painted prop flowers. After performing a brief dance, the animated flowers depart to take revenge on the man who showed such disregard for the lives of the flowers that he trampled.28 Animated Flowers was primarily an exhibition of Pathé’s new color stencil process, which itself is an extension of the company’s projected color image series called Floral Compositions.29 However, the film is also significantly an early performance of Dulac’s and Disney’s subsequent celebrations of the cinema’s anthropomorphizing view of plants. As Dulac claims, “Flowers, whose stages of life appear to us brutal and defined, birth, blooming, death, and whose infinitesimal development, whose movements equivalent to suffering and joy are unknown to us, appear before us in [timelapse] cinema in the fullness of their existence.”30 The substitution of live actors for the prop flowers visualizes this sense that time lapse reveals the “fullness” of plant life by giving that life a human body, a transformation that transgresses the boundaries between human and object, animate and inanimate. It also functions overtly as a site for displaying the cinema’s capacity to bestow animation on apparently inanimate objects. Another of Velle’s trick films, called The Flower Fairy (La fée aux fleurs, 1905), employs dissolves to simulate the metamorphosis of plants in a manner more demonstrative of the cinema’s capacity to modulate time than we see in Animated Flowers. Here, a woman is depicted watering plants as she stands at an open window. Through the use of a substitution technique,

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flowers and leaves appear to grow on previously bare stems. Other flowers evolve gradually through the use of superimpositions that create the impression of continuous transformation in the tradition of automaton trees and conventional time-lapse photography. The woman then dissolves and reappears in a bouquet of flowers that seems to grow by way of an enlargement technique. In the vein of what Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions,” the woman is framed continuously by the window and is set against a black background that functions as both a condition of the dissolving-view technique and a method of presenting the surprising transformations as sights to be admired for the wonderment they elicit.31 The film organizes this wonder around the figure of the fairy, who, like the modern magician, frames the cinematic metamorphosis of plants as a magical phenomenon. Cinema audiences made the association between popular science films and this genealogy of metamorphic plant tricks fairly early on. In a lengthy article published in 1913, for example, Charles B. Brewer recounts the brief history of the cinema and its various applications in the areas of entertainment, education, and science. He concludes the article with a discussion of one of the first widely circulated time-lapse films, From Bud to Blossom, which was made by Percy Smith for the Urban Trading Company in 1910 to showcase the company’s Kinemacolor process. Brewer is taken less by the use of color than by the uncanny metamorphosis that time lapse produces. He explains that the film presents “a stream of pictures in such rapid succession that they simulate the trick of the Eastern magician who makes flowers grow into being before the eyes of the spectator.”32 The explicit acknowledgment of time-lapse photography as the most recent technological variation of metamorphic plant tricks suggests that, as with stage magic and special effects in early trick films, the magician’s illusions shaped the experience of the wonders of cinemas of scientific discovery. Brewer attributes his particular astonishment to the way in which the cinema, like the magician, is capable of producing visual experiences that border on the miraculous because they place the imperceptible and seemingly impossible “before the eyes” and, therefore, challenge ways of seeing and knowing the world. The reception of time-lapse films in these terms is a prominent trend in early film history. In a review of a screening of From Bud to Blossom from 1910, the author describes the sight of time lapse with the same appeal to the miraculous that audiences associated with modern magic. “A feeling

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of genuine awe came over one [upon beholding this sight],” the author claims, “and the thought, too, that a child who should see these wonderful things must not only have his soul awakened to beauty, but to the knowledge that science brings us close to the divine.”33 The revelation of nature “as it really is” through time lapse is invoked here with the spiritual tenor often associated with a penetrating vision that exhibits supernatural or clairvoyant powers. To be precise, wonder is ascribed not simply to the sight of the plant growing but to the very technique that provides the view. Balázs makes this connection when he aligns time lapse in nature films with fairy tales. In both cases, he argues, the world viewed is one that is otherwise inaccessible to sight. The primary impact of time-lapse photography is that in nature a gap of imperceptibility separates the human eye from a real phenomenon, or what Balázs calls an “authentic reality.” In the cinema, the spectator experiences this “other” world directly but with a difference. “Although what we see is a natural phenomenon,” Balázs explains, “the fact that we can see it at all strikes us as unnatural. . . . In watching such things we feel as if we had entered a territory closed to man.”34 Balázs thus shares with Epstein and Dulac the feeling that what becomes visible through time lapse is not simply the unseen in nature. It is also and primarily the fantastic sense of the technique of ecstatic observation operating in the cinema—that is, the spectator’s awareness and sensation of exceeding the limitations of human vision and virtually encountering a phenomenon that escapes unaided visual perception. The experience of wondering at early time-lapse films was thus ultimately shaped by an operational aesthetic, which time lapse inherited by virtue of being an obvious cinematic trick. In “Flowers Alive,” a short review from 1916 of the significance of time-lapse films up to that year, the author claims: When films such as The Birth of a Flower (Urban-Colonial) and How Winter Flowers Bloom (Pathé) were first shown on the screen, the admiration of their beauty was coupled with wonder that a mere mechanical process could reproduce within a few minutes’ compass that which, spread over hours or days, was practically invisible to us. With each successive viewing of such pictures, there is an added sense of wonder, no longer at the inventive skill that has made such marvels possible, but at the manifestation of life itself.35

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This interweaving of the wonders of metamorphic plants and time-lapse photography is the basis for the endurance of magic as a point of reference for contemplating the possibilities of modern science mediated by the cinema.

The Artful Science of John Ott In the 1950s, the American photobiologist and time-lapse filmmaker John Ott developed a popular image as “a magician with a camera” who offered “spectacular sights through the magic of time-lapse motion pictures.”36 Ott was widely celebrated as both a scientist and a magician because of some extraordinary experiments he conducted that exposed how time lapse could be used to creatively intervene not only in the perception of nature but also in nature itself. Working out of his home in Winnetka, Illinois, Ott arranged a series of flower pots on a special studio stage he had built in his basement. The stage contained an intricate system of lighting, irrigation, and heating mechanisms that Ott used to control the growth of the flowers. A time-lapse camera was then carefully timed to record the manipulations of the flowers, which were coordinated with a musical score in such a way that when the time-lapse footage was projected, the flowers appeared to dance. This “dancing flowers” film harbors a striking resemblance to the magically animated flowers in Fantasia. Both sequences feature versions of waltzing flowers, which are synchronized to similar scores and utilize similar choreographies, no doubt a common reference to Tchaikovsky’s ballet that Fantasia draws upon directly for its episode. The sense of revelry that cuts across these films points to the way in which the magical life of plants offers a forum for playing with techniques of cinematic representation. As a traveling lecturer, Ott initially used the dancing flowers sequence as the concluding feature for screenings of his popular science films. The sequence then became the introduction to his one-man television show, How Does Your Garden Grow?, which aired on NBC for most of the 1950s. Ott privileged the sensational nature of these images as a way of popularizing his rigorous, and very serious, research into the biology of plants. Without denying the intended educational function of this sequence, however, it is difficult, especially from our contemporary perspective, not to see

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the dancing flowers more as an experiment in time lapse’s animating powers and less as an experiment in scientific discovery, although the film was significantly enveloped within Ott’s larger experimental project of manipulating the growth of plants to better understand their sensitivities to changing environmental conditions. In his autobiography Ott points to this when he links time-lapse photography directly with the animated cartoon on the grounds that both filmmaking modes use the same techniques.37 Although it lasts only about a minute, the dancing flowers sequence took almost five years to produce. Ott began by obtaining the musical score on magnetic audiotape, printing the sound on a strip of film, and manually labeling the different elements of the score. He then made preliminary sketches of the various key positions of the plants—upright or wilting, facing left or right—alongside key elements of the score. By calculating how many frames were necessary to transition between these desired positions, Ott created a precise numerical map of the entire sequence before he began filming. He then used this data and an intricate system of automatic timers to replicate the numerical “map” in the studio with time-lapse photography and the actual flowers. Ott’s project thus bears a striking resemblance to the cartoon animator’s labor, which at Disney’s studio, for example, also involved sketching key positions of animated figures first and then filling in the gaps between them. The primary difference, Ott explains, is that his scientific work involved the frame-by-frame animation of nature rather than of inanimate drawings. But the resemblance goes deeper than the technical affinities that make this comparison possible. Although it is unclear precisely what inspired Ott’s choice of music and choreography for this time-lapse film, which calls to mind the trope of dancing flowers in everything from Fantasia to Velle’s trick films, his broader interest in creating popular science films of plants was very much in dialogue with Disney’s work in the 1950s. The experiments that Ott undertook to animate the flowers in his timelapse film coincided with the production of Disney’s True-Life Adventures, which was a series of nature films that were initially released in movie theaters between 1948 and 1960. Ott was commissioned to contribute timelapse footage of plants for several of the films, including Nature’s Half Acre (1951) and Secrets of Life (1956). Ott provided Disney with some familiar moving images of flowers blooming, but he also managed to create some incredible images of pumpkins and apples growing. In the case of the

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Figure 8. The quick-change transformation of a paintbrush animating flowers (top and bottom left) to John Ott’s time-lapse footage of a flower opening (bottom right). Reproduced from Secrets of Life, directed by James Algar (Walt Disney Productions, 1956), DVD.

apples he actually built time-lapse studios around parts of apple trees in an orchard—effectively transforming nature itself into a kind of movie set. Ott’s intersection with the True-Life Adventures reveals an important dimension of what we might call—to borrow Barbara Maria Stafford’s term—the “artful science” of his time-lapse films of plants.38 Secrets of Life, for example, visualizes the embeddedness of time-lapse photography in a discourse of magic and the creative powers of the artist and animator behind the scenes of moving images. Revealingly, the film introduces an extended series of Ott’s time-lapse images of plants growing and flowers blooming with a cartoon in which a paintbrush, like the fairies’ wands in Fantasia, animates a still painting of flowers in bloom. This animated sequence is concluded with a cut to Ott’s time-lapse footage as a voice-over narrator comments on the “vital spark” that brings plants to life. The True-Life Adventures series also embodies the spirit of Disney’s animated films, in part by treating nature as a kind of animated wonderland.

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As Gregg Mitman has pointed out, both Nature’s Half Acre and Secrets of Life promote an image of a timeless, pristine, almost primal nature by representing the lives of plants, animals, and other creatures as unspoiled by modern civilization. Humans are largely absent in these films, and in their place, Disney uses narratives designed to anthropomorphize the natural world: plants are portrayed as having personalities, desires, struggles, and relationships that closely resemble our own. According to Mitman, this fantasy of an untouched nature—or more precisely, nature untouched by the human hand—was explicitly offered in support of a “natural theology.”39 At the end of Nature’s Half Acre, for example, over a series of Ott’s time-lapse images of flowers blooming, the narrator explains reverently that these are “miracles the human eye alone could never see. In nature’s book of wonders, this is the chapter of genesis.” In the context of popular science films, Disney’s suggestion that plant life is animated by the hand of God was not new. Recall, for example, the spectator of Percy Smith’s Birth of a Flower who in 1910 claimed that the science of time-lapse photography “brings us close to the divine.” This idea was a guiding force in all of Ott’s work. For him, time-lapse photography provided visual access to a divine plan in nature by revealing a world that exists beyond the limits of human perception. Considering this, the dancing flowers sequence can be read as an expression of Ott’s willingness to see the movements of plants as evidence that behind the wonders of nature is a kind of animating spirit, like the fairies in Fantasia that bring nature to life. The playfulness of this sequence, however, suggests that Ott’s celebration of time lapse as a technique of “revelation” was also a celebration of his own powers as a magician-animator. In the early 1950s, audiences largely expressed wonder at Ott’s time-lapse images not because of the sight of flowers blooming—this was already established as a commonplace in popular culture—but because of Ott’s machines. From his film lectures to reports of his research in newspapers, magazines, and popular science journals, Ott’s time-lapse images of plants were inseparable from the mind-boggling electro-mechanical apparatuses he invented in order to photograph “nature’s secrets.” Ott even devoted a great deal of time to producing time-lapse films of his time-lapse cameras in the process of capturing time-lapse images of plants in his studio—an almost excessive or obsessive investment in offering up time-lapse techniques and technologies as objects of wonder.

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Spectators’ fascinations with the machinery behind Ott’s films—and the dancing flowers drew a great deal of interest in this regard—thus frequently shifted the discourse of wonder from nature to craft, the artful science of time-lapse photography. Like many animators and special effects engineers from the trick film era to the present, Ott cultivated an identity as a virtuoso of mechanical wonders. Time lapse, by extension, was firmly established in his oeuvre as a kind of special effects technique, not for controlling a fantasy world but for exercising real power over the real world.

Plant Life in Life: Time Lapse as a Special Effect The cinema’s affinities with magic, science, and animation continue to shape our perceptions of time lapse as a trick technique capable of revealing but also manipulating dimensions of reality that are otherwise inaccessible to the human eye. Between 2009 and 2010, the BBC’s nature documentary series Life, produced in collaboration with the Discovery Channel, garnered a great deal of attention because of its use of time-lapse photography in an episode titled “Plants.” The episode begins with the series’ tagline: “Open your eyes.” Over a sequence of time-lapse images, the narrator, David Attenborough, informs the audience that time-lapse photography has provided never-before-seen views of “the private lives of plants.” The promise of access to this secret world within nature is fulfilled to a large extent formally, through the use of scale. The majority of the episode’s images are extreme close-up views of plants, which are overflowing with the details recorded by the filmmakers’ high-definition digital cameras. One reviewer responded to this closeness by claiming, “Experiencing Life is less like watching a documentary than taking a virtual fantastic voyage, one that seems to make the camera-lens barrier between you and nature vanish.”40 The senses of wonder, imagination, and fakery captured by this phrase— “virtual fantastic voyage”—can be attributed primarily to the time-lapse sequence that follows the episode’s brief introduction. Attenborough has just finished introducing the anthropomorphic idea that plant life resembles the struggles and dramas of human life. The episode then cuts to an elaborate time-lapse sequence in which the season-long growth of an entire woodland environment comes into view during a lengthy and continuous tracking shot. As the camera moves backward through a moss-covered

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landscape, plants sprout from the ground and flowers bloom on branches while vines wind their way along logs and up the trunks of trees. The scene is literally full of life, not only in the sense that it is bursting with movement but also in that the plants appear frenzied against the backdrop of what appears to be a normally rather serene landscape. We feel ourselves witness to something out of the land of fairies, the in-between, the visible-invisible, or, as the episode’s producer, Neil Lucas, has claimed, “Middle Earth”—the fantastic world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.41 Because the flowers are rendered in vibrant and supersaturated colors, the musical score is whimsical, and the traveling camera floats magically over the landscape as the scene unfolds, the sight of this woodland environment coming to life might feel closer to the animated world of Fantasia than to the more familiar time-lapse views of plants in popular science films. The undeniable strangeness of this sequence is partly rooted in the fact that this time-lapse photography does not look like the time-lapse photography with which we have become familiar. Although color has been a common feature of time-lapse views of plants since around 1910, the moving camera has not. This is primarily because time-lapse apparatuses like Bull’s and Ott’s were built like laboratories and those early computers that required entire rooms to operate. Another difference is that this sequence captures plants in their natural environment, whereas plants in earlier time-lapse films usually appear against a blank backdrop because they were grown indoors under controlled laboratory conditions. The wondrousness of this sequence is also indebted to a kind of fakery that weaves throughout the history of time-lapse photography and nature films more generally. With a resemblance to the production of Ott’s dancing flowers sequence, Life’s time-lapse sequence was actually crafted over a period of two years. The filmmakers first created a sixty-second camera movement by placing a digital camera on a track and photographing the “real” woodland environment. This scene was then precisely replicated in a special effects studio using models and a blue-screen set. Real plants were grown on the set under controlled environmental conditions, including lighting. The blue screen technology allowed the time-lapse sequence filmed in the studio to be integrated seamlessly with the footage of the actual landscape. Because the woodland backdrop was not filmed on the same time scale as the plants, the landscape in the final shot appears without the changing

Figure 9. Production of woodland time-lapse sequence from Behind the Scenes fea-

tures of “Plants.” The top image shows the camera setup for the on-site long take that was mapped onto the blue screen studio landscape, which is shown in the bottom image. Reproduced from “Plants,” from Life (Discovery Channel, 2010), DVD.

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lighting and weather conditions that would be present if the photography had actually been conducted over the six months that the sequence purportedly represents. What we see, therefore, is an intricate time-lapse image of plants growing in a studio, mapped onto a moving image of “real” nature, notwithstanding that the two worlds represented do not coexist naturally. The artifice of this elaborate act of staging nature is compounded by the fact that each kind of plant in the frame was grown and filmed separately and then uploaded into a computer program. Using digital special effects software, a graphics engineer blended each piece of the time-lapse sequence with the original footage of the actual woodland scene. This method enabled the filmmakers to coordinate the growth of the plants with the receding movement of the camera so that the flowers bloom wondrously, and at the same rate. However, because the different plants would not normally grow simultaneously or at the same rate in nature, what the spectator sees is a view of a natural phenomenon that has no corresponding referent in the real world. The sequence is thus a wondrous view of real plants really growing in a virtual environment. In an interesting way, the virtual dimension of this sequence comes up against an impulse we might have to assign time-lapse photography to the nonfiction categories of “mechanical objectivity” and “evidence.” Unlike most cases in documentaries and nature films where staged sequences have prompted genuine objections to inauthenticity and misrepresentation— and this is currently happening with the BBC’s new series Hidden Kingdoms, which also uses special effects and is being pitched as “dramatized natural history”—time-lapse photography seems to have made its home at the margins of this kind of criticism. Neither Life’s filmmakers nor its general audience considered the “Plants” sequence to be anything but a wonderful representation of nature. This is most likely because the uses of computergenerated imagery and special effects come naturally out of the trick value of time-lapse photography, which is essentially a technique for manipulating “reality” so that we are able to see nature differently. The use of digital-imaging technologies to renew the familiar sight of plants growing ultimately shifted the emphasis of the woodland scene from the authenticity of the subject—“plants”—to the virtuosity and labor of the filmmakers. This is supported by the fact that the techniques and technologies used in the episode were widely publicized in the press, on television, and on the series’ website. Each episode of the series also concluded with

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a ten-minute “Making Of ” segment. These segments detailed the behindthe-scenes challenges faced by the filmmakers and the innovations and ingenuity required to bring nature to life for contemporary audiences. The behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the woodland time lapse quickly became the centerpiece of popular discourses on the series. What this suggests is that the object of wonder was the experience of time lapse as a technique of discovery, that is, the virtual fantastic voyage itself rather than simply the destination.

Controlling Nature, Controlling Cinema From Enlightenment-era devices of wonder to digital special effects, the nature of time lapse as a trick foregrounds the many affinities between the domains of animation, scientific visualization, and moving-image culture in the history of film and related media. These affinities clearly run deep, and although “science” and “animation” have been very much coiled since the early cinema period, unraveling the practices and discourses that have brought them together around trickery and wonder is a project that is only beginning to take shape. At the center is the question of why a fascination with making and viewing time-lapse films of plants has lingered throughout film history. The pervasiveness of these films well beyond their novelty period suggests that the convergence of science and the cinema around this particular trick has tapped into something profound. The elusiveness of this “something” might account for the fact that using time lapse to represent plants growing has endured for more than a century. That is, perhaps we continue to produce these kinds of views because we are haunted by our inability to explain why it is so wonderful to see nature this way. But the long history of time-lapse photography provides valuable insight into how another enduring concern of the cinematic experience might also be at work: our capacity for wielding the power of cinematic technologies over nature. The magician in Epstein’s Le tempestaire is an acute example of this in that the crystal ball he uses to visualize the storm, manipulating it in slow and fast motion, is also the medium that he uses to bring nature under his control. The similar figures of the scientist (Ott) and the animator (Life’s special effects engineers) are also variations of time-lapse photography’s potential for manipulation or control. In the field of animation studies,

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this subject has been explored largely in terms of Donald Crafton’s seminal theory of the “hand of the artist.” Particularly in the early cinema period, animators gestured in their films to the labor and virtuosity involved in producing the illusion of motion by incorporating scenes of their hands in the act of drawing still images, which then often “magically” began to move on their own. Such references to the mechanics of movement in the cinema— where still photographs appear to move when projected on a screen—were also demonstrations of the power of the animator over the animated world of the cinema. As Crafton explains, “In his ability to literally animate his drawings, [the animator] becomes god-like. He is the one who imparts the anima, the breath of life.”42 Digital-imaging technologies—particularly in the area of computer animation—have renewed and transformed this interest in the power of the animator over the animated world. At least since the 1990s, the extreme manipulability of digital images has carved out a space where animators and special effects engineers can revel in a kind of total control over the worlds created or represented on the cinema screen. Unlike the visible hand of the artist in early animated films, this control has manifested in a digital aesthetic that emphasizes what Vivian Sobchack calls the “effortlessness” of computer animation.43 In this case the virtuosity of the animator is increasingly defined by the ability to create images that do not appear to have been created by hand, or, more precisely, images that do not contain traces of the human labor that went into making them. Time-lapse photography moves effortlessly, we might say, between scientific visualization and this reveling in the animator’s fantastic, virtuoso control over cinematic technologies. The woodland time-lapse sequence from Life is a clear example. The fairy tale quality of the sequence is linked in part to the fact that, like Disney’s True-Life Adventures, the landscape seems to exist in a world outside of time and untouched by modern civilization. Beholding this sight, it is as if we had entered a world “remote from reality.” The image of “untouched” nature also works like an object lesson in the animator’s fantasy of godlike control over an animated world: the filmmakers’ use of cinematic technologies to bring nature to life, for example, leaves no trace.44 The built-in revelation that the scene was actually crafted in a special effects studio suggests an impulse—similar to Ott’s—to position this labor as an object of wonder. Unlike in the case of the animated cartoon, however, the wondrousness of this labor comes not

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from the creation of the so-called illusion of life but from the animation of life itself. If we consider time lapse from this perspective, the cinema’s animated views of nature emerge anew as something like interfaces where audiences marvel at and experience the machinery of film and related media in the same way one might marvel at a magician’s tricks. This is not to deny the wondrousness of the views themselves. The spectacle of movement created by time-lapse photography is very much at the heart of its repetition throughout the twentieth century. With a resemblance to the fluid metamorphoses of the famous fin-de-siècle serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller and the enchanting liveliness of Disney’s animated drawings, time lapse embodies a captivating purity of movement that is fundamentally cinematic. But, in a significant way, time-lapse films are much more than wondrous moving images of plants moving. As exercises in discovering, animating, and controlling nature, they visualize the very real power of the cinema, like the magician, to transform how we see reality. At the same time, as experimentations with the possibilities of moving images, they represent explorations of the power of the optical devices that we create in order to expand our knowledge of the world and of ourselves in relation to it.

4 • THE ENCHANTED SCREEN Performing the Cinema’s Illusion of Life

The screen is literally a magician’s handkerchief, a crucible where everything is transformed, appears, and vanishes. —Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 2005

Consider Morin’s claim in relation to a brilliant short cinematic trick performed by Orson Welles. In collaboration with his fellow magician Richard Himber in the 1950s, Welles created a film called Magic Trick, which was projected onto a screen placed on the stage during Himber’s magic performances. Magic Trick begins with Welles onscreen having a conversation with Himber onstage, as if Welles is being broadcast live during the performance. Welles then takes a deck of cards from his pocket and tosses it toward Himber in the theater, a sleight of hand in which the apparent passage of the deck out of frame in the film is matched to a real deck of cards tossed to Himber from behind the screen. Welles and Himber then proceed to perform a card trick in which a member of the audience in the theater chooses a card and places it back in the deck, which is then shuffled and tossed back to Welles on the screen. Using a quick change similar to the first one, the deck apparently passes from the stage back into the film and, without any knowledge of the card chosen (because he is, of course, not really there), Welles correctly identifies the Jack of Spades. Although the timing of Welles’s cinematic performance and Himber’s live one is quite impressive, the real trick is the seamlessness of the movement between worlds—the world of the cinema and the world of the theater—a powerful play on the perceptual ambiguity of moving images. 100

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The ideas that, like Welles’s quick change, the cinema is quicker than the eye, and that wondering at its images can sometimes be inseparable from wondering at the techniques and technologies that produce them, converge powerfully around the cinema’s most basic trick: the illusion of motion. In its earliest forms, the “motion” of motion pictures garnered interest as a form of trickery because, despite popular knowledge of the still-photographic basis of the cinema—inanimate images on a film strip are projected rapidly onto a blank screen—audiences cannot help but see these still images move. During the cinema’s novelty period, the wondrousness of the metamorphosis from stillness to movement stemmed from the fact that when we watch a film we undoubtedly see moving images, but we cannot see how images move; that is, we cannot see the techniques by which images are animated, apparently brought to life. From the outset, this inability to detect the machinery behind the illusion of motion linked cinematic images to a discourse on the “in-between”—between stillness and motion, the inanimate and the animate, and, more figuratively, life and death. This dialectical nature of the cinematic image is one of the most enduring and elusive wonders of the cinematic experience. Popular, critical, and academic discourses alike have been animated for more than a century by the fact that because the cinema cuts across “stillness” and “motion,” it does not seem to belong easily to either category but rather confounds them. It is widely known, for example, that beginning in the 1890s, when the Lumière brothers publicly premiered their Cinématographe in France, the cinema’s potential as a mechanical magician manifested in the form of a simple trick: a still photograph was projected on a screen and then wondrously infused with movement when the projectionist began cranking the Cinématographe. In the shared history of magic and the cinema, the potential for the illusion of motion to incite wonder is nowhere more prominent than in the domain of animation. According to Alan Cholodenko, animated films have consistently promoted a “fascination with the way in which [the cinematic] apparatus animates—gives movement and life to—inanimate images of inanimate people and things—as illusions, making them appear to live and move.”1 This fascination with the illusion of life stems from how movement, particularly in cartoon animation, creates a complicated perceptual experience. As Sergei Eisenstein explained in an oft-quoted passage on Disney’s animated films, “We know that [animated figures] are .  .  . projections of

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drawings on a screen. We know that they are . . . ‘miracles’ and tricks of technology . . . But at the same time: We sense them as alive. We sense them as moving, as active” (emphasis in original).2 Throughout film history, the wondrousness of this phenomenon has prompted invocations of anima, the animistic notion of a vivifying soul, to describe the way in which the animator’s craft resembles a spiritual act of “breathing life” into inanimate objects. We see this in the many familiar cases in which animation is described as the practice of “bestowing” or “endowing” the inanimate with life, the appearance of which is traceable not to supernatural influence but to the techniques of the animator and the trickery of an apparently inanimate mechanical device—the cinematograph.3 In the early cinema period the illusion of life, or the apparent life of moving images, was often the object of playful metamorphoses performed by onscreen animators and magicians. In her book The Haunted Gallery, Lynda Nead has looked to early animated films and insightfully related a trope of transforming still images into moving ones to a long history of the “enchanted painting,” which includes the tableau vivant and Ovid’s Pygmalion.4 According to Nead, through “enchanted painting films”—for example, The Enchanted Drawing (Blackton, 1900) and Animated Painting (Edison, 1904), in which inanimate images are transformed into moving and “living” ones with the use of substitution techniques—filmmakers sought to distinguish the possibilities of the new medium from the other arts. Quick-change substitutions of moving images for still ones demonstrated the cinema’s capacity for producing the impression of reality—the so-called reality effect—more quickly, easily, and convincingly than, for example, the art of painting. The cinema’s novelty and power for simulating reality were put on display and defined by a “relentless mockery of still images and traditional media.”5 Although it is not commonly noted, the fascination with visualizing the interplay between stillness and movement in the cinema has taken shape significantly around a figure that has received much less attention than the enchanted painting: the enchanted screen. Consider a series of illusions performed in the famous early Pathé trick film The Red Spectre (Le spectre rouge, 1907), by Segundo de Chomón. Like most trick films of the period, Chomón’s centers on a devilish conjuror who presents the film’s audience with a variety of combined theatrical and cinematic special effects. Toward the end of the film, the magician conjures an easel holding what appears

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to be a painting of the Pathé rooster, which the magician then manipulates by rotating a set of blinds to reveal, piece by piece, a motion picture of an actress addressing the audience. After reversing the trick, the magician performs two variations of it in which motion pictures appear within a large picture frame and on a screen that the magician (rendered in reverse motion) constructs by stacking large white blocks together as one might when building a brick wall. Like a hall of mirrors, this sequence is brimming with doubles, tricks reflected within tricks that play on the idea that the cinema is a device for conjuring images on a screen “where everything is transformed, appears, and vanishes.” In addition to overtly framing the screen as a magic prop, the magician stages it, in the manner of a mise en abyme, such that it models the experience of viewing Chomón’s film: the audience sees the event of motion pictures framed and performed within the film. The motion pictures that appear in The Red Specter are also references to the broader landscape of early cinema culture: one of them is a parody of Edison’s The May Irwin Kiss (1896), and the “screen” that the magician builds resembles the trick photography in the Lumière brothers’ Demolition of a Wall (1896), which also used a reverse-motion technique. By manipulating the screen with his hands, causing it to appear and vanish, the magician presents the screen as a medium, a surface on which motion pictures, too, can be manipulated. The interaction between the magician and the screen thus visualizes the cinema’s status as a form of screen practice, much like the hyperbolic displays of reality testing in films like The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (Paul, 1901) and its remake Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Porter, 1902), in which naïve spectators are depicted humorously interacting with and, in the case of Uncle Josh, even destroying the cinema’s screen. Buster Keaton would later famously play on this figuration of the screen as an ambiguous and, in a sense, tricky threshold between worlds. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), for example, the comedian plays the part of a film projectionist who at one point falls asleep at the helm of his machine and enters a dream world when he walks through the screen into the films being projected in the theater. It is significant from this perspective that, by the time Chomón’s The Red Specter was released, the spectacle of movement in the cinema no longer garnered the kind of interest that it did in the 1890s. Since in 1907 movement in the cinema was no longer new, its status as an illusion had become

Figure 10. The magician manipulating a screen on which a motion picture of a woman is projected. Reproduced from The Red Specter (Le spectre rouge), directed by Segundo de Chomón (Pathé, 1907), DVD.

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relatively “invisible.” In our contemporary moment, this is reflected in how, as with the question of vision, we rarely contemplate, let alone wonder at, movement in the cinema as an illusion in itself. Tom Gunning captures this when he claims that “the magic of metamorphosis slumbers in the . . . moving image.”6 As we will see, the intricate mise en abyme staged in The Red Specter speaks more broadly to how the figure of the enchanted screen has periodically renewed perceptions of the cinema by reanimating “the magic of metamorphosis,” that is, performing the illusion of life as an illusion.

“A Ghoulish Kind of Life” Toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) an aging Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) is portrayed addressing an audience gathered in a theater to honor the cinemagician’s contributions to the early trick film genre. Méliès stands on a stage and introduces his life’s work. When an archival print of one of his films, The Untamable Whiskers (1904), is projected onto a screen behind the stage, Méliès steps in front of the image and enters the film. The quick-change substitution involves Méliès transforming from a live, three-dimensional human (in color) into a younger version of himself wearing a top hat and smoking a cigarette (in black-and-white). In this wonderful doubling act the trick of Méliès stepping virtually into the cinema and becoming his moving-image self revolves around the suggestion that the screen is not a barrier between worlds but an immaterial, permeable, or ghostly surface that can apparently be crossed. The seamless crossing from the stage to the screen conjures the wonderful sense that, in the cinema, there is no line, no “seam,” between human life and the life of images; Méliès is both really “here” and “there,” in the theater and on the screen. A similarly enchanted screen makes a brief (and admittedly less fantastic) appearance in The Illusionist (Burger, 2006). As the film opens, in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) is investigating how the magician Eisenheim performs a trick that apparently involves conjuring spirits of the dead onstage. Uhl looks to his team of detectives, who offer one possible explanation of the trick by using a hand-cranked cinematograph to project a motion picture of a man onto a “smokescreen,” which calls to mind those “puffs of smoke” magicians use to manipulate objects and even themselves mysteriously into and out of “thin air.” The screen, which rises to a height

Figure 11. An older Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) quick-changing into the historical Méliès performing in his The Untamable Whiskers (1904). Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

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that allows the man in the film to appear life size, consists of a thick veil of steam created by a device located on the floor. The hand-cranking of the projector causes the image to flicker and gives the man the quality of an apparition, but the intended effect of otherworldliness is attributed largely to the smoke. Pulsating with movement, the immaterial screen transforms the moving image into a specter, both present and absent, translucent and made mysteriously manifest on nothing but air. These wondrous screens have a long history. At least since the sixteenth century, occult magicians reportedly used mirrors to reflect images onto smoke. Such spectacles promoted the view that magicians could conjure demons and spirits in the manner of a séance. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s early nineteenth-century phantasmagoria sometimes used a magic lantern to project images onto a smokescreen, which, as Erik Barnouw has claimed, “gave [the images] a ghoulish kind of life.”7 In the context of the cinema, the enchanted screen was reflected notably at the end of the nineteenth century in the swirling fabric of the dancer Loïe Fuller, who performed onstage and in front of the camera as a moving (picture) screen onto which colored lights and images were sometimes projected.8 Similar screens have appeared in the realm of experimental art cinema (for example, Anthony McCall’s hypnotic Line Describing a Cone [1973], which involves projecting a moving beam of light in a room filled with “fog” so that the beam itself is visible) and theme parks (for example, Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where visitors pass beneath a veil of smoke on which the villain Davy Jones appears projected as a motion picture). The spectrality of such motion picture screens plays on the idea that, being made of light and shadow, projected images are like ghosts, conjured before our eyes but as ungraspable as smoke. The screens on which these “ghosts” appear reinforce this by being ephemeral and permeable, like the screen Méliès crosses in Hugo in order to move seamlessly between our world and the world of the cinema. Very early in film history the magical qualities of images animated on screens that flicker with life and screens that can apparently be crossed were displayed by one of the most potentially inanimate of media: an enchanted book. In 1905, for example, Pathé released a film titled The Marvelous Album (L’album merveilleux). Directed by the early trick filmmaker Gaston Velle, the film depicts a magician who presents an oversized book to a wealthy man seated in the foreground. The magician then proceeds to tear from

Figure 12. A magician performing with a blow book in The Marvelous Album (L’album

merveilleux), directed by Gaston Velle (Pathé, 1905). Reproduced from Fairy Tales: Early Colour Stencil Films from Pathé (British Film Institute, 2012), DVD.

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Figure 13. Georges Méliès performing with a blow book in his The Magical Book (Le livre magique) (1900). Reproduced from Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema, 1896–1913 (Blackhawk Films Collection, 2008), DVD.

the book pages containing images of men and women in various costumes, which he crumples and tosses in the air in such a way that when the pages hit the ground they transform into “living” versions of the previously inanimate figures. This action is repeated until all of the book’s images have literally come to life. The film ends abruptly when the wealthy spectator rises from his chair and, as if reality-testing the illusion of life, attempts to embrace the newly animated figures only to have them revert to a pile of crumpled paper in his arms.

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Several years earlier Georges Méliès released a similar film titled The Magic Book (Le livre magique, 1900), which features a magician (played by Méliès) who presents an oversized “magical” book to the film’s audience by placing it on a large easel in what appears to be his workshop. The magician turns the book’s pages to reveal a series of life-size illustrations of commedia dell’arte characters. With each turn of the page, the magician performs a quick-change trick, bringing the illustrated characters to life as human actors by pulling the illustrations from the pages, which are left blank. Upon being freed from the book, the male characters enthusiastically and simultaneously woo the sole (and young and attractive) woman among them. When their courting becomes chaotic, the magician resorts to forcefully returning the living figures to their proper places as illustrations among the pages of the magic book. In a gesture reminiscent of the trick in Hugo just described, the magician tosses the actors toward the blank pages, where the “live” human actors instantly transform back into their image forms. After the book is returned to its original inanimate state, it falls from the easel onto the magician, who vanishes and in the next second comes through a door in the background and takes a bow, picks up the book, and walks out of the frame. The books that appear in Velle’s and Méliès’s trick films are known in the history of magic as blow books.9 Unlike a closely related optical toy, the flipbook, blow books do not produce the illusion of continuous motion. Prior to the emergence of the cinema these books were used to astonish audiences with quick-change metamorphoses in which, using a substitution technique, the magician apparently transformed the book’s contents with the flick of a wrist. While flicking alternating series of concealed tabs located on the open edge of the book, magicians promoted the sense that the images contained in the book were changeable. For at least 450 years, the combination of the book’s illusion of metamorphosis has positioned the magician who uses the device as an animator who mediates between worlds—visible and invisible, animate and inanimate, living and dead—by apparently breathing life into an inanimate object.10 In most cases, for example, the animation of the blow book was framed by magicians who claimed to be able to transform the images by blowing on the book’s pages, which gave the impression of being less like pages and more like smokescreens, that is, apparently immaterial surfaces on which “everything is transformed, appears, and vanishes.” The significance of the book’s appearance in

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The Marvelous Album and The Magic Book from this perspective is that in both films the cinema’s screen is being analogized to the book’s enchanted pages: the screen is the “blank page” on which the cinematograph apparently brings still-photographic images to life. Like that of the cinema and the phantasmagoria, the mercuriality of the blow book has been shaped significantly by a long history of associations between air, breath, and vitality, which themselves stem from considerations of life in the domains of the invisible and the phantasmic. As Marina Warner explains in her book on this subject, Phantasmagoria, “The images condensed into the word ‘spirit’ itself glow through the forms that spirits take: an airy physics passed from antiquity to early Christian thought, composed of breath, vapour, liquor, and cloud, governs the composition of beings imagined to exist beyond the apprehensible physical universe.”11 (Recall the previously mentioned spectral qualities of images projected on smoke.) An interesting related line of inquiry leads etymologically to animation’s derivation from the Latin verb animare (“to give life to”) and from anima (“breath” and “soul”), meanings that are poignantly articulated in the figure of the animator as a life-giver.12 As an occult medium, versions of the blow book dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries predominantly featured images of demons, ghosts, and spirits and were intended to be performed within the context of “real” magic. In the tradition of magical practices that turn on the cultivation of superstition and fear, the magician would typically conceal the technique behind the book’s metamorphosis in order to promote the impression that the book’s images appear as conjurations, apparitions, or miracles. As Philip Butterworth explains of conjuring, the performance is premised on the magician’s attempt “to convince the witness that the appearance of something is indeed the reality.”13 The blow book’s apparent mediation between worlds—for example, the living and the dead, the worldly and the otherworldly—imbues the device with a transgressive power. We see this articulated playfully in Méliès’s The Magic Book through the fact that the magician’s act of bringing the book’s images to life results in chaos. After reveling in the wondrousness of the trick metamorphoses he performs, Méliès quickly loses control over the figures conjured from the book: a potentially violent (albeit hilarious) scene ensues, which the magician must contain by reversing the trick. The dynamics of control and loss of control frame the pages of the book

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(like the cinema screen) as permeable boundaries between the representational world and the world inhabited by the magician (and thus, metaphorically, the spectator). The interstitial nature of the blow book’s animation is also expressed imaginatively by the common trope of the book’s images springing to life, literally being projected from the pages as the magician manipulates the device. On the cover of a nineteenth-century children’s or amateur blow book titled Hokus-Pokus, for example, an illustrated modern magician holds a blow book in his hand, which he extends outward to the audience. The book is held open, and the magician is surrounded by various creatures, including a bat, a lion, a witch, a serpent, and an imp. With a resemblance to the living actors respectively pulled and created from the pages of the blow books in Velle’s and Méliès’s early trick films, some of the creatures have become “real” rather than illustrations in the book. Their corporeality is indicated by the fact that they have escaped from the book and now share the same space as the magician. Other creatures are in the process of emerging from the pages of the book. The separation of these creatures from the otherwise inanimate pages can be interpreted as a play on the idea that the illusion of metamorphosis is linked to the impression that the blow book’s contents can move between worlds, that they are not bound as illustrations to the pages on which they appear but rather appear in a fluid state and, we might say, autonomously of those pages. In what is closest to the effect captured by the cover of Hokus-Pokus, which Méliès and Velle later adapted by transforming illustrations into human beings onscreen, the famous stage magician known as “Professor” John Henry Anderson performed a version of the blow book trick in the mid-nineteenth century called the Magic Sketch (or Scrap) Book. In this act objects—including bird cages, hats, pots and pans, and even a small child—were pulled from the folds of a portfolio no more than two inches thick. In one account from the 1870s, Anderson’s book is described as containing pages “with various pictures, butterflies, gnomes, birds, and so on” from which “the living object” represented on each page is “lifted up” and produced on the stage. For the culmination of the trick, the author explains, “a little devil leaps up from the animated page.”14 Jean-Eugène RobertHoudin performed the same trick during this period as the Enchanted Portfolio. The wondrousness of the magician’s quick-change transformations,

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Robert-Houdin explained, derived from the apparent violation of the “physics” of the portfolio, the basic assumption being “that that which is contained is smaller than that which contains it.”15 It is curious and revealing that the contents of the blow book in these cases (including Hokus-Pokus) appear in three-dimensional moving form, because traditionally blow books do not produce the illusion of movement.16 The image of “living objects” being conjured from the pages of the book appears to be a hyperbolic gesture to the uncanniness of the book’s form of animation, which found its double in the fluid metamorphoses of the images produced by early cinematic technologies.

From the Enchanted Album to the Enchanted Screen The complex sense that the blow book’s still images are apparently brought to life by the magician’s quick-change substitution techniques has a strong affinity with the spectacle of metamorphosis in early animated films. The quick change is a common point of reference in the study of animation because it is related on a technical level to stop-motion animation, which involves manipulating still images or objects between film frames to achieve the illusion of motion. The idea that quick-change metamorphoses stage questions about the animating properties of the cinema has received less attention, but it circulated widely in early animated films that used the substitution splice to bring the inanimate to life. A substitution splice joins two pieces of film containing different sequences of images such that the separate pieces appear with almost seamless continuity when projected—for example, an illustration changing impossibly into a human actor in the blink of an eye. The term itself is an academic one that was applied in the study of the trick film genre after certain discoveries and analyses of the techniques used in creating early cinematic effects were made by scholars including Jacques Malthête, Alan Williams, André Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning.17 In the early 1900s it was more commonly referred to as the “stop-motion trick,” “substitution trick,” or “stop and substitution” technique and was misleadingly explained as the seamless rearrangement of a scene between the stopping and starting of the camera during a performance. In fact, substitution tricks were

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achieved by cutting and gluing strips of film together, and the splices are actually visible in the upper part of individual frames. It is nothing new that early animation in the cinema was shaped by magicians like Méliès and Velle who invoked the trope of “coming to life” or “becoming animate” using substitution splices to produce quick-change metamorphoses. The trick film genre is generally associated with metamorphoses of this kind, as is illustrated by familiar cases involving the animation of still images into living objects like Velle’s 1904 film Barnum’s Trunk (La valise de Barnum) and Méliès’s A Spiritualist Photographer (1903) and The Living Playing Cards (1905), all of which involve metamorphoses similar to the blow book’s. What is not generally discussed, however, is how such films invoke the idea of the quick change as a form of animation. To my knowledge, Tom Gunning’s brief and incisive discussions of how the blow book “anticipates” the “protean nature of the moving image” are the only references that make this connection directly.18 Particularly as it appears in early films like The Marvelous Album and The Magic Book, the blow book and its quick-change animation technique play on the uncanny sense that in the cinema, the inanimate can apparently be brought to life while we watch a film. The point in these cases is not movement alone but the abrupt and apparent transformation of an inanimate object into one with a semblance of life. This form of animation puts the quick change from inanimate to animate on display as a wondrous sleight of hand. The illustrations that are transformed in The Marvelous Album and The Magic Book also notably pass between worlds by becoming animate. This passage is momentary and striking because the trick that animates the inanimate does so instantaneously and undetectably. Life appears not only unexpectedly—a living human being is pulled from the pages of the book—but also with the impact and quality of a spark that literally releases a vital charge. But rather than being sustained, the sense of animation permeating these films is intermittent. Rather than maintaining the semblance of an autonomous life, in other words, objects oscillate between the worlds of the animate and the inanimate. This oscillation is mediated by the figure of the magician who shuttles the illustrated figures back and forth across the threshold of a “screen,” the inanimate page of an enchanted book. Such spectacles of animation revel in the mechanism or operation by which the inanimate springs to life.

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In Méliès’s The Magic Book, the metamorphosis from inanimate to animate and back again performs the idea displayed on the cover of HokusPokus, that the blow book’s images move effortlessly between real and represented worlds. The import of Méliès’s use of the substitution splice to achieve this effect is that it realized—it literally made visible—a sense of the book’s animation, which was previously limited to the spectator’s imagination (although Anderson’s and Robert-Houdin’s performances did this to an extent). This “sense” of animation is imaginary in the context of the book’s metamorphosis because the images are not really transformed. The magician controls which images are seen and which are not in such a way that the spectator experiences uncertainty about whether the images are fixed to the pages or made to appear and disappear. By visualizing the process by which the book appears to come to life, The Magic Book was more than simply an updated version of the trick being represented. This layering of old and new tricks points to how the magician was, in a sense, offering early cinema audiences an object lesson in the animating powers of the medium, that is, a lesson in the wondrousness of the cinema’s “miracle” of movement where there is basically only stasis: still images come to life. It is significant, moreover, that the emphasis in both Méliès’s and Velle’s films is not primarily on the animated or moving image but on the animation of the book’s images, the actual act of animating or bringing to life that which was previously inanimate. To borrow Simon During’s phrase, the object of these films is the power of the cinematic apparatus to “set the world in motion.”19 We can see this most clearly in the films’ shared obsession with images that come to life and move, but only momentarily: the living figures all ultimately revert to their original inanimate forms almost as quickly and easily as they sprang to life. Their animation is fleeting and binary, turned on and off much like the alternating patterns of light and dark projected on the cinema screen. When Edgar Morin describes the cinema screen as a “magician’s handkerchief,” he is referring to the way in which the screen makes visible the wondrous metamorphoses of the images that are projected in a movie theater. As the early film exhibitor and magician Albert E. Smith has claimed, the screen is the medium that makes possible “the magic of movement” in the cinema because it reflects the projector’s play of light and shadow as a moving image.20 Morin’s metaphor is mainly rooted in the familiar fact that the magician’s handkerchief functions as a sort of screen that allows

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for objects to appear and vanish with the flick of a wrist. The comparison offers a view of the cinema screen not only as an enchanted animated terrain where the apparent life of moving images becomes visible but also as a blank page, a site of limitless potential for creating wonders. Everything is possible on the cinema screen; it is, as Morin said, “literally a magician’s handkerchief.” Consider in this light that in Velle’s The Marvelous Album it is literally the book’s pages and not simply the images they contain that come to life, with the shapes of the paper crumpled by the magician matching the postures of the living figures that leap from the ground. (Strikingly, like the figure of the Pathé rooster on the screen in Chomón’s The Red Specter, Velle’s blow book analogizes the cinema: the first page in the book bears the title “Album Pathé Freres.”) In the hands of the magician, Velle suggests, the inanimate page, like the inanimate image on the cinema screen, can be made to do impossible things. But if we try to grasp this “screen” magic, as the wealthy man in Velle’s film tries to do, we are left with nothing but inanimate “stuff ”: an empty book and blank pages, light and shadow and a blank screen. Early film exhibition practices emphasized the novelty of moving images through the figure of the blank screen becoming animate. As previously mentioned, the Lumière brothers’ screening of Arrival of a Train at the Station at the Grand Café in 1895 was structured like a demonstration in which a still photograph was projected on a blank screen and then transformed into a moving image. The magicians James Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith are reported to have projected their locomotive film, The Black Diamond Express (1896), similarly with an introduction by Blackton that framed the animation of the still image as a moment of wonder. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Blackton explained, “you are now gazing upon a photograph of the famous Black Diamond Express. In just a moment, a cataclysmic moment, my friends, a moment without equal in the history of our times, you will see this train take life in a marvellous and most astounding manner.”21 As Gunning has reminded us, the myth of audiences’ hysteria often associated with this screen practice began as a moment of astonishment at the cinema’s uncanny capacity for vivifying an inanimate image.22 The role of the screen as a visible plane of wonder in this still-moving demonstration reveals an underexplored convergence of animation and modern magic’s operational aesthetic—the invitation to investigate and detect “how it’s done”—in early film history. At the end of the

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nineteenth century, Maxim Gorky and O. Winter were among the cinemagoers who commented on the appearance of the screen with a sense of wonder similar to the one identified with magicians’ tricks. Gorky’s recollection of the Lumière brothers’ practice of animating a still image, for example, is expressed as an uncanny encounter with something like life itself. After a moment of disenchantment with the initial “all too familiar scene” that is the still photograph, Gorky explains, “suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life.”23 Gorky’s response to how the apparent life of the image seems to move through the screen calls to mind the uncertain space between the animate and the inanimate in which the blow book made its home. (The resemblance is cast in a curious light by the fact that Gorky is reported to have had a memorable encounter with a magician wielding a blow book in the early 1890s.)24 This space was a common point of reference for commentators trying to explain the wondrous phenomenon of projected motion pictures. In 1897, for example, J. Miller Barr of the Popular Science Monthly responded to the novelty of “animated pictures” by emphasizing not simply the techniques by which motion is rendered on the screen but also the apparently magical properties of the moving image: “[Scientists] have contrived to breathe life into normally changeless records of the camera.”25 Barr’s use of the word contrived captures the complicated unreality of the cinema’s trick of bringing still images to life. His gesture to the breath of life recalls Gorky’s sense of the cinema and suggests that the phenomenon of animation, or more accurately the process of animating, was a dominant point of fascination for early cinemagoers. Alan Cholodenko has theorized the cinema’s relationship with this “scene of animation” by considering what Gorky’s account reveals about the nature and experience of the cinema. He argues that the transformation from still to moving images shaped Gorky’s first encounter with the cinema as an experience of animation conceived as the living dead. Noting Gorky’s references to shadows and specters, ghostly apparitions that call to mind images projected on smoke, Cholodenko invokes Freud’s theory of the uncanny to explain this experience as a moment of astonishment at the “reanimation [or return] of the dead.”26 In this case, the Freudian “return” is figured as the spectator witnessing the inanimate image becoming animate, the inanimate-as-dead returning to the world of the living but not being restored to life. As Gorky explains, “It is not life but its shadow.”27

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Mirroring Gorky, in 1896 O. Winter described how his introduction to the cinema was defined by the moment when a blank screen “quivers into being.” The object of wonder for O. Winter is the visibility of the still image becoming animate, having life apparently breathed into it. He also describes this phenomenon using a physiological metaphor: quivering, like stirring or pulsating, suggests life, or at least the semblance thereof. The description bears a striking resemblance to the representation of animation in Hokus-Pokus and the books in Méliès’s and Velle’s films. Winter continues, “A moment since it [the screen] was white and inanimate; now it bustles with the movement and masquerade of tremulous life. Whirr! And a train, running (so to say) out of the cloth, floats upon your vision.”28 The term cloth is poignantly shadowed by the magician’s handkerchief and the blank pages of the blow book, positioning the screen as a magical threshold on which the intermittent movement between the animate and the inanimate takes place. Whereas these and related early accounts are often privileged for the views they offer into the wondrousness of the cinema’s moving images at the end of the nineteenth century, there seems to be a parallel and equally significant fascination with the tenuousness of the bond between projected moving images and the blank screen that gives them their form. In thinking through the enchantment of early cinema along these lines, Morin has pointed to how the projected image appears to acquire a life of its own by being imbued with movement. Drawing on Albert Michotte van den Berck’s twentieth-century research into the phenomenology of perception in the cinema, he points to how movement has a liberating effect on the projected image, which appears to acquire a life of its own, much like the objects freed from the pages of Hokus-Pokus and Méliès’s magic book. “The moving image,” Morin explains, “extracts itself from the screen: movement completes its corporeal reality.”29 In this case, it is not so much that movement gives the cinematic image its quality of animation as that in moving the image appears unbound to the screen and exhibits a degree of autonomy—a life separate—from the screen and the cinematic apparatus. From this perspective, it is easy to see Méliès’s and Velle’s substitutions of real “live” or embodied figures for previously inanimate ones as visualizations of the uncanny experience of the way in which moving images appear to harbor a kind of “corporeal reality.” Movement appears to bring inanimate images off the screen and into the

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“real” world, and this despite our knowledge, as Jean Epstein claimed in the early twentieth century, that “outside the spectator, there is no movement, no flux, no life in the mosaics of light and shadow which the screen always presents as fixed.”30

The Automation of Sleight-of-Hand Magic In her analysis of the trope of “taking life” in the context of magic and early cinema, Lynda Nead asks, “Is it surprising that early [trick] film-makers turned frequently to the subject of the animated painting, to the image or statue that is magically endowed with a mischievous life?”31 Her response is convincingly “No,” and the explanation she offers is that the cinema harbors a natural affinity for the image that moves between the inanimate and the animate. This affinity stems from the cinema’s basic technique for producing the “illusion of life”—that is, the cinema is the animation of still images. Nead argues that the gesture of bringing still images to life was displayed prominently in the cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century because new media demonstrated “their magical properties through their power to animate the dead image.”32 Like the act of breathing on the pages of the blow book, the spectacle of (re)animating the “dead” offers audiences an object lesson in how animation works. The quick-change metamorphosis from still to moving in films like The Marvelous Album and The Magic Book relates on two levels to modern magic’s operational aesthetic. First, the oscillation between the realms of the animate and the inanimate creates a visual experience in which the spectator is constantly being drawn into and out of the illusion of movement. (Annette Michelson has made a similar observation with regard to Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera [1929], a film that also, not insignificantly, features a magician.)33 This “to and fro” dynamic plays out in visual form Eisenstein’s claim that spectators sense animated figures as being alive and also know that they are not, that they are always still images projected on a screen. The emphasis is not necessarily on the animated object or illustration but rather on the animation thereof, that is, on the techniques that bring the inanimate to life rather than on the liveliness of an animated world. Because the figures from Méliès’s magical book oscillate between still and moving, for example, the spectator is denied the experience of

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remaining fully immersed in the animation of the scene. By shaping the experience of animation in this way, the magician forces the spectator into a visual encounter with the dialectical nature of the illusion of movement in the cinema. What emerges in the process is a view of animation in which the apparent life of cinematic images is acted out through images that are “both alive and dead, neither alive nor dead, at the same time.”34 Second, the figure of the magician who orchestrates this oscillation is always visible and openly invites the spectator’s investigation of how the trick works. In The Magic Book, Méliès fulfills the role of the magic professor by offering the metamorphosis up explicitly as an object lesson in cinematic animation. Each quick-change transformation of the blow book is displayed by the magician as something to be wondered at—for example, Méliès literally points, acknowledges the spectators, and models their astonishment. In Velle’s The Marvelous Album the wealthy spectator watching the trick within the film functions as a surrogate for the cinematic spectator, who watches the trick being performed on the screen. The magician in both films is there to acknowledge the trick as a trick, to frame the trope of taking life as a demonstration of an animation technique, and to deliver the spectacle of metamorphosis with the question “Are you watching closely?” In these and similar cases of quick-change animation techniques, the question of how animation works comes up against the fact that the metamorphosis literally abides by the magician’s conceit of being quicker than the eye. Although films like The Magic Book and The Marvelous Album visualize the cinema’s powers of animation, they do so using a substitution technique that makes it nearly impossible to discern how the transformation itself is accomplished. In his lengthy analysis of the trick film in Moving Pictures: How They Are Made (1912), Frederick Talbot notes this when he compares the “stop and substitution technique” in the cinema to the version of the technique as it is used in the theater. “On the legitimate stage,” he explains, “the sudden disappearance and appearance [of a person] has to be made through a trap door, and, no matter how smartly the operation may be performed, the public nevertheless sees the action taking place. In the movingpicture record not the slightest trace of the movement can be noted.”35 A useful illustration of this contrast is a popular theatrical magic sketch developed by David Devant in 1893 for Maskelyne and Cooke’s stage at the Egyptian Hall: “The Artist’s Dream.” This trick was adapted in numerous films during the first decade of the twentieth century with the use of

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substitution splices and dissolves; it recently made an appearance in The Illusionist, which added computer-generated imagery (CGI) to the list of techniques behind the illusion, a topic to which we will return in the next chapter.36 Originally titled “The Picture Comes to Life,” the theatrical version featured an illusion in which the deceased wife of an artist emerged from a large painting as her husband slept beneath the canvas. That the woman is no longer alive and thus survives only in an inanimate image is important because the conceit of the performance is that the magician can apparently reanimate the dead. Through a complex system of curtains and blinds, an actress sitting on a swing maneuvered herself imperceptibly from the back to the front of a series of canvases. The effect was that when the main curtain covering the painting was drawn back, the living actress was seamlessly substituted for her inanimate likeness: a real human woman emerged from the painting and stepped down onto the stage. As an extension of modern magic’s operational aesthetic, Maskelyne and Cooke openly advertised the trick techniques behind the animation of the painting. In a poster displaying the moment of animation, the woman is shown emerging from the canvas suspended by wires while a spirit figure (the Spirit of Mercy) holds the curtain back to reveal the metamorphosis. Nead claims that this acknowledgment of how the trick was done suggests that “enlightened” audiences “were happy to surrender themselves to the thrills of stage technology and deceptive sleights of hand.”37 But the revelation of the technique also functions significantly as an invitation to the spectator to scrutinize the actual performance of the trick, to pit a watchful eye against the magician’s execution of the trick with the knowledge that the transformation has to be made, following Talbot, with the use of wires. Donald Crafton has noted a similar use of the operational aesthetic in early animated films, which cued audiences to the animator’s behind-thescenes labor by using a motif that Crafton calls the “hand of the artist.” With a resemblance to magicians’ gestures of “showing their hands,” early animators frequently integrated into their films images of their hands at work drawing inanimate images, which subsequently come to life and move on the screen. These gestures to the process of animating in the cinema visibly linked the metamorphosis from still to moving with the otherwise imperceptible manual techniques that animators used to bring the inanimate to life. Part of the wondrousness of seeing “how it’s done” in these films is the

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obvious tension between the visibility of the technique—we can see the wires, so to speak—and the fact that, once animated, objects or illustrations in such films often remained animated independently of the intervention of the human hand.38 As Scott Bukatman, Vivian Sobchack, and other scholars have pointed out, this independence or “autonomy” of the animated image plays on the idea that the cinema intervenes between the animator’s hand and the trick of animation, that the illusion of movement is not really being performed by the animator.39 There is thus another layer to the notion that the cinematic representation of quick-change metamorphoses offered early audiences a technique for visualizing the imperceptible mechanics behind the transformation of still images into moving ones. Whereas the quick-change techniques used in proto-cinematic versions of the blow book, for example, are hidden in plain sight, the uses of substitution splices to achieve the illusion of metamorphosis in The Marvelous Album and The Magic Book profoundly changed the conditions of wondering at the trick. The cinematic metamorphosis of the book is truly wonderful because no amount of scrutiny on the part of the spectator detective during the act of watching the trick will account fully for how the extraordinary phenomenon works. This is because the process of answering the question of how the metamorphosis works in the cinema is deeply troubled by the fact that the trick is performed not by a magician’s hand but by the cinema itself. In a 1909 article on how trick films used substitution techniques to produce magical effects, the author observes that, because of the seamlessness and instantaneousness of the quick-change transformation, “the spectator fails to realize the manner in which he was deceived.”40 The failure is not a matter of the spectator missing the technique behind the illusion—that is, the substitution splice—but of what we might call the early “automation of sleight-of-hand magic.” “Automation” refers to the metamorphosis of so-called older sleight-of-hand quick-change practices from being strictly manual—that is, of the magician’s or mechanician’s hand—to being “automated” because the magician’s tricks are actually being performed in a different register by the cinema itself. Although more recently cinema scholars have shown that substitution tricks in early cinema did leave material traces of the magician’s techniques that are detectible—if, as Gaudreault explains, “one is prepared to see them”—the cinema nonetheless has an incredible ability to erase nearly all visual evidence of “how it’s done.”41

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The implications of this erasure for thinking about the kind of magic the cinema offers were very much clear from the beginning. As one reviewer commenting on cinematic trick metamorphoses in 1903 put it, “The uncanny feats [the motion picture camera] performs will soon put its more human competitors to shame.”42 The mechanization of the magician’s quick-change techniques created the distinct impression that the techniques behind the cinema’s tricks were not only “less human” but also dramatically more difficult to detect with the naked eye. Méliès plays with this in The Magic Book when he frames the metamorphosis from still to moving images with a manual gesture. With each turn of the page Méliès reaches toward the illustration and grabs it with his hand at the moment the quick change occurs. As if pointing to where the trick interventions were made— the handmade splices are located in the frames where the magician appears to touch the illustrations—Méliès seems to be mocking our inability to detect the line between the inanimate and the animate while watching the film. The trick, in other words, is that the illustrations appear to come to life like puppets without strings.43

Performing Digital Tricks across the Permeable Screen Part of the pleasure of seeing the “hand of the artist” in animated films, or, at least from our contemporary perspective, of being able to discover a substitution splice by freezing and analyzing an individual frame of a trick film, comes from discovering the materiality of animation techniques. Particularly in the case of quick-change metamorphoses in early cinema, these techniques provide visual evidence of “how it’s done.” In a significant way they also thus afford the possibility of distinguishing between the inanimate and the animate, which the magician rather convincingly shows to be questionable. Toward the end of the twentieth century, CGI profoundly renewed this discourse of uncertainty about the apparent life of images in the cinema. In her essay “Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions,” Angela Ndalianis claims that digital effects cinema has returned audiences to the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle stage magic and trick films because CGI solicits the same kind of uncertainty that underpins

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these earlier forms of trickery. Drawing on Tom Gunning’s theory of astonishment and the overlap between fin-de-siècle stage magic and early cinema, she points to how computer animation in films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991) and Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993) similarly engages the spectator in a game of perception. This game involves the spectator’s wonderment at the apparent inexplicability of fantastic computergenerated spectacles at the same time that the spectator is invited to marvel at the scientific and technological innovations that make these spectacles look and feel so real. At the heart of Ndalianis’s comparison between digital tricks and earlier stage and screen practices is the idea that, particularly in the 1990s, innovations in digital technologies intensified the experience of wonder that dominated magic’s early relationship with the cinema by having “further blurred the line between reality and illusion.”44 Although Ndalianis does not pursue it, the blurring of this line by digital effects resonates strongly with how the magician’s quick-change techniques shaped an early discourse on the apparent permeability of the cinema screen. Ndalianis opens her essay with a brief discussion of Terminator 2: 3D Battle across Time. This Universal Studios multimedia theme park attraction employed motion pictures, digital effects, and surround-sound, widescreen, ride-simulator, and 3-D technologies to immerse the spectator in an artificial world based on James Cameron’s film Terminator 2, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Early in the “ride” the audience is seated in a large movie theater and listens to an introduction by a live actor playing the part of a fictional lecturer. The actor stands on a stage in front of a movie screen and discusses the futuristic robotics research that the audience is about to behold. When the lecture is interrupted by a gunfight between other live actors who invade the theater, stray bullets appear to tear holes in the screen. Invoking the famous motif from Terminator 2, the bullet holes slowly morph into the liquid metal terminator, a kind of robot or automaton known as the T-1000. After a series of 3-D effects, the T-1000 “morph[s] into liquid metal form [again] and slip[s] down to the lower part of the screen where . . . he then transforms into a live actor (as a policeman form of the T-1000) on stage.”45 In this reversal of Méliès’s trick metamorphosis in Hugo, where the cinemagician transforms into his cinematic double by entering the screen, the digital automaton asserts its liveliness by entering the theater and becoming

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human. According to Ndalianis, the effect is that “the perceptual barriers that separate ‘real’ audience space from ‘illusionistic’ cinema screen space magically appear to collapse.”46 She relates this “neo-baroque aesthetic” to the spectacles and experiences created by widescreen cinema formats, like Cinerama from the 1950s, in which audiences find themselves uncannily immersed in the image.47 For Ndalianis, the significance of the “magical” transgression of the screen in Terminator 2: 3D is that it performed the reality effect of CGI, which at the time Ndalianis was writing was celebrated widely as having developed to the point that incredible phenomena appeared to be so convincing that spectators could not visually discern “the line between reality and illusion.” Ndalianis uses Terminator 2: 3D mainly as a gripping device to frame the perceptual ambiguity of viewing digital effects—for example, the difficulty of detecting whether what is seen onscreen “really” existed at one point to be photographed by a camera. But it is worth dwelling on the fact that the “line” between worlds that the T-1000 transgresses is embodied by a cinema screen. As in the hyperbolic renderings of the blow book’s animation on the cover of Hokus-Pokus and in Méliès’s The Magic Book, the screen is figured as a threshold where the relationship between CGI and animation is played out in the form of a quick-change metamorphosis. Ndalianis’s invocation of magic from this perspective speaks to a broader popular fascination, particularly during the 1990s, with digital effects as a new variation on the cinema’s capacity for performing tricks. It is not surprising, for example, that Terminator 2: 3D was shadowed by Last Action Hero (McTiernan, 1993), another blockbuster vehicle for Schwarzenegger that revolves around similar uncertainties about distinguishing between what is real and what is fake in the cinema. Last Action Hero is about Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brian), a young boy who goes to see an action movie featuring Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger) after being given a “magic” movie ticket by an old projectionist, Nick (Robert Prosky). Nick explains that, as a young boy himself, he was given the ticket by Harry Houdini, who claimed that, like a magic trick, it was “a passport to another world.” While sitting alone in the theater watching the movie, Danny experiences the collapse of the boundaries between “reality” and “illusion”: a bomb is thrown from Slater’s fictional world into the theater, and Danny, realizing that the bomb is real, runs toward the screen only to be blasted through it and into Slater’s film when the bomb explodes. This transgression

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of the screen is followed by total perceptual ambiguity when characters from Slater’s film cross the threshold of the screen and play out their parts in Danny’s world. The reality effect of the cinema, in other words, becomes reality, at least within the larger fictional world of Last Action Hero. In Terminator 2: 3D, the T-1000’s ability to move similarly between the world onscreen and the physical space of the theater is also affiliated with certain aspects of integrated cinema-stage performances like Orson Welles’s previously mentioned Magic Trick, as well as L. Frank Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908) and Winsor McCay’s vaudeville version of Gertie (c. 1914).48 As an adaptation of Baum’s Wizard of Oz book series, Fairylogue and Radio-Plays involved Baum weaving a lecture together with live actors who moved between a stage and moving pictures projected on a screen in the background. The show even involved live actors jumping from the pages of an oversized “book of Oz.” In Gertie, McCay the animator performed live onstage alongside a screen on which his cartoon was projected. It is reported that McCay incorporated a bit in which he tossed a real apple to the animated dinosaur, Gertie, who caught the apple in her mouth when it apparently passed into the screen and transformed into an animated drawing.49 The substitution of a live actor for the digital T-1000 in Terminator 2: 3D plays with the spectacle of animation by extending the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate into the space of the theater. In this case, what Sean Cubitt (invoking Ernst Jentsch’s notion of the uncanny) calls the “problem of animation”—“the issue [or uncertainty] of what is alive and what is not”50—stems less from the capacity of digital technologies to generate perceptually convincing images of objects, beings, or phenomena, whether worldly or fantastic, and more from CGI’s potential to produce seamless and fluid metamorphoses. Rather than being inscriptive or “indexical” in the strictly material sense we associate with celluloid photographic technologies, the digital is usually defined by the “flux and infinite variability” we associate with electricity.51 In effect, CGI tends in the popular imagination to behave like the animating and animated smoke of the phantasmagoria screen. This idea is fairly well worn in the study of animation and digital effects and often appears in the light of Eisenstein’s description of Disney’s animated cartoons as “plasmatic”—that is, exhibiting “the ability to dynamically assume any form.”52 In Terminator 2: 3D, the plasmatic is represented

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by the T-1000’s liquid morph onscreen, which changes like the familiar protean flame in Eisenstein’s analysis and lends itself nicely to the notion of animation as anima captured by Eisenstein’s maxim: “If it moves, then it’s alive.”53 The resonance between CGI and these long-standing ideas about metamorphosis and animation needs to be pushed further if we want to grasp the full significance of Ndalianis’s focus on the ride simulator rather than on Cameron’s film. An arguably more significant metamorphosis of the T-1000 is the one from digitally rendered and entirely virtual plasmatic automaton to living and live human being. The substitution of the human for the digital at the borderland between reality and representation visualizes Morin’s phenomenological claim: “The moving image extracts itself from the screen: movement completes its corporeal reality.” In doing so, it seems rather uniquely to be performing not simply the reality effect of CGI, as Ndalianis claims, but also the relation of digital images to debates about animistic and mechanistic approaches to understanding animation. The uncertainty being acted out by this metamorphosis concerns where computer animation is aligned in the “opposition of organic and mechanical,” which is to say human and machine.54 Onscreen the T-1000 fits relatively securely in the domain of the automaton, which verges on the realm of the living at the same time that it is farthest from being alive. Its mechanical nature is reinforced by the fact that its animation on the screen is the effect of another machine—the computer— such that “the viewer’s sense of real and unreal [is] never in question.”55 This sense is complicated somewhat by the fact that the T-1000 represented on the screen in both Terminator 2: 3D and Cameron’s film behaves organically. According to Sobchack, the digital metamorphosis of the T-1000 fuels an uncanny “naturalness” or “effortlessness” that suggests the representation is not burdened by the limitations of any technological means of production. The T-1000 does not readily appear to be mechanical—that is, animated by and like a machine—but rather appears to have a life of its own, a life that we nonetheless know is the effect of a digital trick.56 To be precise, the onscreen computer-generated T-1000 clearly maintains the dialectic of uncertainty that allows Ndalianis to invoke modern magic’s brand of trickery as a model for understanding the wonder of digital effects spectacles. The terminator’s digital metamorphosis is wonderful because it is clearly the stuff of CGI at the same time that it mysteriously

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appears to be alive because of the automaton’s “plasmaticness,” to borrow Eisenstein’s term. As in Méliès’s The Magic Book, where actors appear to leap from the pages of the blow book within the film, this uncertainty is contained and mediated by the screen in the sense that the computer animation is always positioned on the side of trickery rather than on the side of life. The apparent life of the digital automaton remains a trick so long as it remains on the screen and causes us to question whether the image is an image projected on the screen, obviously part of “that” world and not ours. The quick-change substitution that allows the T-1000 in Terminator 2: 3D to seamlessly take life and literally cross the threshold of the screen transforms this discourse by radically “blurring the line” between the automaton and the flesh-and-blood human. The automaton as a machine represented as a motion picture comes to life as a living human being. CGI is put on display by this metamorphosis as an excessive form of animation. We might say that by becoming human, the computer-generated T-1000 exceeds the limits of its status as a representation or “goes out of itself ” in the ecstatic sense related in the previous two chapters to the experience of seeing with optical devices. The T-1000’s going out of the screen is also a going out of the opposition between the animistic and mechanistic views of animation. This particular instance of sleight-of-hand animation pushes the uncertainty of the still-moving in an apparently new direction. The quick-change metamorphosis that introduces the living human actor seems to perform the idea that the digital somehow exceeds our familiar category of trickery as the display of wonders that may cause us to question our perceptions but are never really real in the way that they appear before our eyes. To borrow Bukatman’s description of the automation of animation techniques in the cinema, the T-1000’s seamless becoming-human, part of our world and no longer clearly part of “that” world, “asserts the reality of the illusion, replacing uncertainty with a more sublime and transgressive terror.”57 The contemporary relevance of this discourse of transgression and terror to the study of magic and the cinema runs deep and has to do with how CGI changed the landscape of what we know and how we think and talk about trickery in the cinema.

5 • DIGITAL PRESTIDIGITATION The Eclipse of the Cinema’s Mechanical Magic

So artful were the illusions in early trick films that moviegoers promptly lost interest in flesh-and-blood showmen like Houdini. —Erik Barnouw, “Magicians Created ‘Living Pictures,’ Then Rued the Day,” 1981

As the uncanny double of the cinema, the magician has had a long history of inciting audiences to wonder anew at the techniques and technologies that distinguish the cinema’s capacity for performing illusions. Similarly, as a mechanical magician, the cinema has been a source for renewing perceptions of modern magic as a set of practices and discourses that have shaped and been shaped by new technologies of illusion for centuries. In the shared history of magic and the cinema, the theatrical illusions of the nineteenth century continue to animate the popular cinematic imagination in part because the convergence of stage and screen practices in the 1890s was so resonant that associating motion pictures with the magician’s tricks became second nature almost immediately. But the cinema also quickly distinguished itself as a potentially more powerful magician than its human counterpart. By mechanizing or automating older sleight-of-hand techniques, cinemagicians like Georges Méliès, Gaston Velle, and Segundo de Chomón began to change the rules of the magician’s game of perception— the invitation to explain “how it’s done”—in ways that are still playing out in our contemporary moment. 129

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Our sense of the cinema as a device of wonder is rooted in a familiar category of manual and mechanical techniques that many audiences— consciously, unconsciously, or out of habit—expect to find behind magicians’ illusions. The strong affinity between the cinematic apparatus and other wondrous machines like the automaton, for example, has long upheld a view of the illusion of cinematic motion as a mechanical phenomenon, which in its earliest forms was linked powerfully with the cinematograph’s hand-operated gears and cranks. The magical effects of trick films were (and continue to be) similarly linked with sleight-of-hand manipulation. The impossible appearances, disappearances, and substitutions that characterize the early cinema period, for example, were achieved by manually cutting and gluing together different pieces of film strips. The materiality of these kinds of techniques—for example, the fact that trick films contain physical splices that might go unnoticed but are nonetheless hidden in plain sight— provides visual evidence of “how it’s done.” Most prominently in the 1990s, the wonders of digital technologies conjured similar associations because computer-generated imagery (CGI) represented a new form of “electronic chicanery through computer sleight of hand,” or what we might call digital prestidigitation.1 “Prestidigitation”—literally, nimbleness of fingers, or “digits”—refers to the quick-change movements of the magician’s hands. The term resonates with a common association between CGI and sleights of hand by highlighting how the digital in both categories— digital effects and prestidigitation—has to do etymologically with fingers and hands. New-media scholar Lev Manovich has argued convincingly that digital effects harbor a strong affinity for the manual techniques of representation associated with painting and animation because they are created and manipulated by hand with the aid of computer technologies.2 This “handmade” magic of CGI also shadows Dan North’s idea that trickery in the context of digital effects manifests in the “discrepancies” between different modes of cinematic representation—for example, a scene recorded by a camera and the digital effects added to it. In moments of wonder that point to the use of digital tricks, North argues, “the spectator is challenged to perceive the joins between composited elements: all special effects leave vestigial traces of their means of production [that is, the handiwork behind the scenes], and it is these traces which aid the spectator in their detection.”3 Granted, at a very basic and important level all filmmaking is handiwork because behind film and digital cameras alike, as well as behind the

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creation of digital effects, are human hands that manipulate a wide range of technologies and techniques of representation. But despite the manual dimension of digital technologies, the possibility of detecting the techniques behind CGI is complicated by the immateriality of computer sleights of hand, which, because they are electronic rather than mechanical in the sense just described, appear to leave no traces that will help audiences to detect how they work. As if prefiguring these troubles, Erik Barnouw made the passing comment in his seminal book The Magician and the Cinema that “our electron apparitions are as ephemeral as images projected on smoke,” potently invoking the late eighteenth-century magic show known as the phantasmagoria.4 Because digital effects lack the sleight-of-hand “stuff ” that we intuitively associate with older special effects techniques—like physical splices that leave visible traces of the labor behind cinematic tricks—CGI promotes the striking sense that what appears before our eyes has literally been conjured out of thin air. This is, of course, not to say that digital tricks pose some sort of epistemic or perceptual crisis that would lead us to call them supernatural. But the wonders of new digital media have compelled audiences to dramatically reimagine the possibilities of the cinema as a technology of illusion. Just as modern magic contributed to shaping perceptions of early cinematic technologies, so too the figure of the magician emerged prominently as a site for wondering at the changes in the landscape of the cinema brought about by digital technologies at the most recent turn of the century. In 2006, two films about late nineteenth-century stage magicians were released within a month: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist. For a brief moment both films hosted an incredibly rich and complicated popular discourse on how CGI works as a form of trickery. Audiences were quick to use the films as stages on which to investigate the similarities and differences between the wonders of early cinema and what Vivian Sobchack has called the “wizardry of digital technologies.”5 Deeply indebted to a view of digital effects that took shape in the 1990s, this discourse held that because the techniques behind digital effects are electronic and thus invisible rather than hidden in plain sight, the human eye is no longer an adequate tool for investigating and detecting “how it’s done” in the cinema. That CGI could pose such a challenge to an older, more familiar way of thinking and talking about tricks led audiences to look closely at the changing nature of cinematic trickery.

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Figure 14. Angier performing with the Tesla device. Reproduced from The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (Touchstone Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006), DVD.

Nolan’s and Burger’s films occupied a prominent place in the popular imagination largely because they reflected the anxieties and uncertainties that had been circulating in digital cinema culture for some time. In The Prestige, two fictional late nineteenth-century stage magicians—Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred “Professor” Borden (Christian Bale)— compete by performing different versions of an act called the Transported Man. In Borden’s version the magician enters a cabinet on one side of the stage and instantly appears in another cabinet a short distance away. The seamlessness of the transportation is attributed to the fact that Borden enlists his identical twin brother to play the part of the magician’s double. Angier, who has no twin and finds himself baffled by Borden’s trick, commissions the scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) to build a mysterious electronic device that allows Angier to clone himself. This process of creating doubles transforms the spectacle of the Transported Man from a staged illusion into a demonstration of the “real” magical possibilities of modern science. The rivalry between the two magicians ultimately ends up in court when Borden is accused of murdering Angier. While discussing the Transported Man with the judge (Daniel Davis) who is trying the murder case, Angier’s manager—a man named Cutter (Michael Caine)—suggests that Tesla’s electronic device should be destroyed because it is “too dangerous.” The judge skeptically replies, “I’m sure beneath its bells and whistles it’s got a simple and disappointing trick.” In response to this wish for an obvious but

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overlooked explanation of how the device works, Cutter states ominously: “Most disappointing of all. It has no trick; it’s real.” Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, which we have considered before, revolves around a similar dilemma. In a notable scene toward the end of the film, Inspector Uhl prepares to arrest Eisenheim, whose act, which involves conjuring the spirits of the dead, has led to speculation that he is not a “modern” magician dealing in puzzling tricks but is actually a necromancer. When, against Uhl’s orders, Eisenheim conjures onstage the ghost of a recently murdered duchess, Sophie ( Jessica Biel), the inspector moves to apprehend him only to find that his hand passes freely through Eisenheim’s body. Uhl is horrified and infuriated by the fact that the magician is literally ungraspable; that beneath the “bells and whistles” of the ghost show there does not seem to be “a simple and disappointing trick.” At stake in both films is a familiar way of thinking and talking about trickery in terms of the visible trace, the actual hand or handiwork, which Norman Klein suggests is essentially the point of a magic trick when he asks, “What good is sleight of hand if you cannot see the hand?”6 The trace is the evidence that can be used to demystify an illusion; it is an unseen movement of the magician’s hand or a substitution splice that passes so quickly in a trick film that it goes unnoticed. As such it promises the very possibility of detecting and explaining “how it’s done.” The promise is important because the wondrousness of a trick is upheld by our belief that the trick can be explained, coupled with the fact that the explanation is temporarily missing, waiting to be discovered. The expectation that discovery is not only possible but inevitable (“It’s all a trick!”) is deeply embedded in our efforts to maintain a grip on the techniques and technologies of illusion that can cause us to question what and how we see. In the cinema the techniques behind special effects tricks are not detectable onscreen in the same way that they are in the performance of a “live” magic trick. This is because the actual labor that produces special effects is not simultaneous with a cinematic spectacle but rather takes place offscreen prior to the act of viewing a film. The gap between the production and perception of a trick in the cinema is compounded in the case of CGI because the techniques behind digital tricks literally cannot be seen; they are electronic operations that take place within a computer. That there is no visible handiwork in the same way that there is in the case of two pieces of film spliced together to produce a quick-change transformation, for example,

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suggests that the idea of a digital trick is the negative object of Klein’s provocative question: CGI is “no good” because you cannot see the hand.

An Archivist’s Ethos A tremendous effort was genuinely made in the production of The Illusionist and The Prestige to eschew CGI as a technique for representing magicians’ tricks, which were primarily performed by actors in front of the camera. In both films, but particularly in The Illusionist, digital effects are largely operating in the obscure role of compensating for flaws in the “real” magic performances or for restrictions imposed by the choreography between the camera and the tricks being recorded. This attempt to reduce the visibility of digital effects was intended to contain modern magic’s operational aesthetic on the level of the pro-filmic trick. In other words, both films privileged the representation of magic tricks as such, using them not in the service of showcasing cinematic tricks but as attractions in their own right. As Burger explains of The Illusionist, “I always wanted the audience to be thinking, ‘How does Eisenheim do it?’ rather than, ‘How do the filmmakers do it?’”7 The Illusionist and The Prestige are thus animated by an archivist’s ethos, which positions the nineteenth-century magic performance as an artifact that needs to be restored to a life it once had, “[brought] back to a state as close as possible to its original condition,” as Paolo Cherchi Usai has explained of the restoration of early silent films.8 Preproduction research for The Illusionist, for example, was concentrated heavily on the question of how specific tricks were “really” performed by fin-de-siècle magicians onstage. For his approach to staging the magic in the film, Burger claims to have relied on detailed historical accounts of tricks offered in Albert A. Hopkins’s Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions and writings by modern magicians like Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, David Devant, and Nevil Maskelyne.9 The contemporary magicians Ricky Jay, Michael Weber, and James Freedman were brought on as script consultants to ensure the accuracy of the tricks as Burger had written them, and then as “technical advisers” who trained the actors to perform the tricks that appear in The Illusionist. Edward Norton and Aaron Johnson—the actors who played respectively the adult and adolescent versions of Eisenheim—received enough tutoring to perform their own tricks in front of the camera. Jay and

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Weber were similarly recruited to train Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale for their respective roles as Angier and Borden in The Prestige. In The Illusionist all of Eisenheim’s tricks are also basically faithful to their nineteenth-century “original” counterparts, not simply on the level of appearance but also on that of technique. One trick involved a miniature orange tree that grows from a pot and produces real oranges that Eisenheim picks and tosses to spectators in the audience. The trick was performed with an automaton tree that was operated by mechanics based on similar devices developed by Isaac Fawkes, Giovanni Pinetti, and Robert-Houdin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Burger, because the automaton used in the film was prone to malfunctioning and posed constant compositional problems during the production, the sequence was ultimately broken up into a series of shots, the basis of which is a 180-degree long take of the automaton sprouting and growing. This footage of the pro-filmic automaton was then layered with CGI “enhancements” that were matched to the mechanical metamorphosis of the tree. Using computer-animation software, the visual effects company contracted for The Illusionist, Universal Production Partners (UPP), created a digital simulation of the tree growing and producing fruit. This digital layer was combined with the original footage of the tree to smooth out those portions of the trick where the device or the filming of it failed to work properly.10 A model of the tree was also used to stand in for the automaton in a close-up of Eisenheim picking the real oranges from the branches. As it appears in the film, therefore, the moving image of the orange tree is actually a dense assemblage of cinematic trick layers. CGI was also frequently used in The Illusionist to cosmetically conceal the secret operations behind “real” sleights of hand that registered visibly on film. In an early flashback sequence, for example, the young Eisenheim performs a card trick for the young Sophie (Eleanor Tomlinson). In this trick the boy holds a deck of cards in front of the girl and causes a card that she had previously chosen to rise slowly from within the deck until it appears to float in the air. The film’s on-location magic consultant, James Freedman, explains that although the trick and several others like it, including a floating flute and an orange that falls in slow motion when dropped, appear to be the work of CGI, they were actually performed using very fine threads that he manipulated like a puppeteer just out of the camera’s field of view.11 Visual effects artists at UPP then removed any threadwork that appeared in the images.

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In a lengthy interview detailing how each of Eisenheim’s tricks was “really” done, Freedman alludes to a tension between the respective powers of the human and the digital to provoke wonder. CGI is consistently figured in his discussion as a burden on the practice of magic, an economically limiting last resort in terms of funding and time, and an uncreative and often technically convoluted means of creating effects that the magician can do, for example, with a piece of thread. Freedman makes frequent and emphatic reference along these lines to where CGI could have been used in the film but was not, as if to underscore the fact that although a trick might appear indebted to digital prestidigitation, its real import is linked to the magician’s physical work behind the scenes. We could read Freedman’s denigration of digital effects in a number of ways. It is definitely an extension of the archivist’s ethos, which assumes outright that CGI is a methodological compromise and, as a technique of magic, anathema to a commitment to representing the nineteenth-century magic performance as an attraction in its own right. Freedman might also be responding to the critical reception of The Illusionist, which was dominated by an almost automatic association of the fantastic tricks in the film with the possibilities of digital effects. One reviewer claimed, for example, “It’s a pity that most of Eisenheim’s grand illusions can only be achieved through computer-generated effects, which undermine his credibility as a master illusionist” (emphasis added).12 Given this, it is likely that Freedman is exhibiting a sense of pride in his virtuoso ability to produce wondrous effects that spectators consider to be beyond the possibilities of human handiwork. His stance, therefore, can be read as an attempt to reassert the vitality and significance of magicians who appear to have been marginalized by innovations in the medium that they once helped to innovate so visibly.13

Modern Magic’s Shadow Like The Illusionist, The Prestige privileges a category of trickery that is deeply rooted in the mechanics and materiality of so-called older forms of prestidigitation. These forms are defined by sleights that are “of the hand” in the sense that they involve the manipulation of objects and apparatuses by actual digits—that is, the fingers. Throughout the film constant forays are made behind the scenes of Borden’s and Angier’s illusions, most of which

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Figure 15. The vanishing bird apparatus. Reproduced from The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (Touchstone Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006), DVD.

are traced to techniques involving manual dexterity, doubles and accomplices, secret compartments, and mechanical devices, like a complex spring, ratchet, and cable apparatus that is strapped to Angier’s body and allows a bird and the cage it inhabits to disappear instantly up the magician’s sleeve. Jonathan Romney of the London Independent claims of Nolan’s emphasis on the actual “stuff ” of modern magic: “Nostalgic for pre-CGI spectacle, The Prestige favours old-school mechanisms and optical tricks. . . . This film puts software aside and reminds us that screen magic, and stage magic before it, were born of levers and lenses, trap doors and collapsible cages.”14 The cinematic representation of “old-school mechanisms and optical tricks” in The Prestige (as well as The Illusionist) inspired a strain of popular reflections on the relationship between magic and the cinema that emphasized dissonance and failure rather than affinity and astonishment. Some

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audiences criticized the films by claiming that the magicians’ tricks and the CGI possibly used to represent them were not wonderful, or that the convergence of fin-de-siècle stage magicians and digital effects confirmed that magic and contemporary cinema were not as tightly bound together as they had been in early trick films. This critique developed in dialogue with an aspect of the archivist’s ethos that Dick Pope, the cinematographer for Burger’s film, captures when he asserts: “The credibility of The Illusionist hangs on the very authenticity and believability of its illusions.”15 Audiences were quick to point out that the thread upon which Burger and Pope hung the attraction of The Illusionist was obviously untenable: Eisenheim’s tricks “clearly” appear to be the work of CGI; they appear like shadows of real tricks because they have the look and feel of digital effects, which, so the discourse goes, do not look or feel like real magic tricks. Although there is a general sense in the reception of these films that there is no longer any magic or wonder in viewing CGI in the cinema, the latent question audiences asked was “How can we think about CGI as a form of magic?” The question was a response to what audiences considered to be the strangeness of the magic performance delivered as such in the context of digital effects. The issue is not specific to discourses on CGI but rather haunts the long history of representing magic in the cinema, a history, we might say, of the unrepresentability of magic tricks. The sense that magicians’ tricks as such fail to work upon being represented in the cinema is illuminated by the fact that The Illusionist and The Prestige deal in part with nonfiction views of magic in the vein of what Matthew Solomon calls “films of tricks.”16 Films of tricks are distinguished from trick films on the grounds that they do not use the magic performance to showcase cinematic trick techniques. Rather they preserve the magic performance as an attraction in and of itself, usually by employing a long take and by abstaining from the use of cinematic effects.17 Solomon traces this mode from a cycle of fiction and nonfiction films of Harry Houdini’s performances in the 1910s and 1920s to some very early actualities like the Lumière brothers’ Prestidigitateur (1896–1897), in which a magician performs a sleight-of-hand trick with a rabbit.18 In his essay “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” André Bazin speaks of these kinds of films when he remarks, “If [a documentary’s] object is to show the extraordinary feats of a great master [magician] then the film must proceed in a series of individual shots” without the use of

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montage. To edit a magician’s trick would be to undermine its authenticity and credibility—to misrepresent “the essence of [the] scene,” as Bazin puts it—because the trick relies for its effect on the continuity of the action taking place.19 Its wondrousness depends on the impression that a surprising transformation takes place before one’s very eyes. To disrupt this by intervening in the trick with cinematic techniques is to add an order of trickery that is incompatible with the performance itself. According to Solomon, the attraction of Houdini’s early actuality films resided precisely in the status of these films as attractions. In the 1910s, the escape artist was filmed predominantly with what Tom Gunning has called a “view aesthetic.” This aesthetic deemphasized the possibility of a cinematographic intervention in order to offer the performance up as an “authentic” event, or at least one that could be authenticated and allowed to stand as “a credible substitute” for the real thing.20 Stunts, especially mysterious ones, exhibit powerful elements of sensationalism and drama that seem to carry a great deal of the performances’ weight and affect across their cinematic mediation. Solomon notes that it was this sensationalism, combined with Houdini’s movement toward transparency—for example, escaping from a straitjacket in plain view of the spectator rather than from behind a curtain—that attracted audiences to these films. The result, however, was a greater emphasis on seeing Houdini’s stunts rather than on detecting the secret methods behind them.21 As one reviewer of a live performance by Houdini explained in 1916, “The well-known vaudeville entertainer does not make any trick of this act; it is a feat of strength and skill.”22 The appeal of Houdini’s films is difficult to account for in the representation of a stage magic trick in the cinema. Although it may involve a dramatic element and may rely similarly on a demonstration of incredible dexterity and skill for its effect, a sleight-of-hand or an apparatus illusion relies for its wondrousness on maintaining magic’s dialectic of uncertainty. This is compromised in a film of tricks by the audience’s automatic association of the representation of magic with knowledge of the cinema’s capacity for faking phenomena. Solomon notes this by pointing to an interview with François Truffaut in which Alfred Hitchcock claimed, “It’s impossible to put an illusionist on the screen, because the public knows instinctively, through the tricks they have seen in films, how the director went about it” (emphasis added).23 Doubling the magic performance with the cinema voids the represented trick’s wondrousness and redirects the act of watching closely

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to the trickery of the medium, which, as Hitchcock acknowledges, is no longer new. Familiarity with this potential second order of trickery is commonly held to be the harbinger of death for magic tricks presented as such in the cinema. Echoing Hitchcock’s conviction, the director Christopher Nolan claimed with regard to The Prestige, “You can’t impress people with stage magic in film; they’re too aware of camera tricks and all of that.” Roger Ebert argued that the film is “nothing but a trick about a trick.” One reviewer of The Illusionist likewise explained, “A significant problem the movie has is that we don’t believe for a second that Eisenheim is employing actual magic. Most of the tricks are shown as CGI effects, which robs the movie of some of its momentum.” Another concluded, “Burger is not so old-fashioned as to eschew special effects.”24 This willingness to disbelieve in the authenticity of represented tricks caused stage magic in these films to be treated like a shadow or specter of the “real thing.”

Where Did All the Magic Go? The significance of this merging of old and new resides less in Burger’s and Nolan’s pursuits of credible representations of fin-de-siècle magic— the filmmakers are obviously aware that this is not the most compelling approach—than in the nature of their shared impulse to look back. The Illusionist and The Prestige privilege the authenticity of the nineteenth-century magic performance in part because they both loosely represent historical subjects. Their collective effort to bring this older form of magic back to life for contemporary audiences is a necessary condition of their investments in representing stage magic in the service of narratives that revolve around magicians in fin-de-siècle Vienna and London, respectively. But the authenticity of “old-school mechanisms and optical tricks” in these films also serves the purpose of rediscovering some original condition of wonder that audiences apparently considered to be lost in the context of CGI. Both films are animated by the conceit that the act of restoring the nineteenthcentury magic performance as such could itself renew the wondrousness of the cinema in the age of ubiquitous digital effects. In a rich review of The Prestige titled “Where Did All the Magic Go?” Jonathan Romney frames the subject of magic in contemporary cinema

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culture as a failure of digital effects to work like magic tricks. Drawing on the idea that the act of watching closely while a magician performs a sleight of hand is premised on the possibility of detecting techniques that are hidden in plain sight, he explains, “These days .  .  . most Hollywood illusion doesn’t [even have] seams: digital image-making irons everything into one smooth, unbroken surface. What’s intriguing about The Prestige is the oldfashioned possibility that such a film actually might contain hidden folds detectable by the attentive eye.”25 For Romney, the “authentic” representation of nineteenth-century stage magic marks an opportunity to restore a pleasurable search for visual evidence of “how it’s done” to a cinema that tends toward the impossibility of discerning both where digital visual effects are located in moving images and how those effects work. When Romney speaks of digital effects in terms of “ironing” the cinematic image, he is invoking a more general discourse on the indeterminacy of CGI. Michele Pierson describes this in its broadest scope as “the dream of total computer-generated simulation” in which new media “might one day produce images that so perfectly simulate the look of objects in the real world that it will be impossible to tell that they have been computer generated.”26 The power of CGI to simulate the real, or, as Lev Manovich explains, to “fake” “photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens,” is largely dependent on the ability of digital effects to vanish while still remaining visible.27 Their (in)visibility is a matter of being seen not as visual effects but rather as moving photographic images, a masquerade that makes it difficult to determine whether an image is entirely fabricated or whether the phenomenon being viewed “really” existed to be recorded by the camera. To varying degrees, this vanishing of the digital promotes the appearance of an image with a homogenous “surface,” one in which the seams between the digital and photographic layers are apparently undetectable, ironed flat, as Romney claims, like a puzzle with no visibly discernible pieces.28 For example, the CGI used to simulate portions of Eisenheim’s automaton orange tree in The Illusionist was meant to be seen through to the magic trick documented by the camera. In order to prevent audiences from recognizing the CGI layer as such, the digital images of the automaton were rendered with “a mechanical vibration [which allowed Burger] to create the appearance of a mechanical method.” Although CGI offered Burger an opportunity to give the automaton’s somewhat clunky, mechanical metamorphosis a “smooth organic” finish, doing so would have given

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the trick the appearance of a digital or electronic method rather than a mechanical one.29 The choice to doctor the pro-filmic magic trick with CGI rather than to digitally create the trick from the ground up was rooted in the sense that digital tricks do not afford spectators the same promise and pleasure of detecting “how it’s done” that manual and mechanical tricks do. According to Romney, the trouble with “invisible” digital effects is that they do not have seams. Seams are sites of potential cleavage, vulnerability, and imperfection that make the act of watching closely, to detect how a trick works, not only possible but also pleasurable. Neil Harris speaks to this in his description of the operational aesthetic when he claims that the attraction of P. T. Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid in the nineteenth century was rooted in the possibility of detecting a tangible seam (literally a suture) that would help to explain the creature’s existence as a trick. The Mermaid was produced by stitching the upper half of a monkey’s body onto the tail end of a fish in such a way that the creature appeared to be a unified whole. “Even if it had been manufactured,” Harris explains, “the object was a superb piece of craftsmanship, for it seemed impossible to see where the fish and the monkey had been ‘joined’” (emphasis added).30 In the scenario that Romney describes, seeing the seams that reveal where digital tricks are operating has apparently become impossible. Although he does not seem to be aware of it, Romney’s celebration of The Prestige as a return of modern magic’s “hidden folds detectable by the attentive eye” is conditioned by the fact that he has stumbled in the act of watching closely; that he has, in a sense, been tricked. The basis for his claim is that, because The Prestige supposedly eschews CGI in the representation of magic, the spectator’s attentive eye can be pitted against the magic tricks that are being performed in front of the camera. These tricks have hidden folds because they employ a mechanical method. As previously mentioned, they are “born of levers and lenses, trap doors and collapsible cages.” While Romney praises the restoration work that Nolan (like Burger) did to ensure the authenticity of the magic tricks that appear in The Prestige, he fails to notice or acknowledge that many of the images have been first doctored by CGI and then “ironed out” to make it difficult, if not impossible, to see the seams of the CGI used in the film. Consider, for example, the following shot from The Prestige of Angier performing an early version of the Transported Man. In this trick the magician

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walks through a door on one side of the stage and instantly appears through another door at a considerable distance opposite the first. This portion of the trick appears in the form of a single continuous long shot, with the camera assuming the point of view of the audience and maintaining a static framing that captures the entirety of the magician’s transportation in one view. In order to achieve the continuity of this action, images of Angier moving separately through each door were combined and blended using “double pass” and “split screen” techniques that allowed the two halves of the trick to be composited into one seamless image.31 The representation of the trick also makes a nod to the use of a cinematic effect because the magician is revealed throughout the performance to be the actor Hugh Jackman. This continuity is significantly complicated by the fact that even Angier’s temporary double in the film (a character named Gerald Root) is clearly also played by Jackman. The appearance of authenticity that Romney praises is thus really contingent on his being enabled to see through digital tricks that he does not recognize as such. The significance of this experience is compounded by the fact that the French animation and visual effects studio contracted for The Prestige, BUF Compagnie, claims that a total of ninety related visual effects shots are operating in the film. Romney’s willingness or desire to see a mechanical method behind these representations suggests that the troubles he associates with digital effects might not reside entirely in the (im)possibility of detecting seams. Granted, there is a definite sense when watching a film with CGI at its disposal that there are no detectable sleights of hand as there are in a live magic performance. However, this sense is basically a rearticulation of the dynamics of trickery and detection that characterized the substitution splice in early trick films, discussed in the previous chapter. What seems to be more centrally at stake in the search for the hidden folds of tricks in The Prestige and The Illusionist is the possibility of stemming the uncertainty and anxiety that audiences beginning in the 1990s expressed over the loss of the actual human “digits” behind digital tricks. The receptions of both films are punctuated with pointed references to the restoration of the materiality of modern magic tricks. One reviewer explained, for example, “In their seeming rejection of CGI trickery . . . The Prestige and The Illusionist honor an older way of fooling the senses. The fun of a magic act lies in knowing there’s a human solution [read: method] to the

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miracle . . . and that brain power and cleverness are more satisfying than CPU time” (emphases added). Another wrote, “The Illusionist boasts a sense of magic that feels handmade, not gussied up with special effects” (emphasis added). In these and other cases it is precisely the hand appearing to be quicker than the eye that informs a trick’s wondrousness.32 This emphasis on the manual, or the “presti-digital,” suggests that the trouble with sleight of hand in the context of CGI has to do with the absence of seams that would offer not merely the possibility of detecting traces of the techniques behind digital tricks but the specific possibility of catching a glimpse of the magician’s hands at work behind the scenes. In an interview about the state of stage magic in the twenty-first century, the magician Raymond Teller (of Penn and Teller) distinguished between the feel of a live magic performance and that of one in the cinema or on television by remarking, “Magic is a very fleshy form.” By “fleshy,” Teller means that seeing a magician performing a trick live and in the flesh prompts a different kind of wonder than “the shock you feel when you’re in a movie theater.”33 Whereas in a live performance sleights of hand and apparently inexplicable metamorphoses take place immediately before one’s very eyes, in the cinema the wonder of the magic spectacle is pushed onto the order of cinematic trickery, which itself becomes the object of wonder and leaves behind only shadows, no flesh. While we can approach this simply enough in terms of the unrepresentability of magic tricks, the emphasis on the materiality of magic points deeper, to the idea that the experience of wonder is significantly bound up in the possibility of linking tricks to human bodies. This corporeal dimension of magic seems to be grounding the experience of wonder in the world, giving it a body, which keeps magic from becoming inexplicable. It is on this premise that what Romney calls “pre-CGI spectacle” or “screen magic”—including the substitution splice—is aligned with the live modern magic performance. In the case of the substitution splice, for example, not only is the quick change visible in the form of one thing being substituted for another before one’s very eyes, but the mechanics behind the trick have material traces of human handiwork that are discoverable as well. Jacques Malthête and André Gaudreault, among others, have emphasized the traces of splices that are visible in the upper part of frames from Georges Méliès’s trick films. Likewise, much seminal scholarship on early cinema using analyses of Méliès’s trick films is based on being able to locate

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actual cuts and sutures in the material film strip that reveal how the filmmaker really manufactured his tricks.34 Burger’s choice to emphasize the mechanical nature of Eisenheim’s automaton orange tree should be seen in this light. In his Memoires, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin explains that he had originally designed one of his automata, the writer-draftsman, to be seamless and untraceable to a mechanical method. “I had taken every care to render the mechanism of my writer as perfect as possible and had set great store on making the clockwork noiseless. In doing this I wished to imitate nature, whose complicated instruments act almost imperceptibly.” However, the “perfect” automaton provoked very little wonder when it was presented to audiences. To remedy this, Robert-Houdin degraded the device’s mechanics “so that a whizzing sound should be heard.” The modification, he recalls, was immediately accompanied by the popular response, “What complicated machinery!”35 In the vein of discourses on the “uncanny valley,” Manovich has similarly described the “degradation” of digital effects as a response to the sense that CGI is “too perfect,” that is, too seamless and too traceless relative to the familiar appearance of the film image, which tends to reveal its materiality and mechanics through versions of “seams” like graininess, blur, flicker, and lens flare.36 It is difficult not to read in the archivist’s ethos and the “nostalgia for pre-CGI spectacle” a subtle concern for the idea that “the digital arts are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects.”37 The now familiar discourse on the anxieties and uncertainties related to CGI, for example, is rooted in the sense that digital images can be created autonomously of any pro-filmic event and, therefore, tend toward being strictly virtual and insubstantial, even plasmatic in the Eisensteinian sense of an animation that “behaves like the primal protoplasm . . . capable of assuming any form.”38 Digital images confront the spectator with the dilemma of an indeterminate referentiality. As Lauren Rabinovitz explains, in the context of viewing digital effects the very possibility of “determin[ing] whether or not the representation has a real-world referent” becomes uncertain to the point of futility.39 Moreover, rather than being “born of levers and lenses, trap doors and collapsible cages,” computer-generated images are the visual effects of electronic systems operations, including software that “cannot be touched.”40

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There is a significant way in which The Illusionist and The Prestige prompted audiences to look closely both at the nature of being a spectator detective in this context and at the changing landscape of cinematic trickery in the popular imagination. What emerges from reflections on the tensions that permeate these films—between the mechanical and the digital, the old and the new, seams and seamlessness—is the idea that at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, CGI exposed the contours of a more familiar category of trickery whose attraction and pleasure were foregrounded precisely because they appeared to be in trouble. The historian and psychologist Peter Lamont offers a way into this when he explains: If you go to the theater and see Peter Pan flying above the stage, you ignore the wires: that is a willing suspension of disbelief. If you go to the theater and see David Copperfield flying above the stage, you do not ignore the wires. You look for the wires. You do not see any wires. That is magic. . . . If you do not look for the wires because the possibility has not occurred to you, then you do not need magic since you must live in a world of endless wonders. If the possibility of wires does occur to you but you decide not to look for them, then that is indeed a willing suspension of disbelief. But it is not magic.41

Rather than being suspended, disbelief is actually dominant and essential to modern magic’s dialectic of uncertainty. But more importantly, the crux of Lamont’s version of the commonplace view of the magician’s audience occupying a space of temporary credulity is the search for “how it’s done.” This search not only distinguishes modern magic from other kinds of magic and regimes of belief, mainly the immersive effect of watching a theatrical performance and the deluding effect, Lamont suggests amusingly, of being ridiculously credulous. It also prompts a difficult question. If the act of looking for the wires that allow David Copperfield to perform a levitation trick is significant because the wires are there but the spectator does not see them, then what are we to make of the idea that in the case of digital effects, the spectator cannot see the wires because there are actually no wires to be seen?

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Flesh and Blood and the Troubled Heart of Magic For Erik Barnouw the emergence of early cinema as a new form of magic spectacle eclipsed the kind of “fleshy” tricks that we associate with the immediacy of the live magic performance. The releases of The Illusionist and The Prestige reanimated this interest in the flesh and blood of modern magic, or at least brought it to the foreground as a primary point of reference in popular efforts to understand where magic fits and how it is working in contemporary cinema culture. What emerges in thinking about responses to the representation of magic in these films is the question of what the materiality of magic promises in the investigation of wondrous phenomena. The question reflects the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of an older category and way of talking about modern magic, a difficulty that surfaced prominently in the contemplation and investigation of CGI in the early part of the twenty-first century. The Illusionist plays out a number of tensions between the material and the immaterial, the old and the new, and the visible and the invisible according to an uncertainty about what kind of magic we might be dealing with in digital cinema. Recall Inspector Uhl’s horror at being unable to grasp Eisenheim during the spirit manifestation trick because the magician had in fact become immaterial. In this case the idea that magic tricks consist of potentially detectable techniques hidden in plain sight appears to vanish; the old expected magic becomes a specter. Given the film’s investment in reanimating magic’s mechanical past, it is possible to see this ghost show as a metaphor for how digital tricks tend in the popular imagination toward the really spectral, not because they promote fear of the supernatural but because they perpetually resist the demystifying efforts of a detecting eye. The less-human or nonhuman dimension of digital trickery plays a dominant role behind the scenes of magic’s troubles in the twenty-first century. Consider that the secret operations behind digital tricks are in a sense always already invisible and undetectable. David Rodowick explains that because it is algorithmic in origin, CGI “cannot be considered the physical act of the author’s hand.”42 A computer graphics engineer might manually initiate an operation by clicking a mouse or touching a keyboard, but the operation itself, the digital sleight or movement of the hand, takes place in the ether that is the visual effects software being used. Pitting one’s watchful

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eye against a digital trick, even when one goes behind the scenes of its production, will never result in making fully visible the operations that will help to demystify what the spectator has seen. An admittedly oblique example offered by the philosopher Michael Heim is useful for understanding this dimension of digital prestidigitation. In his discussion of what John Seely Brown calls the “system opacity” of computerized writing, Heim argues that the act of typing on a computer is troubled by “a certain self-masking [that] is intrinsic to the phenomenon of word processing.” Because the articulations between manually typing on a keyboard and manipulating text on a computer screen are carried out electronically, the actual operations of the process itself “will always remain partially hidden.” With a striking resemblance to Romney’s claim twenty years later, Heim explains that the basic distinction of digital word processing is that in contrast to, say, riding a bicycle, in using a computer “no pulleys, springs, wheels, or levers are visible.” This dilemma of visibility and detection stands as a powerful blot on the project of investigating digital techniques because the investigator is forced to acknowledge that any explanation or understanding of those techniques will inherently remain partial, their incompleteness being a condition of the inevitably “phantomlike” quality—as Heim puts it—of the system and operations being investigated.43 Heim’s comparison should not lead us to equate word processing with the status and reception of digital effects in The Illusionist and The Prestige. Rather, it is useful insofar as it provides a basis for understanding how the opacity of the digital is haunting discourses on the relationship between CGI and magic. It is important to note, therefore, that Heim is writing in the 1980s about the use of computers in which the operational gap that he notes pertains to an individual in the process of creating an electronic word document. This is not the case with the twenty-first-century spectator watching The Illusionist or The Prestige and beholding a magic trick or a digital effect onscreen while trying to make sense of how it was done. However, Heim’s point about the persistent obscurity of certain aspects of the digital clarifies the way in which these aspects can be thought to significantly vex the activity of “grasping”—the term itself connotes the “manual”—how a digital trick works. It is also important to note that tangibility and materiality do not necessarily give anybody a full understanding of how cinematic tricks work. Being able to trace a mysterious substitution in a trick film to visible seams and other handiwork might lead to an explanation that is more “fleshed out”

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and thus that makes the wondrous phenomenon more easily graspable. The experience of wonder affords a stronger sense of mastery if the explanation of the thing being wondered at can be grasped more fully, usually with the senses. In the case of CGI, because there is less stuff to be seen behind the  scenes, there is inevitably an excess of invisible parts and operations that pose a significant challenge to the process of explaining “how it’s done.” The investigative work that wonder compels comes up against a blatant and persistent void, a seam that cannot be unstitched and that undermines the process of making CGI familiar through detection and explanation.44 The Illusionist stages this dilemma in a brief scene (mentioned in the previous chapter) in which Uhl is searching for an answer to how Eisenheim performs his spirit manifestation trick. Uhl directs his attention to the appearance of Sophie’s ghost on Eisenheim’s stage, which baffles the detective because he had previously and physically inspected her body when she was found dead. As part of the investigation into how the trick is done, Uhl’s team of investigators simulates the apparition using a motion picture projector and a steam or smoke screen. The mechanics of the trick are on full display: Uhl stands next to the projector while an assistant inspects the image and the steam or smoke generator located on the floor. Uhl is obviously unconvinced, and by the end of the demonstration he subtly dismisses the simulation as being inadequate to Eisenheim’s spectacles. His skepticism, which also mirrors popular discourse on the relationship between CGI and magic in the film, is braced by the disparity between the seamlessness of the magician’s performance and the clunky mechanical method of this screen magic—for example, the projector is noisy, the image flickers, the screen is visible. What the scene suggests is that the operations behind Eisenheim’s feats are no longer clearly to be found in the stuff of magic tricks. Ultimately, the stage apparitions are never fully explained. They are left to loom just outside of the ordinary and beyond the grasp of the relative mastery that we associate with the intellectual activity of wondering. One reviewer responded to this by suggesting: Even if we know that the apparitions originated in a 21st-century computer, Eisenheim’s trickery would have been much more impressive if we were given the slightest hint as to how they were supposed to have been accomplished in 19th-century Europe. We were not, of course, because there is no way that they could have been accomplished given the technology at that point in time.45

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Figure 16. The schematics for Eisenheim’s automaton orange tree. Reproduced from The Illusionist, directed by Neil Burger (Yari Film Group, 2006), DVD.

This is in direct contrast with Burger’s treatment of Eisenheim’s orange tree, which is demystified at the end of the film when Uhl receives the magician’s notebook containing very detailed and thorough schematics of the automaton’s mechanics. In “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” the short story by Steven Millhauser that Burger adapted for his film, the narrator comments that Eisenheim’s ghosts “made use of no machinery at all” and that in “rejecting the modern

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conjurer’s increasing reliance on machinery” the magician was “returning the spectator to the troubled heart of magic.” It was, the narrator continues, “as if his art could no longer be talked about in the old way.”46 Without ignoring the fact that the primary object of both the short story and the film is the fin-de-siècle magic performance and not CGI, we should take seriously the resonance of this discourse with the one concerning digital prestidigitation in which Burger’s film participated—for the representation of modern magic in contemporary cinema culture seems to be similarly positioning, as a challenge to the “old way” of talking about magic tricks onstage and in the cinema, the question of how digital effects work. In The Prestige, the mutual investigation that defines the rivalry between Angier and Borden is developed along similar lines. As each magician delves deeper into the question of how the other performs the Transported Man, it is revealed that their respective methods diverge radically. Borden’s version, which is the source of Angier’s obsessive investigation and the central focus of much of the film, turns out to be a surprisingly basic although masterful sleight of hand: the magician employs his identical twin brother and a quick-change substitution technique. As Cutter explains of Angier’s version, which utilizes the mysterious electronic apparatus designed by Nikola Tesla, there is no trick in this new magic; “it’s real.” With a striking resemblance to The Illusionist’s “troubled heart of magic,” in Christopher Priest’s novel—on which Nolan’s film is based—Angier describes the Tesla device as a departure from modern magic’s dialectic of uncertainty. “What the audience sees is actually what has happened! But I cannot allow this ever to be known, for science has in this case replaced magic.”47 It is significant that the Tesla device retains its opacity and is ultimately positioned as the dark, sinister shadow of Borden’s sleight of hand. The demystification of Borden’s version of the Transported Man takes the form of a sequence that foregrounds the very tangible techniques that go unnoticed and unseen throughout the film. Borden and his twin brother are shown changing costumes, donning makeup, and even physically removing some of the “double’s” fingers to mirror Borden’s accidental loss of his digits during a trick. In contrast, the explanation that Angier’s version is made possible by the clones produced by the electronic apparatus takes the form of the discovery of an underground chamber filled with the dead bodies of Angier’s creations, but this revelation contributes nothing to our understanding of how Tesla’s device works. As with Eisenheim’s ghost show, the

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Figure 17. Borden and his “double.” Reproduced from The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (Touchstone Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006), DVD.

question of how Angier’s trick works is ultimately never answered; at the end of the film, the mysterious device is destroyed in a fire that also consumes the dead bodies of Angier’s clones. The perpetual indeterminacy and uncertainty of Angier’s new electronic magic are ultimately condemned and conditioned by a longing for a more familiar mechanical method. When Cutter suggests that Tesla’s device should be destroyed, or at least prevented from being used again, the subtext is that modern magic’s promise of the possibility of demystification is in danger of being relinquished to the past and must be safeguarded against the futurist enterprise that Angier embodies so that that trickery can remain pleasurable and, ultimately, benevolent. The disappointment that Cutter notes (the “disappointing trick” is that there is no trick) is directly linked to a loss of wonder: the magician’s illusions no longer stage a game

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of perception in which trickery is treated as a form of play. What Caroline Bynum calls wonder’s “incentive to investigation” is troubled by a spectacle lacking the kind of stuff beneath its bells and whistles that places the activity of investigation on more solid and promising ground.48 A reviewer for the New York Times stated in response to The Prestige that “Tesla . . . conjures the possibility of innovations that could make the old, mechanical stage magic obsolete, much as digital technology now threatens to supersede the handmade magic of cinema.”49 The uncertainty about the spectrality of the digital as a kind of threatening magic reanimates a dilemma that surfaced at the end of the previous chapter. Vivian Sobchack points to this in her analysis of the different kinds of labor mechanical and electronic devices perform in digital cinema. The mechanical, she argues, is “effortful” in its operations—that is, it is traceable to more “stuff ”—while the electronic exhibits a distinct “effortlessness” in this regard. Our increasing awareness of this difference in films that employ CGI has foregrounded the trajectory of the cinema’s alienation from a manual, “flesh and blood” basis for explaining how things work: that is, “from human hands to mechanical machines and again from mechanical machines to electronic and computer-graphic ones.”50 The Illusionist and The Prestige suggest that an older category of sleightof-hand trickery has undergone a similar metamorphosis throughout film history. This metamorphosis is defined by the cinema’s early automation of modern magic, on the one hand, and an emerging uncertainty in the popular imagination about the digital as a mode of “autonomous” sleight-ofhand trickery, on the other. Echoing Rodowick’s remark that CGI “cannot be considered the physical act of the author’s hand,” Sobchack relates the digital separation from the manual and the mechanical to an anxiety about how computer-generated images appear to have a life of their own because their seamlessness makes them untraceable to human labor behind the scenes. The visibility of the human labor, she argues, is important because it keeps the appearance of wonders from becoming the transgressive, nonhuman or post-human stuff of nightmares.51 Scott Bukatman sheds a useful light on this in his related analysis of the tension between automation and autonomy in the cinema when he claims that the figure of Pinocchio—from the 1940 Disney animated film that bears the marionette’s name—cannot be considered an uncanny automaton because by asserting his independence from his creator, Geppetto,

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he becomes too real. Whereas in the case of an automaton the machine is always wondered at in terms of the human hand operating behind the scenes, the vanishing “hand of the artist” in the case of Pinocchio is framed differently by the marionette’s “assertion of free will,” which he declares ominously (albeit musically) with the phrase “There are no strings on me.” Bukatman extends this autonomy to the case of CGI to point up how digital images push the experience of uncertainty in the direction of “the reality of the illusion.”52 The analogy is particularly relevant to understanding the implications of Cutter’s warning in The Prestige that Tesla’s device deviates from the kind of playful trickery that makes magic pleasurable. Because Angier’s electronic “trick” is not really a trick at all, it actually represents an autonomous form of magic, one that is apparently independent of the human hand. The analogy also shadows the magician James Freedman’s celebration of the use of threadwork over digital effects in The Illusionist, and Peter Lamont’s interest in the spectator’s search for the imperceptible “wires” that allow the modern magician to perform wonders. What the intersection between fin-desiècle magic and digital effects compels us to consider is how, in the popular imagination, the eye is no longer seen as a suitable (or sufficient) tool for studying tricks in the cinema. It is significant, moreover, that despite all the troubles that weigh on the topic of digital prestidigitation, The Illusionist and The Prestige confirm that in the twenty-first century, the representation of modern magic continues to compel audiences to explain where magic fits and how it is working in relation to a culture that is still negotiating the impact of CGI on the cinema. Even though nineteenth-century stage magic appears to haunt the popular imagination like a shadow or trace of a more vibrant and meaningful past, the figure of the magician endures in its capacity to facilitate the process of discovering what media are, namely by shaping perceptions of the relation of the digital to the long history of magic and the cinema.

6 • THROUGH DIGITAL EYES Reanimating Early Cinema

She took me by the hand and we passed through several rooms; then she opened the door of a chamber where an extraordinary and truly fairylike spectacle met my gaze. The walls were literally invisible, so covered were they with toys. The ceiling had vanished behind an efflorescence of toys which hung from it like marvellous stalactites. . . . It was a whole world of toys of all kinds, from the most costly to the most trifling, from the simplest to the most complicated. —Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys”

For all of their futuristic orientations and implications, the wonders of digital-imaging technologies also compel us to reimagine the long history of magic and the cinema, to look back at the past with wondering eyes. The study of early cinema to around 1910 has long focused on locating motion pictures in an intricate constellation of stage and screen practices that intersected and interacted with magic in multitudes of ways for hundreds of years prior to the emergence of the cinema. The broad field of “proto-cinema,” for example, consists of an array of devices of wonder— including the magic lantern, the camera obscura, and philosophical toys— that comprise the vast archive of what the artist and media archaeologist Werner Nekes calls “media magica.”1 Far from being a collection of the inanimate remains of technologies of illusion that no longer incite wonder, this archive endures—even in the digital age—as a space where the old and the new are perpetually renewed and reanimated. 155

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Figure 18. Automaton drawing the rocket in the face of the moon. Reproduced from

Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

The domain of proto- and early cinematic technologies has recently been conjured through the figure of the magician, with the effect of shaping how we see the long history of the cinema as a device of wonder in the twentyfirst century. In 2011, Martin Scorsese released his digital 3-D film Hugo, a fictional account of the early trick filmmaker Georges Méliès and his seminal role in the convergence of nineteenth-century stage magic, movingimage technologies, and special effects during the cinema’s novelty period. Based on a children’s book by Brian Selznick,2 the film is set in Paris in 1931 and chronicles the efforts of a young orphan named Hugo (Asa Butterfield) to restore a broken antique automaton that used to belong to Méliès (Ben Kingsley). Having been more figuratively orphaned—Méliès is largely forgotten and rumored to have died during World War I—the cinemagician spends his days mourning the loss of his career as the wizard of early cinema. This past is brought to light (and back to life) when Hugo repairs the automaton and the machine produces a drawing of the now iconic image from Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) of a rocket colliding with the moon. The illustration sets Hugo on the path to discovering Méliès’s contributions to the emergence of the cinema as a form of mechanical magic. In the process, Méliès is reconciled with a history that, for him, had become a painful reminder of his fall into obscurity.

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Figure 19. An older Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, in his toy booth. Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

A memorable image in the film is one that stands as a kind of memento mori in the archive of Méliès’ career. The image captures Méliès sitting behind the counter of a toy booth that he manages in the train station where the majority of the film takes place. Méliès is at the end of his life, gray-haired, alone, and surrounded by an almost unwieldy collection of toys that resembles the one Baudelaire described with great fondness in the nineteenth century. Méliès is also asleep, and except for the movement of the camera, which approaches the booth slowly and frontally, the mise-en-scène is perfectly still. As in a tableau vivant or a wax museum display, Méliès seems to be on the verge of death, or more precisely on the threshold between the living and the dead. His tired posture and uncertain animateness give him the semblance of an automaton whose clockwork mechanism has wound itself down to stasis. It is almost as if, Scorsese suggests, Méliès is a toy among toys, a part of the assemblage of wondrous odds and ends collected and put on display for the delight of curious children. The image is notably not new or fanciful. In the 1920s, the wizard of early cinema had become the obscure proprietor of a toy booth in the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. The image that appears in the film, however, is not so much a representation of this personal history as it is the restaging or

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Figure 20. An earlier fictional version of Méliès, played by his son, André, in his toy booth. Reproduced from Le Grand Méliès, directed by Georges Franju (Armor Films, 1953), DVD.

reanimation of an image that has a history. In 1953, Georges Franju included an almost identical version of this scene featuring Méliès’s son, André, playing his deceased father in the heavily reenacted documentary Le Grand Méliès. Both Franju’s film and Hugo are shadowed further by a historical black-and-white photograph taken of Méliès around 1930, shortly after he was rediscovered in Paris by Jean Mauclaire and the French avant-garde.3 The original photograph captures Méliès toward the end of his life and calls to mind the “charming family albums” that the early film critic and theorist André Bazin credited with harboring “the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration.”4 From our contemporary perspective, Méliès’s appearance in this photograph mirrors his status as part of film history—an artifact in the “family album” that is the cinematic archive. Granted, Méliès is by no means obscure or forgotten. He is in fact one of the most visible and recognizable representatives of the shared history of magic and the cinema.

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But the image of Méliès, as an artifact from the early history of magic and the cinema, placed within an assemblage of trifling toys is a poignant reflection of the collection of once wondrous devices, spectacles, and techniques that became ordinary and sometimes fell into obscurity as technological innovations changed the landscape of the cinema. By replicating this photograph, imbuing it with color and movement, and rendering it in 3-D, Hugo performs a kind of living historiography, the renewal and reanimation by the cinema of a photographic representation of the past. The significance of the version as it appears in Hugo is that the image is what we might call an image with “deep time,” to borrow Siegfried Zielinski’s words.5 Scorsese’s film was released simultaneously with a hefty behind-the-scenes book detailing the research involved in authenticating the re-creation of scenes from Méliès’ life and work.6 The book also includes a side-by-side comparison of the “new” and “old” representations of the cinemagician sitting in his toy booth. This pairing of the images circulated as a prominent motif in the critical and popular reception of the film. Both versions often appeared alongside each other combined with popular investigations of the accuracy of the re-creation or, more significantly, with expressions of wonder at the long history that links the photograph and Scorsese’s film. With a resemblance to its own narrative of a child discovering the magical world of early cinema, Hugo circulated widely as a stage on which audiences (re)discovered the shared history of magic and the cinema. The impulse to see Hugo as both ghosted and animated by the “artefactual remains” of early film history, and then to visualize the genealogy being referenced in Scorsese’s film, suggests that wondering at the cinema as a form of magic can become an archaeological venture.7 Along with many other images in the film, the one of Méliès in his toy booth inspired in audiences a prominent trend of investigating interrelationships between old and new techniques and technologies of illusion—from the early substitution splice to digital 3-D—and then making connections that extended beyond the film and deep into the history of magic and the cinema. As we will see, these playful explorations or “popular archaeologies” of Hugo’s images speak significantly to how, particularly in our contemporary moment, the onscreen magician invites investigations of the longue durée of magic and the cinema in much the same way that a magician’s tricks invite investigations of how illusions work.

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A Cabinet of Curiosities In his book Modern Enchantments, Simon During offers the term “magic assemblage” to describe the constellation of technologies, spectacles, and exhibition practices in which stage magic made its home following the secularization of conjuring in the Enlightenment. Assemblage captures what During calls the “motley” collection of popular forms of (audio)visual entertainment—like science demonstrations, ventriloquist acts, and puppet, magic lantern, and motion picture shows—that intersected with stage magic at fairs and variety theaters into the late nineteenth century.8 The study of the “intermediality” of early cinema often focuses on the question of how film became a part of the magic assemblage early on, when motion pictures were used by and featured alongside stage magicians.9 While exploring the magic assemblage in relation to the shared landscape of stage and screen practices, During turns briefly to Méliès and the early history of magic and the cinema. He observes, “Méliès’ film oeuvre is a memory theater of earlier show business: old féeries.  .  . ballets, operettas, stage-magic illusions, magic sketches, harlequinades, magic-lantern shows, ‘living-picture’ tableaux, spiritualist séances, waxwork tableaux, quick-change artists, and farces.”10 The idea that Méliès’s films are dense with layers of the modern enchantments that shaped and were shaped by the emergence of the cinema is, of course, not new. Scholars like André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, Matthew Solomon, and Thierry Lefebvre, among others, have been mapping early cinema’s relationship with magic in these terms for quite some time. Archaeologies of film and related media by Laurent Mannoni, Erkki Huhtamo, and Siegfried Zielinski have also been carried out along these lines. But During also means to point up how Méliès’s films themselves invite a particular way of seeing early cinema that is in a sense archaeological. By invoking the figure of the “memory theater,” During suggests that Méliès’s images are like curiosity cabinets, animated repositories of the artefactual remains of the fin-de-siècle visual culture in which Méliès experimented with the cinema as a form of media magic. Beginning prominently in the sixteenth century, the curiosity cabinet housed collections of wondrous and often fragmentary objects placed on shelves and in drawers so as to promote wonderment as well as a wandering eye. As Barbara Stafford explains, ranging in size from a cupboard to a room, the curiosity cabinet “function[ed] as a theater, a laboratory [and] a little museum for the harmonization of

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far-fetched things [that] encourage[ed] the observer to see each object as part of a new constellation.”11 As a metaphor for how Méliès’s films can incite audiences to wonder at the shared history of magic and the cinema, the curiosity cabinet is useful because, as Zielinski claims, it compels us to reimagine the history of media magic not as the linear progression from old to new but as “a collection of curiosities . . . things in which something sparkles or glitters . . . and also points beyond the meaning or function of their immediate context of origin.”12 This collector’s ethos, this work of seeing constellations, what Giuliana Bruno calls a “museographic archaeology,”13 is an animating force behind Scorsese’s film that has significant implications for how we see the cinema’s enduring relationship with the domain of theatrical magic and the long history of technologies of illusion. Hugo treats Méliès’s oeuvre like a curiosity cabinet of early cinematic magic in part by using the cinema as a forum for displaying devices of wonder that populated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These displays take many forms throughout the film, but one of the richest occurs when Hugo and a young girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) encounter René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), a film historian and collector. In a scene set in the fictional Film Academy Library, Tabard walks the children through his personal collection of artifacts related

Figure 21. René Tabard’s Méliès collection at the Film Academy Library. Reproduced

from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

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to Méliès’s early film career. The scene poignantly mirrors Baudelaire’s encounter with the “children’s treasury” in Madame Panckoucke’s home. Passing through the doors of Tabard’s office, we are met with a “truly fairylike spectacle”: as if in a museum, we move with Hugo and Isabelle through a room filled with costumes, photographs, motion picture cameras, and proto-cinematic devices (like the stereoscope, the magic lantern, and the phenakistiscope) that were replicated for the film using historical objects drawn from the Méliès collections at the Cinémathèque française. In addition to resembling Méliès’s toy booth, the scene significantly embodies the spirit of proto- and early cinema studies, which is indebted in no small part to the kind of work done by Werner Nekes. Nekes’s archive of around twenty thousand artifacts related to moving and transformational image technologies, some of which date back to 1700, has become an invaluable resource for relocating the cinema as one “modern enchantment” within a broader landscape of optical devices, wondrous images, and trick practices, what Tom Gunning has called a “cultural optics.”14 In his sixvolume documentary film series Media Magica (1995–1997), Nekes places the cinema in a kind of curiosity cabinet overflowing with the animations and metamorphoses of, among many other things, zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, flipbooks, anamorphic images, panoramas, magic lantern slides, and shadow plays. Like Tabard, Nekes often plays the part of historian and museum guide. Walking the audience through his collection of both familiar and arcane devices of wonder, Nekes demonstrates how many of the devices work, while also providing some historical context for how they were used. In many of Nekes’s demonstrations the cinema is used to bring the domain of proto-cinema back to life, that is, to renew or make the devices wonderful again for contemporary film audiences. Media Magica is largely a collector’s catalog of optical devices, and thus it is also an exercise in reveling in and wondering at their moving and metamorphic images. Woven into Nekes’s demonstrations, for example, are extended sequences devoted solely to reanimating hand-operated devices like the zoetrope and the phenakistoscope, which produce the illusion of motion using techniques similar to the rapid succession of still sequential images in the cinema. Many of these sequences consist of playful, mesmerizing displays of spectacles of pure movement, which Nekes offered by simulating the devices’ illusions of motion using a cinematic trick: stop-motion animation.

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For Nekes, as well as for other media archaeologists like Mannoni, Zielinski, and Huhtamo, the value of reanimating these devices is in the revelation that the cinema is itself animated by techniques and technologies of illusion that span centuries. For quite some time, this longue durée approach to film history has been aimed at rethinking the origins of the cinema. Against a teleology that positions the cinema as the perfection of optical devices that are, in Jonathan Crary’s words, “not yet cinema, thus nascent, imperfectly designed forms,” Nekes offers a kaleidoscopic view of protoand early film history.15 For him, the domain of media magic is a shifting, almost living constellation of technologies of illusion that share affinities because their spectacles play with the nature and habits of vision in ways that are still relevant to the contemporary media landscape. As Sean Cubitt has remarked, the significance of Nekes’s collection is in “the disorienting dislocation we experience when confronting once-familiar, now forgotten, relics of the recent past, about their difference from contemporary media as well as their similarities.”16 Hugo offers a similar kaleidoscopic view of the relationships between “old” and “new” media. The film is largely organized as a museum of special effects tricks that span the long history of the cinema. In addition to its use of computer-generated imagery, Hugo is brimming with tricks achieved with the use of miniatures, stereoscopy, stop-motion animation, time-lapse photography, stroboscopic effects, and matte paintings. Many of these tricks are actually layered, in much the same way that the deep-time image of Méliès in his toy booth has layers. In one case, for example, Méliès releases a mechanical wind-up mouse on the counter of his toy booth in front of Hugo. As it appears in the film, the movement of the mouse—much like Nekes’s version of the phenakistoscope—was achieved using stop-motion animation, which was then augmented with computer-generated effects. This layering of tricks is present in most references in the film to protoand early cinematic visual culture. In another scene depicting an encounter between Méliès and Hugo, the cinemagician confiscates the young boy’s notebook containing detailed schematics and drawings of the automaton he is trying to rebuild. Méliès recognizes his creation, which he thinks has been lost, and while flipping through the pages of the notebook, he animates a portrait of the machine in the act of turning its head toward the viewer. Upon witnessing his automaton reanimated in the form of a flipbook, Méliès responds hauntingly, “Ghosts.” In a similar sequence later in

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the film, Hugo and Isabelle discover a small box containing Méliès’s old drawings of scenes from his early trick films. When the children accidentally drop the box, causing it to burst open upon the floor of Méliès’s apartment, the drawings are thrown violently into the air. As the images swirl around the room they generate flipbook and thaumatrope effects that compel Méliès, who happens upon the children unexpectedly, to utter to himself painfully, “Back from the dead.” In both sequences the animations are actually digital simulations of the illusions produced by older optical toys. Layering the old and the new in this way is, of course, not new. As Michele Pierson explains, cinematic trickery has always functioned as a process of compositing different effects techniques within a single cinematic image known as an “effects assemblage.”17 The import of such an assemblage is that it means an apparently seamless view of a wondrous phenomenon in the cinema is actually a collection of old and new visual effects artifacts that have been layered to form a single image. What distinguishes Hugo is that the film’s effects assemblages take on a self-consciously historiographical valence. By conjuring the cinema’s past with state-of-theart digital tricks, Scorsese invites us to see the history of magic and the cinema with wondering eyes. To borrow Stafford’s description of Nekes’s collection, Hugo makes visible how “newer, more glamorous technologies still glimmer with mysterious and sensual ancestors,” which are “the ghosts lurking” in so-called new media.18 As we will see, these “ghosts” point to how the film can be read as a form of cinematic archaeology, that is, an archaeology of the cinema by the cinema aimed at unraveling the long history of media magic.

Machine Interest Revisited Hugo’s relationship with the world of proto- and early cinematic magic is shaped prominently by the renewal of what Stephen Heath has called the “machine interest” of early cinema—a fascination with the mechanics of the cinema’s ways of seeing, representing, and creating worlds.19 As we have seen, particularly in the long history of time-lapse photography, this interest has strong resonances with the operational aesthetic and investigative practices that characterize modern magic’s game of perception. In Hugo, the interest in the mechanics of the cinema is articulated most clearly in

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the film’s centerpiece: the young orphan’s antique automaton. The automaton has long held a prominent place in the popular imagination as a device of wonder and, like the cinema, as a philosophical toy that plays with the uncertain spaces between stillness and motion, animate and inanimate, life and death.20 As it appears in Hugo, the automaton is the source of a variety of notable analogies that together stage a discourse on what we might call the rediscovery—through re-creation—of the wondrous machinery of early moving-image technologies. Consider that both the automaton and Méliès are figured as curious relics or artifacts of the wondrousness of early cinema and nineteenth-century mechanical entertainments. Both are haunted by loss, but they are also haunting figures. The lifelessness of the broken automaton, which Hugo keeps secreted away for most of the film, is mirrored early on in Méliès’s physical and emotional isolation and decrepitude. In direct contrast to the familiar image of Méliès, always center stage, as the spritely, bounding trickster from his early films, Hugo depicts an angry, cruel, slightly wretched, and weathered old man, as if the magician, marginalized by the movement of film history, had become a mere shadow or ghost of his former self. Méliès makes this connection explicitly toward the end of the film when he refers to himself despairingly as “a broken wind-up toy.”

Figure 22. Hugo’s automaton. Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

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Hugo’s restoration of the automaton thus functions as the motivation for and the analog of Méliès’s renewal. In the process of investigating the significance of the automaton’s drawing of the image from A Trip to the Moon, Hugo encounters René Tabard, who, unaware of Méliès’s life of decay in the recesses of the train station, is led to the rediscovery of the magician-filmmaker. This rediscovery leads to another restoration at the end of the film when, in a scene modeled on the historical 1929 Gala Méliès, Tabard and the French Film Academy that employs him celebrate the life and work of Méliès by publicly screening salvaged prints of his films that were thought to no longer exist. The mechanics of the automaton are also reflected in the architecture of Hugo’s home: a train station where the majority of the film takes place. The station is not only reminiscent of or an homage to the so-called definitive or “primal” scene of the cinema’s emergence—that is, the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train (1895)—which is referenced explicitly at several points throughout the film. Nor is it simply the scene of Méliès’s obscurity and, therefore, symbolic of the loss of the wonder that was so prevalent in the not-so-distant trick film era. The station is also an intricate mechanical apparatus that is moved by the secret operations of a clockwork system and the imperceptible labor of Hugo, who is figured as the embodied animating soul, spirit, or ghost within the walls of the machine in which he dwells. This is literalized at one point when Hugo dreams that he is becoming the automaton he is trying to reanimate while the clockwork gears that move behind the station’s walls come to life. Bringing to mind Charlie Chaplin’s consumption by the factory machine in Modern Times (1936), the station rather monstrously threatens to absorb the newly mechanical boy.21 As a kind of automaton—what David Channell and Alan Cholodenko would call a “vital machine”—the train station mirrors both the machine being restored and the one that defines the film: the cinematograph.22 The cinematic apparatus is introduced as a device of wonder late in the film when Méliès is compelled by Hugo’s investigation of the automaton to recount his introduction to the cinema. During a flashback sequence in which he describes attending a fairground screening of The Arrival of a Train and subsequently constructing his own motion picture camera, a young Méliès is depicted at work assembling the device’s hand-cranked motor, using extra parts from the automaton that he is also building. In this particular shot, Méliès is shadowed by the automaton while he operates the partially built

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Figure 23. Hugo’s dream (or nightmare) of becoming an automaton. Reproduced from

Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

camera with what appears to be a completed version of another camera sharing the frame in the foreground. The affinity between the two devices is made visible by the demonstration that the cinematograph harbors material traces of the automaton. The scene thus resonates with Gaby Wood’s claim that “in Méliès’ workshop, you might say, automata gave birth to the movies.”23 The image of Méliès cranking the cinematograph is also an iteration of a visual motif that circulates widely in the film, usually in the form of Hugo

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Figure 24. Méliès building his camera. Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

winding the mechanisms that animate the automaton and the station’s clockwork system. The motif serves as a constant reminder of what Vivian Sobchack calls the “effortfulness” of mechanical wonders—the idea being that the automaton is always already defined by the materiality and ingenuity of the manual human labor responsible for the device’s movements.24 Both the manufacturing and the operating of mechanical apparatuses are dominant throughout Hugo and link the various devices of wonder together on the basis of the mechanics and materialism of modern magic. The effortfulness of the automaton is made doubly significant by the fact that, although computer-generated imagery was used to enhance and reproduce it periodically throughout the film, the device was not a digital creation. Rather, it was built by a British manufacturing company called Dick George Creatives. The company crafted a total of fifteen versions of the mechanical figure. Two of these were fully functional machines, which were operated by a combined antique clockwork and electronic motioncontrol system. According to the prop maker Dick George, the automaton was designed with the capacity to produce the rocket-in-the-moon drawing that appears in Hugo. The process is represented elliptically in the film because it took approximately forty-five minutes to complete offscreen. The act of drawing was facilitated by a computer-programmed system of

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Figure 25. Top: Hugo winding the automaton. Bottom: Hugo winding a clock in

the  train station. Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD

magnets concealed beneath the top of the drawing table that connected to the automaton’s hand to move a ballpoint pen across the surface of the paper. Electric motors and a gear system concealed within a slightly ornamental but operable clockwork mechanism controlled the figure’s tilting head and the periodic extension of the arm to dip the pen in an inkwell.25 Shadowing this integration of old and new technologies is the fact that the automaton built for the film was modeled on two notable late

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eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century automata. The first is the writer automaton created between 1768 and 1774 by the master mechanic JeanFrédéric Leschot and the Swiss-born father and son Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz.26 George says that this device most directly informed the designs his company received from Scorsese’s art department. The second, which the author Brian Selznick used to design the automaton that appears in the children’s book that Scorsese adapted for the film, is the writerdraftsman built around 1800 by the Swiss mechanic Henri Maillardet. Both automata are still operational and exhibited respectively at the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History in Switzerland and at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The devices are capable of producing highly intricate written and illustrated documents using programmable cam systems. The correspondences between the Maillardet automaton and the representation of the device in Scorsese’s film are particularly rich. Owing much to Selznick’s research and the restoration efforts of Andrew Baron and Charles Penniman at the Franklin Institute, Hugo’s automaton is depicted throughout the film with its mechanics on full display, except for a brief flashback detailing the discovery by Hugo’s father ( Jude Law) of the automaton in the attic of a museum, when the device appears in tattered clothing. This is partially a condition of the restoration narrative that organizes the film: Hugo’s tinkering with the device requires that its clockwork be visible. But it is also an index of the fictional automaton’s archival counterpart. Housed in the Amazing Machine exhibit at the Franklin Institute, the Maillardet automaton appears without any of the costumes that have historically concealed its operations. The automaton was intentionally stripped of its ornamentation as part of the exhibit’s “exploded view” approach. The revelation of “how it’s done” is intended to focus the visitor’s attention on the labor and craftsmanship that support the figure’s complex internal motions. The visible actions of writing and drawing—the visual “effects” of an otherwise imperceptible mechanical system—are meant to be secondary objects of wonder.27 This employment of what we might call, to borrow Neil Harris’s concept, a radical operational aesthetic—that is, total transparency with regard to “how it’s done”—resembles the “explanatory mode” of Jacques de Vaucanson’s eighteenth-century automata, which were similarly displayed, Vaucanson explains, “rather to demonstrate the Manner of the Actions, than to show a Machine.”28

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Hugo’s automaton differs from the Maillardet device in at least one significant respect. The automaton on display at the Franklin Institute moves almost completely noiselessly and fluidly and achieves a nearly perfect simulation of human behavior. This is reinforced by the fact that the device is choreographed to “express” fatigue and even boredom with the labor it is programmed to undertake. Hugo’s automaton, on the other hand, whirs and whizzes noisily, and its movements are ratcheted and laborious in an artificial sense. As Baron explains of many clockwork automata, the device’s operations are “acutely mechanical in appearance.”29 The acute mechanical nature of the automaton in Hugo significantly shifts the discourse of trickery in the film toward the delights and insights offered by philosophical toys. The imperfect, degraded automaton is also distinctly artefactual; its “effortfulness” is a condition of the device’s decay and loss to time. As a trace or remnant of the shared history of science, magic, and proto-cinematic technologies, the automaton belongs to the domain of the archive. The film narrativizes this by positioning the automaton as an orphaned device that eventually makes its way home to Méliès’s apartment, where it is put on display. Ultimately, the film suggests, the automaton will find a new home in the museum or curiosity cabinet at the Film Academy Library, that is, Tabard’s collection of Méliès’s early theatrical-cinematic remains. In a poignant realization of this narrative movement, Scorsese donated a version of the automaton used in the film to the Cinémathèque française, which has since put the device on display in one of the main galleries of the public museum.

The Mechanical Magic of Méliès’s World It is not insignificant that Hugo is animated by the theme of childlike wonder. The kinds of curiosity and investigation that children exhibit in their playful interactions with toys, including the elaborate philosophical one that is Hugo’s automaton, are offered up in the film as models for wondering at early film history. This is articulated in Hugo through a focus on craftsmanship and the act of manually tinkering with mechanical devices. Most references in Hugo to the landscape of magic and early cinema are made through the lens of modern magic’s investigative enterprise, in the form of behind-the-scenes demonstrations of how Méliès achieved his cinematic trick effects or how

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early films were projected for fin-de-siècle audiences. Hugo’s efforts to repair the broken automaton, an endeavor that is largely experimental and fraught with failure, as well as his constant maintenance of the train station’s clockwork system, are also extensions of this guiding narrative fixation on how stuff works that frames early cinema as a device of wonder. The many layers of the machine interest embodied by the automaton speak to other ways in which Hugo is very much an index of the archival work that went into making the film. Owing to Scorsese’s activities as an avid film collector and a contributor to film preservationist efforts, Hugo is organized like a memory theater of the wonders of early cinema. Although the film was shot digitally and heavily computer-animated, Scorsese integrated a tremendous amount of footage from archival prints of early films. Among these is The Arrival of a Train, which appears in a playful re-creation of the “myth of initial terror,” complete with flinching spectators and a depiction of the projectionist hand-cranking the film in full view of the audience.30 Footage from Safety Last! (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923) and numerous Méliès films was similarly employed, most notably in a scene in which Tabard screens a print of A Trip to the Moon for Hugo, Isabelle, and Méliès’s wife (Helen McCrory) in the magician’s apartment. This play on the twenty-first-century filmgoer wondering at the magic of early cinema— restored and reanimated on the contemporary cinema screen—is captured similarly at the end of the film in a sequence where the French Film Academy honors Méliès and his formerly lost oeuvre at a gala. At one point, after delivering a brief monologue to the gala’s audience, Ben Kingsley’s Méliès dons a top hat, produces a cigarette, and disappears into the screen behind him with the effect of being seamlessly replaced by the historical Méliès performing in his 1904 film The Untamable Whiskers. This version of the figure of the “enchanted screen” is then followed by a montage of shots from archival prints of at least a dozen of Méliès’s trick films, including The Melomaniac (1903), An Impossible Voyage (1904), and The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906). The merging of these two worlds—the literal traces of early cinema and the domain of digital cinema culture—prompted some reviewers to speak reverently of Scorsese in the light of Henri Langlois, the French film archivist and cofounder of the Cinémathèque française, who was personally acquainted with Méliès and helped amass the extensive collection of film and proto-cinema artifacts that populate the Cinémathèque’s archive and museum. Hugo was also received along these lines as a kind of living history

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of the cinema. The film promotes this idea in a scene set in the Film Academy Library where Hugo and Isabelle flip through the pages of Tabard’s fictional history of early cinema, The Invention of Dreams.31 As the children read the book aloud to each other, still images from early films printed on its pages are matched with motion picture footage from films by the Lumière brothers, Thomas Edison, D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, and Robert Wiene, among others, accompanied by a nondiegetic orchestral version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s famous “Danse Macabre.” The encyclopedic and educational tone of the sequence is colored by the sense that the specters of cinema’s past are being brought wondrously back to life for members of Hugo’s audience, who, as Tabard’s book explains of cinema audiences at the end of the nineteenth century, had probably never seen anything like it before. Hugo is shadowed significantly in this regard by Franju’s Le Grand Méliès. Another cofounder of the Cinémathèque, Franju used archival materials to create this documentary surveying Méliès’s career. Like Hugo, Le Grand Méliès begins at the end of Méliès’s life and chronicles the “sad story” of one of the pioneers of early cinema from the mournful perspective of Méliès’s wife, Jehanne d’Alcy, played by herself toward the end of her life in the 1950s. The film consists of a series of reenactments of what have become motifs in reflections on Méliès’s relationship with the cinema: Méliès performing at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, attending the Lumière brothers’ screening of The Arrival of a Train, creating cinematic tricks in his famous glass studio, and selling toys to children in the Gare Montparnasse. Each of these vignettes, including a brief scene of Méliès building and then hand-cranking a motion picture camera, is mirrored in Scorsese’s film. Franju also incorporated archival footage of films like The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), The Melomaniac, and A Trip to the Moon, a fairground screening of which is reenacted as part of the culminating sequence of Le Grand Méliès. The significance of these kinds of references to early film history in Hugo extends beyond the affections of the cinephile that permeate the film’s homage to early cinema. Hugo also inhabits Méliès’s world of mechanical magic in quite literal ways. For a sequence in which Tabard recalls, as a child, visiting the set of Méliès’s film Fairyland; or, The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), Scorsese commissioned a full-scale replica of Méliès’s glass studio. Based on photographs and specifications of the original structure in Montreuilsous-Bois, the building was constructed on the Shepperton Studios backlot in Surrey, England, and allowed for scenes from Fairyland to be restaged and

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filmed in an “authentic” production context using the same visual effects techniques that Méliès would have used.32 One scene from the 1903 version of Fairyland involving an underwater procession of mermaids and other mythical sea creatures was refilmed through a large aquarium containing live fish and crustaceans behind which costumed actors performed their roles. The use of the technique in Hugo was modeled on a diagram of Méliès’s camera setup provided by the Cinémathèque française, and the set was furnished with backdrops and props that were meticulously crafted, frame by frame, to mirror footage from the original film. As it appears in Hugo, the underwater scene is represented in the process of being filmed, such that Tabard, the surrogate for the contemporary spectator, is privy to the secret operations behind Fairyland that even fin-de-siècle audiences would not have accessed in this way. Upon entering the glass studio, the young boy, wonderstruck, encounters what is essentially an animated view of the diagram that informed Scorsese’s re-creation of the scene: the aquarium, the actors being filmed, and the crew and camera operator using a functional, hand-cranked motion picture camera built for Hugo are all on display. Similarly, in 1998, the final episode of a twelve-part television miniseries called From the Earth to the Moon used archival footage and reenactments of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon to historicize the fantasy of lunar exploration, which materialized in NASA’s Apollo space program during the late 1960s and early 1970s. A self-proclaimed pseudo-documentary, the episode—“Le Voyage dans la Lune”—offers an elaborate and meticulous behind-thescenes reenactment of the production of Méliès’s film, which is depicted through the lens of a recounting in the 1950s by Méliès’s fictional assistant, a character named Jean-Luc Despont (Tom Hanks). The reenactment was filmed on a soundstage using a glass studio modeled on Méliès’s Star Films studio in Montreuil. As part of the reenactment, first camera assistant Mike Klimchak and the series’ prop master, John Harrington, restored a functional hand-cranked 1902 Pathé camera, which was not only featured in the depiction of the production of A Trip to the Moon but also used to film parts of the reenactment that appear in the episode.33 The assemblage of old and new, authentic and re-created, in this episode, along with the discourse of memory through which the story is told, positions Méliès’s oeuvre as a rich site of historical knowledge. Scorsese’s interest in layering the old and the new in this manner speaks to how Méliès’s films have a history of being the objects of a kind of

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archaeological memory work that centers on reanimating the material artifacts of the cinemagician’s career. Consider, for example, that the sense of childlike wonder that colors Tabard’s memory of visiting the set of Méliès’s Fairyland is embedded in layers of historiographical discourse. This scene is “of the past” in that it is conjured in the film as a recollection thirty years after its occurrence. It is also a memory that belongs to a film historian. Prior to motivating the flashback, Tabard is depicted in his office at the Film Academy Library educating Hugo and Isabelle about Méliès’s early stage and screen practices while walking them through the curiosity cabinet of the artifacts he has collected and assembled in an attempt to recover and re-create his childhood introduction to the “magic of the movies.” Given the resemblance between Scorsese’s literal reanimation of Méliès’s world and Tabard’s role in educating Hugo and Isabelle about the cinema’s past, it is not difficult to see the film’s forays behind the scenes of early cinema culture and into the archive of film history as object lessons in the research, labor, and discovery that went into making the film. What emerges if we consider Scorsese’s investment in thus visualizing his own investigation of the history of magic in early cinema is a sense that the actual work, say, of “doing film history” is being offered up as something to be wondered at. The significance of this is thrown into sharp relief by the fact that with Hugo, we are seeing early film history through digital eyes.

Early Cinema through Digital Eyes With a nod to the nineteenth-century stereoscope, Hugo was filmed in 3-D using digital cameras and computer-generated imagery. Although the use of digital stereoscopy has a distinct teleological dimension, to which we will return shortly, the use of digital-imaging technologies participated in an interesting discourse of renewal. This discourse centered on two things: the relevance of early film trickery to historicizing the wonders of digital cinema, and the potential for CGI to make early cinema wonderful for contemporary audiences. In his review of Hugo in Film Comment, for example, Michael Koresky claimed, “Perhaps what’s most remarkable is that Hugo doesn’t treat [the remains of early film history] as lost, discarded artifacts, but rather as pieces of a living cinematic dialogue.”34 The film’s preoccupation with (re)animating film history, a project that is mirrored in the

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previously mentioned “living history book” sequence, is thus not figured as a straightforward exercise in nostalgia, although this is important and inarguably present in the fascination with an older manual-mechanical category of trickery. Behind Koresky’s claim is a sense that the cinema is an animating medium that has acquired new powers with the availability of digital forms of trickery. A major point of attraction in Hugo’s reception was the fact that the entire film was shot in digital 3-D without pretension to showcasing the technology as a future-oriented device of wonder. 3-D was used primarily to give depth and dimensionality to the early world of magic and the cinema, which no longer exists for contemporary cinema audiences except through surviving two-dimensional motion picture artifacts created by cinemagicians like Méliès. The archival footage from early films was also remarkably rendered in 3-D. In Hugo, 3-D and digital technologies were thus employed historiographically, that is, in the service of representing history; but they also caused audiences to wonder at early cinema. In a lengthy article on the film in which he discusses Scorsese’s more conservative approach to 3-D, Ian Christie argues: Stereoscopy has allowed Scorsese to bring the world of Méliès’ studio alive more vividly than could otherwise have been achieved, taking us from the physicality and mechanism of those films’ making into the modern world of multimedia image-consumption—and using [computer animation and] 3D . . . to create the kind of impact that Méliès’ films had for early spectators. Enhancing these films, once dismissed as “primitive,” allows a wider audience to see them afresh, benefiting from the novelty of 3D and from what digital techniques have brought to film restoration.35

Here, the wondrousness of the mechanical world of early cinema that we encounter through the re-creation of Méliès’s Fairyland, for example, or through viewing the archival footage of Méliès’s films in 3-D, is attributed to the digital techniques used to represent early trick films. Méliès’s handiwork, Christie suggests, which was researched, authenticated, and re-created for Hugo in front of the camera, is a secondary source of wonder. What this means is that contemporary special effects technologies were used to offer audiences a means of virtually experiencing the

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trickery of early cinema, which Christie implies would not otherwise compel the twenty-first-century spectator to wonder in the same way early film audiences once did. The teleological impulse behind Christie’s description of how new media renew how contemporary audiences see the history of early cinema is complex. For Christie, whereas Méliès’s manual-mechanical cinematic tricks have largely been deemed “primitive,” digital 3-D has allowed Scorsese to bring Méliès’s fantastic vision of the cinema powerfully into the digital age. But this movement from mechanical past to digital future is not linear. Through the lens of digital cinematic technologies, the domain of early cinematic trickery no longer appears primitive. Rather, the past becomes new and wonderful because the twenty-first-century spectator is provided with a mechanism for virtually inhabiting Méliès’s world as an early film spectator, that is, with fin-de-siècle eyes. Koresky gestures to this in his discussion of how Hugo creates a “living cinematic dialogue” when he claims that Scorsese and his crew “feel like instructors as much as entertainers . . . educating a world well ensconced in the digital age—150 years after the birth of Méliès—in how to retrain their eyes.”36 By “retrain their eyes” Koresky means that Hugo works like an object lesson in linking digital cinema culture to a past of which contemporary audiences are likely to be unaware but which offers a new way of seeing digital techniques and technologies of illusion in the cinema. Another reviewer claimed along these lines that “Scorsese’s nostalgic homage to early cinema uses [digital] 3D as an archaic alienation device, reminding us that stereoscopy was around from the birth of the moving image, aligning the process with the Kinetoscopes and hand-tinted prints which have now become fossils of film history” (emphasis added).37 The digital is figured here as both the object and the means of an act of renewal. Méliès’s trickery points up how 3-D technologies are not new, an idea that has been circulating in film and media studies prominently since the early 2000s.38 Rather than being “fossils,” the remains of the early history of magic and the cinema might thus be better described as ghosts, not inanimate artifacts frozen in time but animate traces of the past that haunt the present. By making visible a genealogy of digital 3-D as a form of media magic, Hugo demonstrates how cinema in the twenty-first century is a ghosted medium. It also uses the cinema’s past to enact what Tom Gunning has called a “re-enchantment through aesthetic de-familiarization” on a digital cinema

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that no longer incites the kind of wonder that dominated the reception of CGI in the 1990s.39 Additionally, there remains the question of the effects these renewals of early and digital cinemas have had on the status in the popular imagination of an older category of cinematic trickery rooted in the manual and mechanical techniques that we tend to associate with magicians’ sleights of hand. Christie offers one perspective in his article on how digital cinema has brought Méliès’s films back to life when he concludes that “Hugo pays an elegiac tribute to the vanishing world of the film strip with a closeup demonstration of what a celluloid splice actually is—something that deserves the respect of all cinéphiles.”40 By celluloid splice, Christie means the technique of cutting and gluing strips of film together in order to create the kinds of special effects that flourished in the early cinema period— namely instantaneous appearances, disappearances, and substitutions. The demonstration Christie notes takes place late in the film during Méliès’s culminating memory sequence in which he recalls creating a disappearing trick for the 1905 film The Palace of the Arabian Nights. The scene depicted is a battle between a prince, his comrades, and a group of skeletons, which, upon being struck by the heroes’ swords, disappear in a puff of smoke. Méliès’ recollection of how this trick was done is represented in a step-by-step visual analysis of early substitution techniques. Méliès is first shown filming the battle on a set in his glass studio. The swordsmen are directed to freeze upon striking the skeletons, at which point the cameramen stop filming, and the actors made up as skeletons are removed from the scene; when the cameramen resume filming, a pyrotechnic smoke blast is set off.41 This episode is followed by a series of extreme close-ups of Méliès at an editing bench cutting and hand-splicing the original negative footage to substitute the smoke for the skeletons. The effect is immediately demonstrated with a cut to an edited print of the scene showing the seamless disappearance as it is seen in the final version of the film. As Christie insightfully points out, the substitution splice figures, like the aged Méliès, as a casualty of the movement of film history that motivates a mournful act of looking back at a form of trickery that has been lost with innovations in digital filmmaking practices. Computer editing software, for example, has made it so that film editors no longer have to manually cut and glue the celluloid film strip together to produce the kinds of tricks that Méliès once crafted so artfully by hand. (Of course, as Michele Pierson has

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Figure 26. Re-creation of The Palace of the Arabian Nights (Méliès, 1905). Top left:

Actors freezing in pose during a battle scene. Top right and bottom left: Méliès cutting and splicing the negative of the scene. Bottom right: The same footage printed and projected with the substitution splice showing the seamless disappearance of the skeletons in a puff of smoke. Reproduced from Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.

argued, the “manual” dimensions of older special effects are not so different in the context of the “craft” of digital filmmaking.)42 The materiality of the substitution splice is thus not only framed as part of an investigation into how cinematic trickery has historically been done. It also appears as a revenant, conjured through memory work and made doubly virtual by being represented digitally—a sleight of hand captured and reproduced as a digital motion picture. It is not difficult to see what Christie calls the “vanishing world of the film strip” as an object of lament being reflected in and performed by Scorsese’s behind-the-scenes interpretation of The Palace of the Arabian Nights. The scene to which the substitution splice is linked is a scene of death: the notquite-living skeletons are “slain” violently by the swordsmen and vanish into thin air. On one level, the scene literalizes the substitution splice’s potential to perform a nearly perfect sleight of hand such that the operations behind the trick disappear almost entirely from view, displaced as they are from the act of viewing the film. On another, following Christie’s lament, the vanishing act visualizes how the materiality of the substitution splice has become

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a shadow of its life in early cinema. Like the human remains uncannily animated in Méliès’s film, it will continue to recede further into film history until it can only be conjured through the traces it has left behind. Christie’s claim about the “elegiac” import of this sequence is therefore strikingly resonant, but the demonstration of how Méliès crafted his trick films has another dimension. The sequence reflects a certain enduring fascination with the capacity of early cinematic tricks to cause us to wonder. Consider, for example, that Scorsese’s peek behind the scenes of Méliès’s sleight of hand is mirrored in a film that has been a centerpiece of discourses on the techniques and trickery of the moving image for the better part of the twentieth century: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In a memorable sequence from the film, a man perched precariously on a moving automobile is shown using a hand-cranked motion picture camera to film a horse-drawn carriage. Intercut with views of the cameraman filming are shots of the carriage as seen by the camera within the film. This oscillation in perspectives—from seeing the act of filming to seeing the cameraman’s footage—is interrupted by a series of freeze-frames, first of the horse-drawn carriage and then of anonymous women and children who also appear in Vertov’s film. These freeze-frames are revealed to be the individual frames on a series of filmstrips being cut and glued together by Elizaveta Svilova, the editor of Vertov’s film. As in Hugo, what we see in Man with a Movie Camera is an intricately layered view of both the film and its behindthe-scenes production, simultaneously. (Recall, moreover, the similar selfreflexive sequence of Orson Welles editing his film F for Fake on a Moviola.) The significance of Vertov’s demonstration of the manual labor that went into producing his film is thrown into sharp relief by the fact that among the sequences Svilova is shown editing is one of a group of children watching a magic show. The sequence, which only appears fully later in the film, depicts a sleight-of-hand magician performing a series of tricks, including the manipulation of rings and the quick-change transformation of a ball into a living mouse, as the children look on in various states of wonder, delight, and nervousness. As Annette Michelson, among others, has pointed out, by conjuring the figure of the magician, Vertov is pointing to the filmmaker’s capacity for producing illusions with the mechanical magic of the cinema.43 But by drawing the specific analogy between the magician and the editor, Svilova, who is performing her own sleight of hand on the footage of the magic show, Vertov also visualizes the dynamic of wonder

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and demystification that characterizes the playful game of perception that the cinema stages in its capacity as a kind of magician. It is revealing that the symmetry between these sequences from Hugo and Man with a Movie Camera is upheld not only by an interest in the magician and in making visible otherwise unseen filmmaking techniques but also by the figure of the child. Magic is often associated with children because the experience of beholding a magician’s tricks can strongly resemble the innocence, naïveté, and playfulness children bring to their engagements with the world. This resemblance is captured by the common view of magic spectacle as a form of child’s play, an idea that is reinforced by the fact that Hugo is told through the eyes of children for whom Méliès is the keeper of and gateway to the cinema’s wondrous past. But the resemblance also, and more significantly, speaks to how the magician can make children of even the most mature audiences by exposing the fragility of their capacities for visual acuity and rational explanation, for masterfully engaging with the world. Even the educated observer, we might say, can be made by magicians like Méliès and Vertov to see like children again, that is, to see the old, familiar world with wondering eyes. It is precisely in this light that Scorsese’s display of how Méliès used the substitution splice appears to be working like more than an effigy in which the world of early cinematic trickery is relinquished to history. Like Hugo’s discovery of and enchantment by the wonders of the cinema’s past, Scorsese’s reanimation of Méliès’s techniques confirms that, far from being laid to rest for good, the old can return and renew what has been deemed familiar—say, the magical world of early trick films. Drawing on Freud’s approach to the uncanny, Tom Gunning has argued convincingly along these lines that the wonder response to new technologies “need not run only one way,” because the process of integrating wonders into the fabric of ordinary life is shaped by the sense that explanations of “how it’s done” can never completely dispel the imprint of the apparently inexplicable that wondrous phenomena leave behind; they can only “cover over” it.44 For example, Hugo’s visual effects supervisor, Bob Grossman, confesses that while conducting research to recreate the cinematic tricks that appear in the film, he was truly “humbled” in his efforts “to figure out how in the hell” Méliès accomplished his feats.45 After more than a century, the tricks with which Méliès once captivated fin-de-siècle audiences continue to haunt the popular imagination as reminders of the shared ability of the cinema and the magician to renew what and how we see.

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The Deep Time of Media Magic Hugo clearly offers a way of seeing digital cinema culture as part of a constellation of technologies, practices, and discourses that took shape prominently in the enchanted world of Méliès’s mechanical magic but that also has roots in a broader history of “media magic” that spans centuries. By treating the domain of proto- and early film history as a site both for historicizing the “magic” of digital technologies and for rediscovering the wondrousness of “old” techniques and technologies of illusion, Scorsese also invites us to see how the shared history of magic and the cinema continues to evolve, to pose new questions, and to reveal new points of access for exploring old sites of inquiry. Although Hugo is largely a playful exploration of the shared history of magic and the cinema, it compels us to take seriously the idea that understanding the wonders of digital-imaging technologies can benefit from bringing the insights and methods of proto- and early cinema studies firmly into the contemporary moment. Whereas early film audiences looked to nineteenth-century visual culture for insight into the new magic of the cinema, we in the twenty-first century can look to the longue durée of magic and the cinema to evaluate the “new” magic of digital images, technologies, and techniques. With more than one hundred years of cinema history in our purview, we are ideally positioned to historicize what magic and wonder mean now, and we can do this using our cumulative knowledge of the cinema as a medium with a long history of performing tricks of its own. Moreover, being that we are so close to this new magic, we have a unique opportunity to evaluate it with wondering eyes, that is, to see the magic of contemporary cinema in much the same way we imagine fin-de-siècle audiences saw early cinema as a device of wonder. If, throughout film history, the figure of the magician has facilitated the process of discovering what new media are, then Hugo’s project of reanimating early cinema expands this idea by transforming the magician’s game of perception into an investigation of history. Philip Rosen has noted a similar phenomenon related to historical films that is particularly relevant here. With what he calls “Everett’s Game,” Rosen posits that, at least since the silent era, American films that make claims to representing history have served prominently as forums in which the efforts of studio research departments to authenticate the past onscreen are pitted against spectators’

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knowledge of the subject being represented. The game proceeds in terms of questions about the accuracy and detail achieved by historical films in representing the past, the authenticity of which spectators may challenge by pointing out inaccuracies in the representation. Rosen notes that the game itself is quite “excessive” in that the pursuit and assessment of authenticity have little bearing on the effectiveness of the narrative work of an historical film. The game also importantly exceeds the act of viewing a film, because the issue of authenticity is usually addressed through popular discourse. For Rosen, the significance of Everett’s Game is that knowledge of history is an inevitable outcome of the cinematic experience, because either a film will offer up the past in the form of an object lesson that teaches the spectator something new about history or popular discourse will offer a more accurate perspective in response. “The spectator,” he claims, “cannot lose.”46 Cinematic representations of magic in Hugo have staged a similar game, the outcome of which, as we have seen, is a kind of popular interest in the history of the cinema. The primary difference between this and Everett’s Game is that the question of history in Scorsese’s film is not so much about determining the accuracy of the historical subject’s representation—Hugo’s faithfulness to a specific moment in film history (although this is important)—but about the related impulse to unravel the history of digital-imaging technologies as a form of trickery. Bracketing whatever historical inaccuracies or ambiguities serious scholars of early cinema might find objectionable (and understandably so), Hugo might best be understood as a film that stages an archaeology of magic and the cinema. We see this reflected most strongly in Scorsese’s layering of old and new techniques and technologies of illusion that span film history. But this layering—in what I have called deep-time images—raises an important question that seems to haunt the film in a way that reveals Hugo’s complex relationship with early film historiography: Why do we have excessively layered images at all? That is, why go through the effort of re-creating the mechanical magic of Méliès’s world using a combination of digital effects and the cinemagician’s authentic trick techniques? Along with many critics of the film, Scorsese attributed these representational “excesses” largely to a nostalgia inspired by digital technologies for the “charming” manual-mechanical wonders of Méliès’s world. Others viewed it in a related vein as part of an homage to the early history of special effects as a craft and claimed that Scorsese was engaging the idea—from the

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perspective of a cinephile—that such wonderful cinematic spectacles have a long history of being composites of a wide range of visual effects artifacts. Both of these interpretations, however accurate, are animated from within by a broader, more basic, and largely overlooked tendency we have to wonder at early cinema, to engage in a form of play, as Werner Nekes does in Media Magica, with the “disorienting dislocation” old and even arcane devices of wonder can produce in how we see, for example, the history of magic and the cinema. If we consider Hugo in this light, Scorsese’s assemblages of old and new—like the automaton, which appears as an electronic system embedded in antique clockwork overlaid with CGI—emerge as something like interfaces where audiences can wonder anew at the long history of media magic of which the cinema is a part. This stands as an alternative to a pervasive reading of the film as a requiem for the vanishing world of the manualmechanical magic that Méliès has come to represent. At the very least, it complicates the idea that the tremendous effort to re-create the mechanical magic of Méliès’s world, and the corresponding desire to virtually inhabit the “magic” of early cinema, were in the service of relinquishing the artifacts of early cinematic magic to history as fossils to be buried in the shadows of the wonders of digital effects. In shifting our perspective to the way in which Hugo frames early cinema as a kind of cabinet of curiosities, the film can be seen as a space of (re)animation in which “dead” artifacts are brought back to life by the intellectual curiosity they inspire in being assembled together. It is in staging this “living cinematic dialogue” that Hugo taps into something deeply embedded in the image of early cinematic magic that has circulated in the popular imagination now for more than a century: the way in which the domain of magic and technology continues not simply to entertain us but also to shape our perceptions of the cinema and, in so doing, to renew our understanding of early cinematic technologies as “ghosted” media embedded in a landscape of optical devices, practices, and discourses that continue to cause us to wonder.

CONCLUSION Other Obscurities and Illuminations

Cinema had become a powerful robot ousting its former master. —Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema, 1981

Barnouw’s lament for the magicians of early cinema is aimed at figures like Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón who were eclipsed by the metamorphosis of the cinema from a mechanical wonder to a kind of mechanical magician itself. The lament speaks to a long-standing discourse on the vanishing act performed by magicians in the shadow of their “less human” creation. The mythical overtones of this narrative are not insignificant. For Barnouw, with a nod to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein (and the Promethean and Epimethean lineage to which he belongs), the modern magicians who breathed life into the fin-de-siècle machine were cast into obscurity when that machine began to automate their tricks. The development of the cinema as a new magic of the twentieth century was thus inflected early on with a sense that the medium exhibited a marked independence from its masters’ handiwork. This ousting supports a view of the magician as a relic, an object of nostalgia, and an anachronism whose primary relevance is to the study of those trick films that flourished before modern magic’s apparent fall into obscurity. Although it is undeniable that magicians no longer hold the same place in film culture that they did during the first decade or so of the cinema, the shared history of magic and the cinema confirms that magicians have had many lives throughout film history. Barnouw carefully suggests that by the 185

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end of the trick film period, stage magic morphed into cinematic trickery, where it has since persisted in the domain of special effects, as well as in abstract form as the general wondrousness of motion picture technologies. But these “afterimages” of the visible magic of early cinema take us only so far in understanding how magicians and their tricks continue to animate what and how we see and think about the cinema as a device of wonder. As we have seen, looking closely at the enduring affinities between magicians and the cinema not only allows us to rediscover the cinema’s powers as a mechanical magician, even in our contemporary moment; it also opens our eyes to a long history of wonder, technology, and trickery of which the trick film is only (albeit significantly) a part. In moving toward an archaeology of the shared history of magic and the cinema, this book is admittedly not meant to be encyclopedic. Rather, it makes its home in the light of a much broader constellation, parts of which remain obscured and wait to be (re)discovered. There is much more to be said, for example, about the role of magicians in the domain of animation, particularly with respect to the animated cartoon. It has long been a point of interest in animation studies that magicians and their tricks were highly influential in the early development of stop-motion animation techniques. As Donald Crafton and others have shown, cartoon animation in the early 1900s emerged in part from late nineteenth-century forms of animation, including the “lightning sketch” practices of magicians like James Stuart Blackton and Walter Booth, who rapidly produced and transformed drawings by hand in front of an audience.1 This technical association between magic and animation eventually manifested in the tendency of animators, as we have seen, to present themselves as magicians, usually through what Crafton calls the “hand of the artist” motif. The affinities between magicians and animation have resonated with cinema culture well beyond this early historical convergence. In 2010, for example, Sylvain Chomet directed The Illusionist (L’illusioniste), an animated film based on a screenplay by Jacques Tati about a magician in the 1950s struggling to captivate audiences who no longer see theatrical magic with wondering eyes. The magician’s stage acts are troubled throughout the film by an unwieldy rabbit, which becomes the source of a series of gags in which the virtuosity of the magician is undermined by tricks that are constantly on the verge of going awry. The Illusionist is thus significantly shadowed by Tex Avery’s short animated film Magical Maestro (1952), about a

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magician whose tricks wreak havoc on an opera singer who spurned him, and Chuck Jones’s Case of the Missing Hare (1942), about a magician who is tormented by the antics of Bugs Bunny. The preoccupation in these films with magicians who struggle to control their tricks—even the most familiar one of pulling a rabbit from a hat—is part of a long history of what Scott Bukatman calls “animated disobedience,” which manifests in the common trope of animated creatures rebelling against their animators.2 (A famous example of this is Jones’s Duck Amuck from 1953.) That such disobedience also circulates throughout the long history of magic and the cinema suggests that the so-called magic of animation continues to be animated by the figure of the magician. There is also the question of the prominence of onscreen magicians during the cinema’s transition to synchronized sound in the 1920s. Matthew Solomon has dealt insightfully with this by considering the centrality of stage magic in feature films like You Never Know Women (Wellman, 1926), The Show (Browning, 1927), The Last Performance (Fejos, 1929), and Illusion (Mendes, 1929).3 These films place the study of sound cinema in dialogue with exciting and underexplored discourses in the history of magic. Of particular interest are the phantasmagoric properties of eighteenthand nineteenth-century acoustic tricks related to ventriloquism, disembodied voices, talking automata, and even the rapping and talking spirit phenomena of the Spiritualist movement. Given the primacy of vision in magic practices and in the pleasures of investigating and discovering “how it’s done,” the question of sound’s relationship with wonder, trickery, and detection acquires a tremendously complex layer. What might an operational aesthetic of acoustic tricks in the cinema “look” like? Moreover, the uncharted mid-twentieth-century history of magic and the cinema is a rich site for expanding how we define the archive for studying this topic. For instance, although this book has explored nonfiction representations of magicians in the cinema, the documentation of magical practices and beliefs related to shamans, sorcery, mysticism, and the trance begs for inquiry, especially because these kinds of ethnographic spectacles do not have a defined place in scholarship on magic in the cinema. From the 1940s through the 1960s the cinema came to the fore in visual anthropology’s interest in investigating supernatural magics, namely in the work of visual anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers like Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Robert Gardner. These

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anthropological uses of cinematic technologies speak to questions about the kinds of evidence and knowledge the cinema affords in documenting magic for research and educational purposes. Similarly, Paul Fejos’s interest in magic in the early sound-film era, and his subsequent ethnographic film and anthropological research, also prompt the question of how ethnographic films fit within histories and theories of magic and the cinema. Given the range and diversity of this handful of examples, there are no doubt other histories and genealogies that parallel and intersect with the cases explored in this book. More and more it is becoming clear that Barnouw’s gesture to the question of where magicians went once they vanished from the landscape of early cinema culture is simply a matter of perspective. Although I have not ventured too far beyond the scope of the cinema in my own research, for example, enough material exists to write a rich history of magic and television, from Ernie Kovacs’s Festival of Magic (1957) and Orson Welles’s Magic Show (1976–1985) to Penn and Teller’s many recent TV specials and series, some of which revolve explicitly around explaining “how it’s done.” Even beyond this, magicians continue to haunt the histories of film and related media in unexpected but surprisingly fitting ways.

Magicians behind the Scenes Since the 1980s, one of the most accomplished and widely known magicians in our contemporary moment, Ricky Jay, has committed himself to preserving the history and culture of modern magic that resonated so profoundly with the cinema in the 1890s. In addition to making appearances in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, Jay performed magic in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) and was consulted on the design and performance of many of the fin-de-siècle stage illusions and sleights of hand that appear in the film. He also did similar work in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and, more recently, garnered a great deal of attention for a documentary about his life and work, Deceptive Practice (Bernstein, 2012). In fact, Jay and his colleague Michael Weber operate a business called Deceptive Practices, which has been a force in the Hollywood industry for quite some time, providing consultation to filmmakers on scenarios and special effects spectacles involving “cheating, gambling, swindling, confidence games, pickpockets, sleight of hand, deception, illusions, playing

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cards, poker, magic, mind reading, séances, spiritualism, crime, and medical quackery.”4 For Jay, this kind of work behind the scenes of the cinema is part of a larger investment in exploring the rich “intermediality” of magic. Although he is not a visible part of cinema culture in the same way that Méliès was, for example, as a collector, historian, and performer Jay has a significant relationship with the history of wonder, technology, and trickery explored here. Jay is widely known because of his reputation as a keeper of “arcane knowledge” who makes his home in the realm of “the peripheral and offbeat.”5 Jay built his career early on around mining the history of modern magic, collecting forgotten material on magic’s “anomalies” and curiosities, and promoting his discoveries through publications, but also rather uniquely by integrating them into his performances, many of which have appeared as specials on television. In shows like Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (1989), Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (1996), and On the Stem (2002), Jay offered something like popular histories of theatrical magic and the visual culture of which it is has been a part for centuries. On the Stem, for example, combined Jay’s sleightof-hand tricks with patter that explored the long histories of the wonders he was performing. A reviewer for Variety noted Jay’s penchant for reanimating history in this manner and characterized the magician revealingly as an “archaeologist of lost forms of entertainment.” Another reviewer, commenting on the fact that Jay managed to sustain the audience’s wonder at a series of essentially “old” sleights of hand, called the show “a compendium of the tricks, buffooneries, cons, and sideshows that make up the marvelous margins of American theatre history.”6 The novelty of On the Stem derived from Jay’s performance of the obscured histories of modern magic tricks, including a version of RobertHoudin’s automaton orange tree that had been reproduced by the contemporary magic-craftsman John Gaughan. By directing the spectator’s wonder response to the margins of magic’s history, the magician “offer[ed] a new mode of theatrical historiography.”7 For Jay, theatrical magic provides a natural occasion for educating audiences about how tricks harbor visible traces of their own histories. As he explained in an interview about On the Stem, magic “is an art form that’s based on cumulative knowledge. There are endless variations and recyclings” of tricks lurking in spectacles that appear to the audience to be new.8 Jay’s investment in popularizing the layers of “old” and “new” in the history of magic not only resonates with the figure

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of the magic professor and the idea that tricks are opportunities of learning; it also speaks to Jay’s relevance to the spirit of the central project undertaken in this book.

A Kinship with Violence For all of its affinities with science, technology, wonder, and discovery, the shared history of magic and the cinema also has a dark side. In his book Modern Enchantments, the historian Simon During claims that modern stage magic “flourished in the shade of what had long been a core component of the craft: cruelty.”9 In the mid- to late 1800s modern magicians, including Robert-Houdin, were commissioned as political “weapons” to combat social unrest in colonial settings by pitting science-based trickery against indigenous “primitive” magicians.10 The history of performance magic is also littered with violent transgressions (both illusory and real) of the boundaries between life and death in the form of decapitations, dismemberments, and electrocutions. Early trick films featuring magicians exhibit a similar penchant for bodies that are disintegrated and then miraculously restored, painlessly and much to our delight. With their related studies of vanishing women in the cinema, Lucy Fischer and Karen Beckman have shed a necessary light on the gender and psychological dimensions of these kinds of violence against female bodies in magic’s visual culture into the 1960s. Despite being a relatively familiar topic, magic’s affinities with violence, spectacle, and technology have not been broached rigorously in terms of their cultural function, at least not in the context of magicians’ roles in shaping audiences’ perceptions of the cinema. In this book I have used the history of magic and the cinema to think through how the experience of wondering at cinematic illusions, and the techniques and technologies behind them, is intimately bound up in a process of (re)discovering what the cinema is. As we have seen, particularly in the domain of fiction films about magicians, the investigative or detective practices that cinematic wonders can incite in audiences have been reflected prominently in narratives about investigating magicians’ tricks. In many cases these investigations are embedded in larger narratives about criminal acts, usually involving murder.

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As Matthew Solomon and Alison Griffiths recently pointed out, Harry Houdini made his home in spectacles related to incarceration and execution by performing stunts like the Water Torture Cell and the Electric Chair onstage and in films.11 Houdini’s film career centered largely on the use of the magician’s escape acts as threads for weaving together dramatic and thrilling stories in which he is caught up in a variety of dangerous situations. In the serial The Master Mystery (1918–1919), for example, Houdini’s stunts are integrated into a story about the magician’s dangerous entanglements with a villainous robot. Houdini is caught up similarly in a series of events involving murder and imprisonment in The Grim Game (1919) and is held captive by “natives” in the South Seas in Terror Island (1920). A more explicit interest in the violence of performance magic can be found in John Brahm’s 1954 film The Mad Magician. With a dark twist on the premise of the magician’s game of perception—the question of “how it’s done”—The Mad Magician is a detective story about a fin-de-siècle magician named Don Gallico (Vincent Price) who murders his manager, Ross Ormond (Donald Randolph), for revealing the secret of one of Gallico’s tricks to a rival magician. The trick involves an apparatus that Gallico uses to simulate the decapitation of an assistant, but Gallico uses the device to kill Ormond, effectively transforming the illusion into an act of real violence. The Mad Magician was, significantly, filmed in 3-D. With a nod to the “magic of stereoscopy” that would resurface in Scorsese’s Hugo, Brahm’s use of 3-D was intended to exploit the success of an earlier 3-D film, House of Wax (de Toth, 1953), which similarly revolves around the blurred line between reality and fakery: unbeknownst to visitors, an artist, Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price), has populated his museum with wax figures that are actually the bodies of his murder victims. The “violent” transgression of the line between reality and illusion in Brahm’s film is also at the center of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970). Employing a detective narrative similar to the one in The Mad Magician, The Wizard is a horror film about a stage magician (Ray Sager) suspected of using trick apparatuses to murder women who perform as part of his stage acts. Lewis’s use of the magician to make spectacles of the destruction of human bodies was not simply an interpretation of genre conventions; it was also in the service of staging a discourse on the nature and pleasures of violence in the cinema and the media. In the opening sequence of the film, for example, the magician is shown introducing his stage act

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with a monologue in which he states, “Today, television and films give you the luxury of observing grisly dismemberments and deaths without anyone actually being harmed.” He then promises to violate this safety by “really” performing such grisly acts of violence onstage. Later, the magician appears on a television show and apparently hypnotizes not only the people in the television studio but also the viewers watching the magician from the safety of their own homes, no doubt a gesture to enduring anxieties about the effects that mediated spectacles of violence can have on audiences. Ultimately, the film ends where it began, with the magician framing the film itself as a trick. “What is real?” he asks his audience. “Are you certain that you know what reality is? How do you know that at this second you aren’t asleep in your beds, dreaming that you are here in this theater?” As Orson Welles did in F for Fake, the magician suggests that everything, including and above all the cinema, is an illusion, a trick within a trick, an endless hall of mirrors. As we have seen, The Prestige and The Illusionist explored similarly dark themes by depicting real rather than illusory destructions of magicians’ bodies, that is, as “real” as they can get in fiction films. In The Prestige, for example, the competition between the two magicians, Robert Angier and Alfred “Professor” Borden, results in Borden’s being accused of murder when he witnesses Angier drown in a water torture cell during a performance of the Transported Man. One of the Borden twins is eventually convicted of the crime and hanged. It is subsequently revealed that the drowning is simply one of many orchestrated by Angier, who during every performance secretly murdered the clones of himself created by the electronic Tesla device. At the end of the film the surviving Borden shoots and kills Angier beneath the stage, where the dead bodies of Angier’s clones have been secreted away from the inquiring eyes of Borden and audiences who still believe the electronic Transported Man is all a trick. Similarly in The Illusionist, the question of whether or not Eisenheim actually has supernatural powers centers on the problem of the magician’s body. In the final encounter between Eisenheim and Inspector Uhl, when it is revealed that the magician who has been conjuring spirits onstage has himself become a specter, Eisenheim’s “ghost” flickers, dissolves, and then vanishes into thin air. Uhl’s horror and uncertainty at not being able to grasp the magician with his hand when he reaches to apprehend him are compounded by the fact that Eisenheim’s physical body is ultimately never

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accounted for. The implication that the magician himself is the virtual double, the insubstantial projection (like a motion picture) of an absent body, frames the spectacle of magic as a transgression of the kind of trickery the modern magician, as a worldly, corporeal human being, is supposed to embody. Recall, for example, that in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Magician, Vergerus performs an autopsy of the dead magician, Vogler, partly in order to trace the magician’s spectacles to an ordinary body. On a metaphorical level the recent examples of these excesses of the magicians’ spectacles of violence—that is, illusions of death and destruction that exceed the boundaries of the stage and become real—capture the idea, most prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that digital tricks are excessive, disobedient, and unsettling because they lack the familiar stuff that makes tricks graspable and, therefore, controllable. At least in the popular imagination this stemmed from the sense that digital trick techniques apparently are not as easily linked to human bodies as “older” manual and mechanical tricks are. Considering this leads to the question of what it is specifically that compelled the popular “wish” for the return to the “flesh and blood” of nineteenth-century stage magic in films like The Illusionist, The Prestige, and, to an extent, Hugo. What does this older category of magic promise in the experience of beholding digital wonders, which, as audiences suggested, feel less safe than the more familiar tricks through which we have come to know the cinema? One possible answer is that magic’s mechanical past harbors the potential to restore the pleasure of searching for answers to “how it’s done.” Embedded in this pleasure, however, is another one that moves somewhat quietly through this book. During argues provocatively that since the secularization of magic in the Enlightenment, trickery has provided a forum for audiences to playfully disavow the material realities of death, violence, and loss that proliferated with the industrialization and scientific disenchantment of the world.12 Secular magic tricks allowed audiences to experience new and uncertain realities virtually, safely, and at a distance, essentially becoming spectators of the rapidly changing modern world much as cinemagoers have experienced the world on display for the last century. The pleasure of this experience is ultimately in knowing that the magician’s spectacles are not real; that because they are tricks we are never really in danger of losing complete control over our perceptions or over our abilities to explain the world around us, however much the world or the magician

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may challenge us to do so. It is in expecting this promise that, particularly throughout film history, we have looked to magicians to mediate between us and the representational technologies we use to expand our knowledge of the world and of ourselves in relation to it. This is reflected in one salient and recurring theme in the majority of Méliès’s trick films. As much as he consistently lost control over the powerful world of early cinematic trickery, the cinemagician also managed to restore order to his wonderful, sometimes chaotic, universe. Perhaps the recent cinematic interest in fin-de-siècle stage magic is embedded in a popular desire to cope with an increasingly virtualized world by inhabiting a more familiar mechanical past that always seemed to be on the verge of danger but never lapsed into it. Or perhaps magicians in the cinema have allowed audiences to root the wonders of CGI in this past as a way of reanimating the pleasures and delights that were apparently troubled by digital tricks. In any case, modern magic continues to bear the promise of new knowledge about a medium that has yet to wane in its ability to incite wonder at the same time that it ceaselessly eludes our efforts at knowing it.

NOTES

Introduction: Watching Closely 1. Orson Welles, foreword to Bruce Elliott, Magic as a Hobby: New Tricks for Amateur Performers (New York: Gramercy, 1958), viii, vii. 2. Tom Gunning uses this idea in his seminal theory of the “aesthetic of astonishment,” which concerns how early films, like tricks, were received with an “I know, but yet I see” response. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 117. I have added the term inexplicable to emphasize how this response involves an impulse to explain how tricks work. 3. Welles, foreword, vii. 4. A distinction is often made between pro-filmic effects—those created on the set or in the camera during production—and those that are created in postproduction and added to the primary footage. Dan North points out that these have been classified by scholars and professionals as “special effects” and “visual effects” respectively. A second distinction is often made between “visible” and “invisible” effects, with the former designating effects that are on display and intended to be noticed and contemplated as such and the latter designating those that are not. For more on these distinctions, see Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 5; Warren Buckland, “Between Science Fact and Science Fiction: Spielberg’s Digital Dinosaurs, Possible Worlds, and the New Aesthetic Realism,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 28; Alison Griffiths, “Wonder, Magic and the Fantastical Margins: Medieval Visual Culture and Cinematic Special Effects,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 2 (August 2010): 165–166; and Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 102–107. North navigates the problematic application of these terms to actual films by using “special effects” to refer to any manipulation created at any stage of the making of a film, but he maintains the distinction between visible and invisible effects and organizes his discussion of CGI around the former. Stephen Prince has recently eschewed “special effects” altogether in his book on CGI, claiming that the digital ushered in the era of “visual effects” and relegated “special effects” to pre-1980s filmmaking. See Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 3–4. 5. Caroline Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 72. 6. Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 61.

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7. See Matthew Solomon, “Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s,” in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61–84. 8. See Angela Ndalianis, “Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of QuickChange, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 251–271; Pierson, Special Effects; North, Performing Illusions; Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); and Griffiths, “Wonder, Magic, and the Fantastical Margins.” Pierson’s account of the relationship between magic and computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the context of science fiction is very carefully done and provides a model for the kind of work that I do with the representation of the magic performance in the cinema up to the present. I am not taking a critical approach to her work or that of Ndalianis but rather specifying one avenue of research that I think their collective “project” supports in significant ways. 9. Ndalianis, “Special Effects,” 256. 10. See specifically Pierson, Special Effects, 17–51. 11. North, Performing Illusions, 25. 12. “Magicians on Screen,” http://www.movingimage.us/films/2011/12/10/detail/ magicians-on-screen/. 13. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains,” in Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 1. 14. Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 107. 15. Peter Lamont, “Magic and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief,” in Magic Show, ed. Jonathan Allen and Sally O’Reilly (London: Hayward Publishing, 2009), 30. 16. See Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema, and Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 17. See Tom Gunning, “Tricks, Effects, Attractions,” keynote address at the international conference “The Magic of Special Effects: Cinema, Technology, Reception” held at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal, 10 November 2013. 18. See in particular Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), and Murray Leeder’s forthcoming book, Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 19. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, introduction to Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 3. 20. See Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (1994), trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Tom Gunning,

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“Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in The Cinema: A New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau (Lausanne: Payot, 2004), 31–44. 21. See Charles Musser, “Toward a History of Screen Practice,” in The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, vol. 1 of History of the American Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 15–54; André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” trans. Paul Attallah, Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (1987): 110–119; André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium Is Always Born Twice . . . ,” Early Popular Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (May 2005): 3–15; and Solomon, Disappearing Tricks. 22. For example, Mannoni introduces The Great Art with the following fantasy: “If we could film the changes in costumes, the increasing size of the room, the appearance of a large projector behind the audience,” he proposes, “we would see in a few minutes—like a time-lapse film of a flower blooming—the progress of a long wait which lasted over half a millennium” (3). Elsewhere in his book he calls the Lumière Cinématographe the “realization” of “one of the oldest dreams of humanity” and claims that, with its invention, “it was as though an eye, whose lids had been lifting, slowly, across the centuries, now opened completely on the world” (416). 23. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 146. See also Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 14, nos. 2–3 (2004): 92–93. 24. Tom Gunning, introduction to Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, xxi. 25. On “thick description,” see Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree have counterposed this approach to the tendency of new media studies to focus on “newness”—particularly the novelty of digital media—as a phenomenon of the present, a focus that has the potential to promote ahistorical thinking. See Geoffrey B. Pingree and Lisa Gitelman, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). In many ways scholarship on proto- and early-cinematic technologies in the “new film history” tradition has always contextualized the newness of the cinema by exploring how motion pictures have long and multifaceted histories. Media archaeologists have expanded this to tracing the genealogies of digital technologies in the longue durée.

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1. Henry Ridgely Evans, introduction to Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, by Albert A. Hopkins (New York: Munn and Co., Scientific American Office, 1901), 6. 2. For more on the emergence of the cinema in this period, see André Gaudreault, ed., American Cinema, 1890–1909 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009).

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Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Chicago: Intellect, 2007), 103. 4. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, ed. and trans. Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1859), 234–236. 5. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 120. 6. Charles Musser, “Toward a History of Screen Practice,” in The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, vol. 1 of History of the American Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 18. 7. During, Modern Enchantments, 15. 8. David Hume, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 75–78. 9. Ibid., 74. Hobbes echoes this in his description of the nature and effects of miracles when he claims, “For such is the ignorance, and aptitude to error generally of all men, but especially of them that have not much knowledge of naturall causes, and of the nature, and interests of men; as by innumerable and easie tricks to be abused.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 323. 10. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains,” in Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 51. 11. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 261. 12. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 23. 13. Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant, Our Magic: The Art in Magic, the Theory of Magic, the Practice of Magic (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1911), 175. 14. For a discussion of the demonstration lecture and popular science, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 37–71. 15. “Conjurers and Spiritualists, Part 2,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art 4 (21 October 1876): 686. 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008), 189–194. 17. Anonymous clipping, 1843–1844, Box 2, Folder “Anderson, Prof. John Henry, clippings,” Magicians Collection, 1750–1920, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 18. Anonymous clipping, 1846, quoted in Mike Caveney, “From Black Magic to Modern Magic,” in Magic, 1400s–1950s, ed. Noel Daniel (Cologne: Taschen, 2009), 180. 19. The Royal Polytechnic Institution for the Advancement of the Arts and Practical Science (London: Royal Polytechnic Institution, 1845), 5. 20. During, Modern Enchantments, 147. 21. Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), 77.

Notes to Pages 33–37 22.

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“Egyptian Hall,” Times (London), 19 October 1865, 10. Charles Romley Alder Wright, The Threshold of Science: A Variety of Simple and Amusing Experiments (London, 1891), 303. 24. André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema, Part Two,” in What Is Cinema? 2 vols., ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 1:97. 25. Henry Dircks, The Ghost! as Produced in the Spectre Drama, Popularly Illustrating the Marvellous Optical Illusions Obtained by the Apparatus Called the Dircksian Phantasmagoria (London: Spon, 1863), 40. 26. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 181. Matthew Solomon has made a brief but relevant mention along these lines of the relationship between Harry Houdini’s serial film, The Master Mystery (1918–1919), early twentieth-century vernacular science visual culture, and crime and detective fiction. In the serial, Houdini plays a detective for the Department of Justice whose encounters with and use of modern technology are often oriented within a modern magical framework. See specifically Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 115. 27. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 21. 28. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–133. 29. Anonymous clipping, 1804, Flat File “Philipsthal,” Magicians Collection, 1750–1920, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 30. Advertisement for a performance at the Lyceum, 1803, Flat File “Philipsthal,” Magicians Collection, 1750–1920, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 31. “On the Spaniard Called the Incombustible,” Port Folio 1, no. 7 (22 February 1806): 107. 32. On the Philidor-Philipsthal relationship, see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 173–175. For Philidor’s introductory comment see “La Phantasmagorie,” La Feuille Villageoise 22 (28 February 1793): 506, quoted in ibid., 144. 33. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physician-aéronaute E. G. Robertson (Paris, 1831), 278–279, quoted in Musser, “Toward a History of Screen Practice,” 24. 34. For a discussion of Robertson’s patent debacle, see Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 165–171. 35. Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions of Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in The Cinema: A New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau (Lausanne: Payot, 2004), 41. 36. Todorov claims, “‘I nearly reached the point of believing’: that is the formula which sums up the spirit of the fantastic. Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us 23.

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beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life” [emphasis in original]. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 31. In his book on the phantasmagoria, Milner applies the concept of what he calls the “optical fantastic” to how illusions are capable “of playing at once on belief and non-belief, of establishing, at the level of perception, an uncertainty made of simultaneous acceptance and denial.” See Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie: Essai sur l’optique fantastique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982), 19, quoted in Clément Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, ed. Clément Chéroux et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 53. 37. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 75. 38. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11. 39. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 56–57. 40. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 8. John Onians also discusses Bacon on wonder in “‘I wonder . . . ’: A Short History of Amazement,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85 (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 18. 41. See Carolyn Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 37–76. 42. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “astonishment.” Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 58. 43. Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 119. 44. Fisher, Wonder, 47. 45. Onians, “‘I wonder . . . ,’” 12. See also Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turnof-the-Century,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 45. 46. Harris, Humbug, 85–89. 47. I should note that my application of the operational aesthetic to different historical periods is not necessarily in conflict with Harris’s original use of the concept. Although he develops the idea in light of a connection with P. T. Barnum’s historical context— specifically, Jacksonian America—he allows for its viability beyond the scope of that period by acknowledging its persistence into the late nineteenth century. Without disregarding this historical connection or treating the operational aesthetic as a kind of floating category or ahistorical concept, I am using the broad applicability of Harris’s case to understand articulations of the operational aesthetic in different historical contexts. 48. Harris, Humbug, 57. 49. James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.

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50. Lauren Rabinovitz, “From Hale’s Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films, and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 42–60. 51. Maxim Gorky, “Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” in In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 5. In another notable review from 1896, O. Winter similarly argues that the machine provides “the terrifying effect of life, but of life with a difference.” See O. Winter, “Life Is a Game . . . ,” in Harding and Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows, 13. 52. Matthew Solomon has noted that Méliès linked the end of the trick film era in part to the overexposure and explanation of magic tricks and trick films in this fashion. While feuding publicly with the French periodical L’Illustration, which had taken up a project similar to La Nature and Scientific American with respect to the trick film, Méliès took to task magicians who were participating in the demystification of magic: “You destroy the fruits of your own labor since you have destroyed the illusion that was your whole goal in composing the trick” [emphasis in original]. Although it is obvious that the explanation of cinematic tricks affects the novelty value and thus the attracting power of such technological innovations, Méliès’s comment demonstrates that we cannot adequately study magic and the cinema without accounting for how modern magic is complemented by an investigative enterprise. See Georges Méliès, “Les coulisses de cinématographie: Doit-on le dire?” Phono-Cinéma-Revue, April 1908, 2–3, quoted in Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 57. 53. My use of the phrase “device of wonder” throughout this book is a direct reference to the media-archaeological treatment of optical devices as wondrous media in Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, eds., Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001). 54. Étienne Souriau, “Filmologie et esthétique comparée,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 10 (1952): 139, quoted in Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 4–5. 55. See Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), xiv–xv. 56. Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies,” 47.

2 1.

Quicker than the Eye: Science, Cinema, and the Question of Vision

I am borrowing “interval” directly from two brilliant conference presentations on animation: Paul Ward, “Dark Intervals, Mechanics, and Magic: Animated Movement as the Illusion of Life,” lecture given at the University of Utrecht’s Center for Humanities and the Holland Animated Film Festival, 23 September 2011; and Donald Crafton, “Black Magic: Another Look at the ‘Space between the Frames’ of Cinema,” keynote address at the international conference “The Magic of Special Effects: Cinema, Technology, Reception” held at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, 9 November 2013.

202 2.

Notes to Pages 47–51

Christian Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 670. See, for example, Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision,” Journal of the University Film Association 30, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 3–8; and Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3–12. 4. Philip Butterworth has argued along these lines: “Jugglers’ hands cannot move fast enough to deceive the eye. In order to be successful, sleight of hand must be slow, deliberate and undetectable, unless the intention is to create a ploy to mislead the spectator by attracting his attention. This may amount to misdirection of the eye although such misdirection is not the only sensory apparatus by which the juggler works.” See Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5. 5. Tom Gunning, “Flickers: On Cinema’s Power for Evil,” in Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 32. For more on this, see Vivian Sobchack’s edited collection Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 6. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 122, 123. 7. Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 38–39. 8. Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable” (1935), in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 2, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 190. 9. Alfred Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” Revue des Deux Mondes 54, no. 125 (October 1894): 904. For the English translation, see Alfred Binet, “Psychology of Prestidigitation,” Smithsonian Report for 1894 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1896): 555–571. All quotations are my translations. The page numbers refer to the French version. To the best of my knowledge the remaining original photographs are currently housed at INSEP (Institut national du sport, de l’expertise et de la performance) in Paris, France. I have consulted secondary reproductions in Jacques Deslandes, Le boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963), 16; and Laurent Mannoni, Méliès: Magie et cinéma (Paris: Paris Musées, 2002), 62. 10. Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” 922. 11. Gilbreth used the method of attaching a light bulb to a worker’s limb or instrument and photographing habitual movements during the labor process. The long-exposure technique involved in this process recorded the path of an action as a continuous line of light, which could be analyzed to evaluate and improve the worker’s efficiency. See Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 100–112. My reference to the “expert eye” is from Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 85–99. See also 3.

Notes to Pages 52–54

203

Scott Curtis, “Dissecting the Medical Training Film,” in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, ed. Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2012), 161–167. On related uses of film by the French surgeon Eugène Louis Doyen, see Thierry Lefebvre, La chair et le celluloïd: Le cinéma chirurgical du docteur Doyen (Brionne: Jean Doyen, 2004). 12. See Sofie Lachapelle, “From the Stage to the Laboratory: Magicians, Psychologists, and the Science of Illusion,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 319–334. 13. Binet’s experiment is dealt with briefly, for example, in Laurent Mannoni, ÉtienneJules Marey: La mémoire de l’oeil (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1999), 307–309; Laurent Mannoni, Méliès: Magie et cinéma (Paris: Paris Musées, 2002), 54–58; Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 20–24; Deslandes, Le boulevard, 15–17; and Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 174–175. The most comprehensive account I have come across is Lachapelle, “From the Stage to the Laboratory.” See also Sofie Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853–1931 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 14. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 320–350. 15. One study not discussed in this chapter is Max Dessoir’s “The Psychology of Legerdemain,” published in five weekly installments in Open Court, 23 March–20 April 1893. 16. Joseph Jastrow, “Psychological Notes upon Sleight-of-Hand Experts,” Science 3, no. 71 (8 May 1896): 685–689. 17. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 269. 18. Quoted in Ricky Jay, “Isaac Fawkes: Surprizing Dexterity of Hand,” Jay’s Journal of Anomalies 2, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 57–58. 19. Joseph Jastrow, “The Psychology of Deception,” Popular Science Monthly 34, no. 10 (December 1888): 145. 20. See, for example, Joseph Jastrow, “The Mind’s Eye,” Popular Science Monthly 54 (1899): 299–312. 21. Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” 907. Original French: “L’illusion n’existe, peut-on dire, que pour le sens de la vue; la raison la contredit.” 22. Jastrow, “The Psychology of Deception,” 151. The resonance of this early psychological investigation of the nature and malleability of attention with Münsterberg’s research cannot be overlooked. Binet’s case is a curious one, and I have highlighted its place in the broader context of psychology in the early 1900s because of its implications for studying the representation of the magician in the cinema. Münsterberg’s seminal work on attention and suggestion in early cinematic spectatorship is an important extension of this discourse on the manipulation of the senses and the mind by optical tricks and optical devices. In particular, his discussion of attention involving the falling into shadow or obscurity of the visual field outside the attentive gaze—a phenomenon

204

Notes to Pages 54–58

that, for Münsterberg, is articulated or objectified by the cinematic close-up—speaks directly to Binet’s fascination with the magician’s ability to move undetected in plain view of the human eye. Binet’s fascination along these lines manifested in his use of the chronophotograph to produce close-up views of sleights of hand. This investigative technique essentially performed the operations of attention that Münsterberg would later theorize in relation to the cinema. Moreover, the nature of the relationship between magic and suggestion is reflected nicely by Münsterberg’s claim that “the spellbound audience in a theater or in a picture house is certainly in a state of heightened suggestibility and is ready to receive suggestions” (97). See Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002). The role of memory in this scenario is something that I will only touch upon, but Münsterberg’s dealings with it, particularly in the areas of witnessing, evidence, and false memories, are relevant as well. For an incisive discussion of this subject, although not in terms of the magic performance, see Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 9–32. 23. Georges Méliès, “En marge de l’histoire du cinématographe,” part 6, Ciné-Journal, 10 September 1926, 9, quoted in Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 36. 24. Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” 921. Original French: “fixe sans discernement tous les détails de la réalité.” 25. Ibid., 917. 26. Jastrow, “Psychological Notes upon Sleight-of-Hand Experts,” 688. 27. Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” 921. Original French: “Pour tout voir, il ne suffit pas d’ouvrir les yeux.” 28. Ibid., 922. 29. Ibid. Original French: “dans aucune des images les mains n’ont la position réelle qu’elles devraient avoir pour saisir un object.” 30. See Comolli, “Machines of the Visible”; Tom Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in Phillip Prodger, Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 222–272; and Tom Gunning, “Invisible Worlds, Visible Media,” in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–63. 31. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 510–512. 32. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 84. Hannah Landecker calls this virtual vision a form of “automatic seeing” with cinematic technologies. She explains with regard to Alexis Carrel’s use of time-lapse microcinematography in the early twentieth century, “The scientist knows there is something happening in the [phenomenon being studied] but can’t see it with the naked eye; turning sight over to the ‘mechanical retina’ reveals what is there.” See Hannah Landecker, “Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 926. 33. Binet, “La psychologie de la prestidigitation,” 921.

Notes to Pages 58–62 34.

205

For more on issues of scientific objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 35. The renewed interest in the scientific study of magic has promoted the sense that magic has returned after a century-long period of dormancy, which my emphasis on the relationship between the “old” and the “new” models to a certain extent. However, I do not wish to give the impression that this particular history of magic, science, and technology is limited to cases at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century. Alison Winter has noted, for example, that the magic performance emerged in a similar (albeit more oblique) manner during the 1950s and 1960s through the figure of the social psychologist Martin Orne, whose background as a magician shaped his later experiments with memory, attention, and suggestion in the light of Cold War research into hypnosis in interrogation and courtroom settings. See Winter, Memory, 148–155. 36. For a brief discussion of the animation of these chronophotographs, see Richard Wiseman, “The First Film of a Magician,” Genii 69, no. 4 (April 2006): 34–37. 37. Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land, “There’s More to Magic than Meets the Eye,” Current Biology 16, no. 22 (November 2006): R950–R951. 38. Michael Land, “Predictable Eye-Head Coordination during Driving,” Nature 359 (24 September 1992): 318–320. See also Michael Land, “Eye-Head Coordination during Driving,” Proceedings of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Conference, Le Touquet, 17–20 October 1993, 490–494. 39. Kuhn and Land, “There’s More to Magic,” R951. 40. See Stephen Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson, and Susana Martinez-Conde, “Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, no. 11 (November 2008): 871–879; Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, “Magic and the Brain,” Scientific American 299, no. 6 (December 2008): 72–79; Gustav Kuhn and Benjamin Tatler, “Magic and Fixation: Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” Perception 34, no. 9 (2005): 1155–1161; and Gustav Kuhn, Alym Amlani, and Ronald Rensink, “Towards a Science of Magic,” Trends in Cognitive Science 12 (2008): 349–354. 41. For information about DIEM, see http://thediemproject.wordpress.com/. 42. These studies are admittedly ocular-centric. The similar role of sound remains to be explored. 43. See Bordwell’s series of blog postings at http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/2008/02/13/hands-and-faces-across-the-table/; http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/2011/02/06/the-eyes-mind/; http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/02/14/ watching-you-watch-there-will-be-blood/. 44. For more on this, see Arthur P. Shimamura, ed., Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 45. For more on classical continuity editing, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012). 46. For more on change blindness, see Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, “Change Blindness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1, no. 7 (October 1997): 261–267; Tim Smith and John Henderson, “Edit Blindness: The Relationship between Attention and Global

20 6

Notes to Pages 63–67

Change Blindness in Dynamic Scenes,” Journal of Eye Movement Research 2, no. 2 (2008): 1–17; Tim Smith, “The Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity,” Projections 6, no. 1 (2012): 1–27; and Tim Smith, “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Cognitive Film Theory,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–191. 47. Smith and Henderson, “Edit Blindness,” 1–17. 48. Tim Smith, “An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 2006), 87–88. Whereas the substitution splice in Méliès’s films is often approached in terms of its visibility—its overt presentation as a cinematic trick— film scholars have also emphasized its use to achieve spatial and temporal continuity. Matthew Solomon, for example, explains, “Parts of A Trip to the Moon that seem to transpire entirely in long takes are actually made up of several discrete shots of performances by different actors or groups of actors. The most complete version of the film that is currently available shows evidence of more than fifty cuts—many of which often go unnoticed.” See Matthew Solomon, introduction to Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s “Trip to the Moon,” ed. Matthew Solomon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 7. As Tom Gunning pointed out much earlier, moreover, “While later classical editing can be referred to as ‘invisible editing’ only metaphorically, such ‘substitution splices’ are nearly literally invisible, having passed for the last eight decades for the most part without notice.” We should, as Gunning reminds us, be mindful not to equate Méliès’s use of splicing with later continuity editing techniques—the former being concerned with the continuity of “viewpoint” and “framing” rather than “a dramatic and spatial articulation of the action.” See Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-up? or The Trick’s on Us,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 98–99. 49. Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (New York: Holt, 2010); and Ben A. Parris, Gustav Kuhn, Guy Mizon, Abdelmalek Benattayallah, and Tim Hodgson, “Imaging the Impossible: An fMRI Study of Impossible Causal Relationships in Magic Tricks,” NeuroImage 45 (2009): 1033–1039. See the articles published as a response to the Magic of Consciousness Symposium held in 2007: Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 871–879; and Stephen Macknik and Susana MartinezConde, “Real Magic: Future Studies of Magic Should Be Grounded in Neuroscience,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (March 2009): 241. For a comprehensive overview of the research being done in this field, see Peter Lamont, John Henderson, and Tim Smith, “Where Science and Magic Meet: The Illusion of a ‘Science of Magic,’” Review of General Psychology 14, no. 1 (2010): 16–21. 50. Parris et al., “Imaging the Impossible,” 1038. 51. Deslandes, Le boulevard, 17. For Wiseman’s comment, see Wiseman, “The First Film of a Magician,” 36. 52. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 65. 53. Étienne-Jules Marey, Physiologie médicale de la circulation du sang (Paris: Delahaye, 1863), 9. The quote as it appears here is my translation of the original French text. See

Notes to Pages 67–78

207

also Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (1994; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 322. 54. For a brief discussion of the sphygmograph, see, for example, Braun, Picturing Time, 16–18. 55. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Conjuring: How the Virtuoso Romantic Learned from the Enlightened Charlatan,” Art Journal 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 28.

3

Second Sight: Time Lapse and the Cinema as Seer

1. Germaine Dulac, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea” (1925), in The AvantGarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 39. 2. Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 2, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 190. 3. My use of ecstasy here is also aligned with the derivation of ekstasis from the Greek verb existēmi, which I am taking in its most literal translation as “to put out of its place” and “to stand aside from” but also “to project.” The literal projection of vision—a kind of “throwing forth” from the body—and the corresponding senses of wonder and uncertainty are the values I am placing on the term ecstatic observation. I diverge somewhat, therefore, from Sergei Eisenstein’s more familiar use of ecstasy, particularly in his writings on Disney, pathos, and affect. While describing the activation or movement of the spectator by the composition of a film, for example, Eisenstein makes reference to ecstasy as ex-stasis, “literally, ‘standing out of oneself,’ which is to say, ‘going out of himself,’ or ‘departing from his ordinary condition.’” See Sergei Eisenstein, “The Structure of the Film,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 166. Whereas Eisenstein uses ecstasy to describe a sort of “pre-logical,” “sensuous,” and even animistic experience of moving images, I am working from a more rational interpretation of a similar phenomenon. See also Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986). 4. See Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 221–235. 5. See Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 27–47. 6. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 52–53. 7. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 173. 8. Gaycken speculates on this point that any animation of the images would probably have been intended “to test the [time-lapse] equipment.” See Oliver Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants: Visualizing Vegetative Movement, 1880–1903,” Early Popular

208

Notes to Pages 78–83

Visual Culture 10, no. 1 (31 January 2012): 60. We could also extend this genealogy to the speculations about the future of time-lapse photography (particularly in the area of plant metamorphosis) made by the French physicist and inventor Louis Ducos du Hauron in 1864. See Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Denoël, 1946), 36–37. 9. For more on Scott’s use of the Kammatograph, which she called a Kinematograph, see Henderina Scott, “On the Movements of the Flowers of Sparmannia Africana, and Their Demonstration by Means of the Kinematograph,” Annals of Botany 17, no. 68 (September 1903): 761–780. 10. Frederick Talbot, Practical Cinematography and Its Applications (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 129. 11. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 53. 12. Abel Gance quoted in Norman King, Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: BFI, 1984), 66. 13. Edfrid Bingham, “Moving Pictures of Microbes,” Technical World Magazine 13 (March 1910): 74. 14. Patricia Thomson, “Conjuring the Past,” American Cinematographer 87, no. 9 (September 2006): 56. For another discussion of CGI in this sequence, see Matthew Solomon, “Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s,” in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 76–81. 15. The Mango Tree trick did not originate in the seventeenth century but rather has its roots in ancient Hindu mythology. Its seventeenth-century form is the one that is commonly referenced for the trick that I am describing here. For a discussion of this longer history, see Lee Siegel, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 165–166. The Navajo of North America are reported to have had a similar version of this trick in which performers would mysteriously grow a yucca plant in the context of a ritual dance. In this case, the concealment of the sleightof-hand changes in which artificial flowers and fruit were slowly added to a stalk was facilitated by a group of dancers who would orbit the plant and periodically converge on it, causing momentary periods of obscurity. See, for example, Washington Matthews, The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997). 16. Siegel, Net of Magic, 166–167. 17. See Harry Houdini, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (New York: Publishers Printing Company, 1908), 52. 18. For more on pseudo-automata, see Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1998), 160–264. 19. Henry Ridgely Evans, “Robert-Houdin—Conjurer, Author and Ambassador,” Cosmopolitan 28 (November 1899–April 1900): 649. 20. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 93.

Notes to Pages 83–93 21.

209

For Jentsch’s discussion of the uncanny, see Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 7–16. 22. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions (New York: Munn and Co., Scientific American Office, 1901), 109. 23. Jean Epstein, “Timeless Time,” in “Magnification and Other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (Spring 1977): 19. 24. Ibid. 25. On the artist-animator as a “life giver,” see Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 12. 26. Talbot, Practical Cinematography, 126. 27. In Moving Pictures, for example, Talbot claims of the manipulation of objects between takes in a stop-motion animation sequence, “It is essential that the progress [from one pose to another] should be very gradual, or else the material would look as if it took shape by spasmodic jumps, and the illusion would be destroyed.” See Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1912), 236. 28. I have viewed a partial print of this film online, but the majority of my description comes from the catalog entry in the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). See the NFSA website at http://www.nfsa.gov.au/. 29. On Pathé’s Floral Composition series, see Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914, vol. 2 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), 157. For more on color in early cinema, see Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 30. Dulac, “The Essence of the Cinema,” 39. 31. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 56–62. 32. Charles B. Brewer, “The Widening Field of the Moving-Picture: Its Commercial, Educational, and Artistic Value,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 86 (May–October 1913): 78. 33. “The Spectator,” Outlook 96, no. 14 (3 December 1910): 767. 34. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 173. 35. “Flowers Alive,” Independent 84, no. 3497 (13 December 1916): 438. 36. Clifford B. Hicks, “His Cameras Spy on Life’s Secrets,” Popular Mechanics 107, no. 6 ( June 1957): 65–66. 37. John Ott, My Ivory Cellar: The Story of Time-Lapse Photography (Chicago: Twentieth Century Press, 1958). 38. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 39. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 127–128. 40. James Poniewozik, “Discovery’s Life, Up Close and Personal,” Time, 19 March 2010, http://entertainment.time.com/2010/03/19/tv-weekend-discoverys-life-up-closeand-personal/.

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Notes to Pages 94–110

41.

Fergus Collins, “A Year in a Minute: How to Film a Year in the Life of a Wood,” BBC Wildlife 27, no. 12 (2009): 61. 42. Donald Crafton, “Animation Iconography: The ‘Hand of the Artist,’” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 415. 43. Vivian Sobchack, “Animation and Automation; or, The Incredible Effortfulness of Being,” Screen 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 375–391. 44. For more on this fantasy of control, see Mihaela Mihailova, “The Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 8, no. 2 (2013): 131–148.

4 The Enchanted Screen: Performing the Cinema’s Illusion of Life 1.

Alan Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton,” in The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 496. 2. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 55. 3. For more on animistic and mechanistic approaches to theorizing animation, see Cholodenko, “Speculations,” 486–527; Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Donald Crafton, “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 6, no. 2 ( July 2011): 93–110; Donald Crafton, “Animation Iconography: The ‘Hand of the Artist,’” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 409–428; and Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4. See Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c. 1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 45–104. 5. Ibid., 91, 93. For more on the cinema’s reality effect, see Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 6. Tom Gunning, “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion,” in Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52–69. 7. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 19. 8. On Loïe Fuller, see Tom Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcom Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 75–90. 9. I am very much indebted to Peter Bloom for introducing me to the object of this chapter—the blow book—and to Tom Gunning, who has broached the relevance of this device in film studies and generously made room for me to engage it in my own work. See, for example, Tom Gunning, “Flickers: On Cinema’s Power for Evil,” in

Notes to Pages 110–116

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Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 31–32. I am also very grateful for Suzanne Buchan’s invaluable insights and encouragement regarding my exploration of this topic. 10. The most comprehensive histories of the blow book that I have come across are Ricky Jay, The Magic Magic Book: An Inquiry into the Venerable History and Operation of the Oldest Trick Conjuring Volumes, Designated “Blow Books” (New York: Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994); and Volker Huber et al., Fresh Breath on the Blow Book: A Companion Volume to Horst Antes’ Flickbuch (Humble, TX: H&R Magic Books, 2003). 11. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 61–62. 12. For more on this in the field of animation studies, see Crafton, Before Mickey, 57; and Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (New York: Routledge, 1998), 10. 13. Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 14. Wiljalba Frikell, Magic No Mystery: Conjuring Tricks with Cards, Balls, and Dice; Magnetic Writing; Performing Animals (London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1876), 49. 15. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Stage Conjuring, trans. and ed. Prof. Hoffman (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1900), 229. 16. There is a hybrid form that applies the blow book’s substitution technique to the technology of the flipbook so that multiple sequences of movement can be shown using one device. See, for example, Daumenkino: The Flip Book Show (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2005), 13. 17. See, for example, Jacques Malthête, “Méliès, technicien du collage,” in Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique, ed. Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 169–184; Jacques Malthête, Méliès, images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996), 64–65; Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 36; André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, and ‘Trickality’: Re-evaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 110–119; André Gaudreault, “Méliès the Magician: The Magical Magic of the Magic Image,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 2 ( July 2007): 167–174; and Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 3–12. 18. See Gunning, “Flickers,” 31–32, and Gunning, “The Transforming Image,” 52–69. 19. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 208. 20. Albert E. Smith with Phil A. Koury, Two Reels and a Crank (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 38. 21. Ibid., 39, quoted in Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 120. 22. See Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 114–133.

2 12 23.

Notes to Pages 117–122

Maxim Gorky, “Last Night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” in In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 5. 24. An account of Gorky’s encounter with a blow book is given as a recollection by Nicholas Roerich of a version of a story that Gorky had shared with him. See Nicholas Roerich, Himavat, Diary Leaves (Kitabistan, Allahabad, 1946), 227–228. 25. J. Miller Barr, “Animated Pictures,” Popular Science Monthly (December 1897): 177. 26. See, Alan Cholodenko, “(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part 1: The Kingdom of Shadows,” in Animated Dialogues (2007): 17, also on Journal of the Society for Animation Studies website, http://journal.animationstudies.org/ category/animated-dialogues/alan-cholodenko-the-death-of-the-animator-or-thefelicity-of-felix-part1/; see also, Alan Cholodenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema,” Cultural Studies Review 10, no. 2 (September 2004). 27. Gorky, “Last Night,” 5. 28. O. Winter, “Life is a Game . . . ,” in In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 13. 29. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 118. 30. Jean Epstein, “The Universe Head over Heels,” in “Magnification and Other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (Spring 1977): 23. 31. Nead, The Haunted Gallery, 52. 32. Ibid., 82. 33. Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera,” in The Essential Cinema: Essays on Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, vol. 1, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975), 108–109. 34. Cholodenko, “(The) Death (of) the Animator,” 15 and 18. 35. Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1912), 215. 36. A few notable examples include The Animated Poster (Edison and Porter, 1903), The Artist’s Dilemma (Edison and Porter, 1901), An Artist’s Dream (Edison and Porter, 1900), The Artist’s Dream (Bray, 1913), Artistic Creation (Paul, 1901), A Mysterious Portrait (Méliès, 1899–1900), and The Sorcerer’s Scissors (Booth, 1907). 37. Nead, The Haunted Gallery, 87. 38. Crafton, “The Veiled Genealogies,” 102. 39. See Scott Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines: Animation and Autonomy,” in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, ed. Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 128–148; and Vivian Sobchack, “Animation and Automation; or, The Incredible Effortfulness of Being,” Screen 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 375–391. 40. “Moving-Picture Tricks,” Photo-Era: The American Journal of Photography 23, no. 3 (September 1909): 153. 41. Gaudreault, “Méliès the Magician,” 167.

Notes to Pages 123–128 42.

213

“Moving Picture Tricks: How the Biograph Is Made to Show Seemingly Impossible Things,” Washington Post (March 1, 1903): 30. 43. I am borrowing this comparison directly from Scott Bukatman’s essay “Disobedient Machines” in which he uses the coming to life of the Disney animated character Pinocchio as a way of understanding issues of automation and autonomy in animation’s relationship with the cinema. 44. Angela Ndalianis, “Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 256. 45. Ibid., 252. 46. Ibid., 254. 47. See Ndalianis’s follow-up discussion of Terminator 2: 3D in her book Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 199–207. 48. L. Frank Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio-Plays were early theatrical-cinematic performances of Baum’s famous Wizard of Oz books and actually involved sequences in which the pages of a large book on-screen were turned while the illustrations of characters sprang to life in the form of real actors. Artemis Willis has recently done some exciting work on this in an essay titled “‘Marvelous and Fascinating’: L. Frank Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio-Plays,” in Performing New Media, 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe (New Barnet, Herts, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2014), 141–149. 49. See, for example, Crafton, Before Mickey, 110–112. 50. Sean Cubitt, “Observations on the History and Uses of Animation Occasioned by the Exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions Selected from Works in the Werner Nekes Collection,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 3, no. 49 (March 2008): 54. 51. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 28. See also Lev Manovich’s detailed discussion of digital imaging and the nature of “variability” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 36–45. 52. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 21. Matthew Solomon makes this connection briefly in “Quick-Change: ‘Twenty-Five Heads under One Hat’ in the 1890s,” in MetaMorphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 16–17. 53. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 54. 54. Cholodenko, “Speculations,” 496. To describe this Cholodenko uses the term “vital machine,” which he borrows from David F. Channell’s book The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 55. Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines,” 145. 56. Sobchack develops this idea in her essay “‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’: Meta-Morphing and Meta-Stasis,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also her recent article “Animation and Automation.” 57. Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines,” 147.

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5

Notes to Pages 130–139

Digital Prestidigitation: The Eclipse of the Cinema’s Mechanical Magic

1. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Display and the Rhetoric of Corruption,” in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 51. 2. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 3. Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 4. 4. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 105. 5. Vivian Sobchack, introduction to Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. V. Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xvi. 6. Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: New Press, 2004), 89. I am grateful to Dan North for foregrounding this quote from Klein in his book Performing Illusions, 1. 7. Patricia Thomson, “Conjuring the Past,” American Cinematographer 87, no. 9 (September 2006): 56. 8. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Film: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000), 66. 9. Richard Kaufman and Yari F. G., “Behind the Scenes of The Illusionist,” Genii 69, no. 10 (October 2006): 65–69. 10. Neil Burger, “DVD Commentary,” The Illusionist, dir. Neil Burger, 1 hr. 49 min., Yari Film Group, 2006, DVD. 11. Kaufman and Yari F. G., “Behind the Scenes,” 66–68. 12. “Norton Conjures Up Movie Magic,” Sunday Sun, 4 March 2007, 77. 13. Erik Barnouw describes the disappearance of magicians after the era of the trick film in this vein when he claims, “Cinema had become a powerful robot ousting its former master.” See Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema, 9. 14. Jonathan Romney, “Where Did All the Magic Go?” Independent on Sunday, (12 November 2006), 11. 15. Thomson, “Conjuring the Past,” 56. 16. Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 65. 17. Matthew Solomon, “Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s,” in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61. 18. See Solomon, Disappearing Tricks. Barnouw lists four similar films made by R. W. Paul of the British magician David Devant performing magic tricks in 1896: The Mysterious Rabbit, The Egg-Laying Man, Devant’s Hand Shadows, and Devant’s Exhibition of Paper Folding. See Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema, 56. 19. André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 50–51.

Notes to Pages 139–143 20.

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Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 80–81. For Gunning’s “view aesthetic,” see Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Netherlands Filmmuseum, 1997). 21. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 88–92. 22. “Houdini’s Straight-Jacket Mid-Air Escape,” Scientific American, 15 April 1916, 398, quoted in Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 88. 23. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 231. See also Solomon, “Magicians,” 76. 24. Bob Strauss, “Magic Men Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan Conjure Their Experience with The Prestige,” Los Angeles Daily News, 22 October 2006, U4. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2009 (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2009), 536. Joshua Rupp, “Pulling a Reel out of a Hat in The Illusionist,” Bennington Banner, 14 September 2006, n.p. Chris Bartlett, “Magical History Tour,” Sunday Mail, 4 March 2007, 9, quoted in Solomon, “Magicians,” 78. 25. Romney, “Where Did All the Magic Go?” 11. 26. Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 120. In his critique of the tendency to interpret this “dream” as the telos of visual effects in the cinema, Dan North refers to this interestingly as a “myth” that turns on the potential for “immaculate imitation.” Although he does not address it, the invocation of perfection here carries a strong sense of the miraculous, the strictly impossible and inexplicable, which resonates with the current of “real” magic that seems to be circulating in discourses on CGI. See North, Performing Illusions, 2. 27. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 200. 28. Stephen Prince has similarly argued: “In one period, visual effects were ‘special’ because they were regarded as tricks supplementing live-action cinematography. .  .  . They were special, too, because the joins were generally visible between the elements comprising the effect, and this made boundaries between live-action cinematography and composited shots clear. . . . In today’s era, digital effects are not solely a postproduction endeavor, and visual effects can blend seamlessly with live action so that clear boundaries between the domains often do not exist.” Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 3–4. 29. Kaufman and Yari F. G., “Behind the Scenes,” 77. 30. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 63. 31. Pierre Buffin, “The Prestige,” personal e-mail, 21 April 2012. Buffin is the founder and CEO of BUF Compagnie, the visual effects studio that worked on The Prestige. The double pass technique is essentially a kind of double exposure in which a scene is filmed twice using the same camera position with the effect that two separate actions— e.g., Jackman walking through one door and then walking through another door at two different times—are composited to form one continuous motion. In The Prestige, the

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Notes to Pages 144–145

split screen technique is similar and uses a combination of multiple passes and matting to combine separate performances by the same actor in one shot. 32. “At Box Office, Old-Fashioned Magic Works Wonders,” Boston Globe, 28 October 2006, 1. Betsy Pickle, “Movie’s Magic Sure to Leave Viewers Spellbound,” Knoxville News Sentinel, 1 September 2006, 24. Another reviewer claimed, for example, “The hand is faster than the eye in The Illusionist, just as you’d expect in a movie about conjuring. But it’s also mightier than the computer, and that’s the real magic here.” Peter Howell, “Truth and Illusion,” Toronto Star, 18 August 2006, D1. 33. Peter Goddard, “Practical Magic: From a Local Festival to a Penn & Teller TV Special, the Art of Magic Offers Light Fantasy at a Time When Reality Seems Unreal,” Toronto Star, 22 September 2001, J01. 34. See, for example, Jacques Malthête, Méliès, images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996), 64–65; André Gaudreault, “Méliès the Magician: The Magical Magic of the Magic Image,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 2 ( July 2007): 167; and Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 28. See also Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-Up? or, The Trick’s on Us,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1994), 97–98; Jacques Malthête, “Méliès, technicien du collage,” in Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique, ed. Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 169–184; and John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 74–75. 35. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin: Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer, trans. and ed. Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1859), 205–206. Neil Harris also notes that this imperfection was central to Barnum’s operational aesthetic because, Harris argues, “spectators required some hint of a problem, some suggestion of difficulty,” for the attraction to invite inquiry and speculation. See Harris, Humbug, 89. 36. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 201–202. The term “uncanny valley” is commonly traced to Masahiro Mori’s research and writing in the field of robotics, but it is has made its way into new-media discourses and has been applied specifically to the capacity of CGI to convincingly simulate reality. Mori describes the phenomenon using the example of a prosthetic hand: “Some prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation. So maybe the prosthetic arm has achieved a degree of human verisimilitude on par with false teeth. But this kind of prosthetic hand is too real and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness. So if we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature. In this case, there is no longer a sense of familiarity. It is uncanny.” See Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato, Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–34. 37. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 10.

Notes to Pages 145–154

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38. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 21. 39. Lauren Rabinovitz, “From Hale’s Tours to Star Tours,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 44. 40. Software is commonly referred to in these terms in popular discourse. The distinction is made primarily with reference to the more tangible “hardware” systems that provide the material basis of software operations. 41. Peter Lamont, “Magic and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief,” in Magic Show, ed. Jonathan Allen and Sally O’Reilly (London: Hayward Publishing, 2009), 30. See also Paul Ward, “Dark Intervals, Mechanics, and Magic: Animated Movement as the Illusion of Life,” special talk, Centre for Humanities and Holland Animation Film Festival, University of Utrecht, 23 September 2011. 42. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 15. 43. Michael Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 128, 132, 133. 44. Heim, for example, points out that this explaining unavoidably proceeds along metaphorical lines and ultimately remains a process of “making operational guesses at the underlying structure [of the electronic system]. These are not, of course, explanations in any strict scientific sense.” See ibid., 133. 45. Alden Graves, “A Rabbit That Should Stay in the Hat,” Bennington Banner, 18 January 2007), n.p. 46. Steven Millhauser, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” in The Barnum Museum (New York: Poseidon Press, 1990), 228–229. 47. Christopher Priest, The Prestige (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1995), 317. 48. Caroline Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 72. 49. A. O. Scott, “Two Rival Magicians, and Each Wants the Other to Vanish,” New York Times, 20 October 2006, E12. 50. Vivian Sobchack, “Animation and Automation; or, The Incredible Effortfulness of Being,” Screen 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 386. 51. Sobchack gestures preliminarily to discourses on the posthuman and cybernetics, specifically with regards to ideas about the computer’s relation to autopoiesis and artificial or synthetic life. She is interested in the way that autonomy carries with it a sense of terror and the sublime, which Scott Bukatman calls “nightmarish,” and which distinguishes the digital from the uncanny and the automaton on the basis that in these other cases the human hand exerts a dominating influence over the phenomenon being witnessed so as to keep it from becoming autonomous. See Scott Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines: Animation and Autonomy,” in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, ed. Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 128–148. For an incisive discussion of the posthuman, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 52. Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines,” 141, 146–147.

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6 1.

Notes to Pages 155–161

Through Digital Eyes: Reanimating Early Cinema

I am borrowing this from Werner Nekes’s film series Media Magica (1995–1997). Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (New York: Scholastic Press, 2007). 3. I have been unable to verify the date or source of this photograph. I am, however, very grateful to Matthew Solomon for helping with my research in this vein. Erik Barnouw lists the photograph’s date as 1930 and references the Museum of Modern Art in New York. See Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 104. The same photograph is also credited to the Bibliothèque du film in Jacques Malthête and Laurent Mannoni, eds., Méliès, magie et cinema (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2002), 30–31; and to the Cinématheque française in Brian Selznick, The Hugo Movie Companion: A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture (New York: Scholastic Press, 2011), 255. The photograph appears in Selznick’s book on pages 84–85. 4. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 14. 5. See Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 6. Selznick, The Hugo Movie Companion (cited in note 3 above). 7. I am borrowing the phrase “artefactual remains” from Vivian Sobchack, who uses it to refer to the collection of wonders that WALL-E, the antiquated robotic main character from the animated film WALL-E (2008), keeps in the dump truck that he has made into his home. Sobchack also refers to the robot’s home as a curiosity cabinet. See Sobchack, “Animation and Automation; or, The Incredible Effortfulness of Being,” Screen 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 387. 8. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66–67. 9. On the concept of intermediality, see in particular André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Paris: CSRS Éditions, 2008); André Gaudreault, “The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” trans. Wendy Schubring, in Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2000), 8–15; and André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium Is Always Born Twice . . . ,” Early Popular Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (May 2005): 3. 10. During, Modern Enchantments, 171. 11. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains,” in Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 3. 12. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 34. 13. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 153. 2.

Notes to Pages 162–171

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14. Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in The Cinema: A New Technology for the Twentieth Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau (Lausanne: Payot, 2004). 15. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 110. 16. Sean Cubitt, “Observations on the History and Uses of Animation Occasioned by the Exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions Selected from Works in the Werner Nekes Collection,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 3, no. 1 (2008): 53–54. 17. Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 111. 18. Stafford, “Revealing Technologies,” 1. 19. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 221–235. 20. My research in this area has benefited greatly from Ian Christie’s insightful analysis of automata, wonder, and the cinema in a paper titled “A Scientific Instrument? Animated Photography among Other New Imaging Techniques,” which he presented at the 2014 International Domitor Conference. 21. David Channell uses the case of Chaplin’s automation in Modern Times to elaborate his concept of the vital machine, and I invoke it here similarly to point up how this scene is performing the idea, as Channell explains, that in the case of automated machines, “we can no longer distinguish where the human or intelligent aspects begin and where the mechanical aspects end.” See David Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 117, 125. 22. For more on the topic of the “vital machine,” see Alan Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton,” in The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 486–528; and Channell, The Vital Machine. 23. Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 183. 24. Sobchack, “Animation and Automation.” 25. Cristy Lytal, “Working Hollywood: It’s All in the Mechanics: Dick George and His Crew Made the Automaton for the Director’s Hugo Draw like Clockwork,” Los Angeles Times, 27 November 2011, D8. 26. See ibid. 27. Steve Snyder, “Maillardet Automaton (Cat. #1663),” personal e-mail, 18 October 2012. 28. Jacques de Vaucanson, An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing on the German-Flute, trans. J. T. Desagoliers (London, 1742), 23, quoted in David M. Fryer and John C. Marshall, “The Motives of Jacques de Vaucanson,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 264; see 264–267 for more on the “explanatory mode.” 29. Andrew Baron, “Report on the Restoration of the Maillardet Automaton,” Franklin Institute Science Museum (2012): 29–30. Baron has also claimed, “In Maillardet’s case,

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Notes to Pages 172–180

the apparent goal was to mystify the audience, as any good illusionist hopes to do, blurring the line between mechanism and life. Even the words of the automaton’s poems are composed to strike a personal note with its audience. By contrast Scorsese’s automaton (and Brian’s to some extent) convey the wonder of mechanism for machinery’s sake.” Andrew Baron, “Maillardet Automaton (Cat. #1663),” personal e-mail, 24 October 2012. 30. On the myth of initial terror, see Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–133. 31. The echoes of the title of Tabard’s book with Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899) are intriguing, especially given the ways in which Scorsese’s interest in the cinema’s past not only manifests in a discourse of dreams but also takes the form of a kind of fetishization of the artefactual remains of early film history. I am grateful to Tom McDonough for drawing my attention to this connection. 32. See, for example, Mekado Murphy, “Making Marvels: A World for Hugo,” New York Times, 1 January 2012, MT12; and Selznick, The Hugo Movie Companion, 54–55. 33. For more on the production of this TV episode, see Jean Oppenheimer, “A Trip to the Moon,” American Cinematographer 79, no. 4 (April 1998): 64–68, 70, 72, 74–77. 34. Michael Koresky, “Back to Basics,” Film Comment 48, no. 1 ( January 2012): 45. Hugo’s cinematographer, Bob Richardson, used a digital camera prototype called the Alexa, which was made by the Arri Group and developed throughout the production of the film to accommodate shooting every shot in digital 3-D. See Mark Hope-Jones, “Through a Child’s Eyes,” American Cinematographer 92, no. 12 (December 2011): 54–67. 35. Ian Christie, “The Illusionist,” Sight and Sound 22, no. 1 ( January 2012): 39. 36. Koresky, “Back to Basics,” 45. 37. Mark Kermode, “Magical—However You Look at It .  .  .  ,” Observer (London), 1 April 2012, 30. 38. On the novelty of media, see Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds., Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 39. Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” in Thorburn and Jenkins, Rethinking Media Change, 47. 40. Christie, “The Illusionist,” 39. 41. There are actually two cameramen filming simultaneously on two separate cameras set side by side in the studio. The setup is likely a reference to Méliès’s practice of filming with two cameras to produce nearly identical negatives, one of which he would have copyrighted in New York. See, for example, Jacques Malthête, “Les actualités reconstituées de Georges Méliès,” Archives 21 (March 1989): 9–11; and Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 66. 42. See Pierson, Special Effects, 137–168. 43. Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera,” in The Essential Cinema: Essays on Films in the Collection of Anthology

Notes to Pages 181–193

221

Film Archives, vol. 1, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975), 95–111. 44. Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies,” 47. 45. Barbara Robertson, “Magic Man: Visual Effects Artists Push Deep into Cinema History to Help Martin Scorsese Create Hugo,” Computer Graphics Magazine 34, no. 9 (December/January 2012): 24. 46. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 155–161.

Conclusion: Other Obscurities and Illuminations 1.

For more on the lightning sketch, see Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35–58; and Malcolm Cook, “The Lightning Cartoon: Animation from Music Hall to Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 3 (2013): 237–254. 2. Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 135–163. 3. See Matthew Solomon, “Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema During the 1920s,” in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61–84. 4. “No. 3: Deception,” http://rickyjay.com/text003.htm. 5. Ricky Jay, “A Curious Passion,” Threepenny Review 103 (Autumn 2005): 15. 6. Charles Isherwood, “Ricky Jay: On the Stem,” Variety 386, no. 13 (13 May–19 May 2002): 32; Ginger Gail Strand, “Review of Ricky Jay: On the Stem,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 2 (2003): 352. 7. Strand, “Ricky Jay: On the Stem,” 352–353. 8. “Q & A: Ricky Jay, a Man Who Believes More in Magicians than in Magic,” New York Times (September 21, 2002): B11. 9. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 131. 10. For more on Robert-Houdin in particular, see Murray Leeder, “M. Robert-Houdin Goes to Algeria: Spectatorship and Panic in Illusion and Early Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010): 209–225. 11. Matthew Solomon addresses this at length in Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Alison Griffiths also explored Houdini’s relationship with violence in the cinema in “Edison, Houdini, and the Electric Chair,” which was her keynote address for a 2011 conference I co-organized at the University of Chicago titled “The Powers of Display: Cinemas of Investigation, Demonstration, and Illusion.” 12. During, Modern Enchantments, 130–134.

INDEX

3-D: education and, 177; historiography and, 159; Hugo (2011) and, 6, 16, 175–178, 220n34; and The Mad Magician (1954), 191 aesthetics: aesthetic of astonishment, 35, 195n2, 199n28, 211n21, 220n30; media change and, 44, 177; view aesthetic, 139, 215n20; visual effects and, 123–125, 213n47; wonder and, 38–43. See also operational aesthetic Anderson, John Henry, 25, 30–31; blow book (the Magic Sketch Book), 112 Animated Flowers (Les fleurs animées, 1906), 86 animation: anthropomorphosis and, 75; automata and, 80; computer animation, 16, 80, 98, 123–128, 135, 145, 176; definition and etymology of, 102; hand of the artist and, 97–98; illusion of life and, 101–102; labor and, 98; quick change and, 114–115; still and moving images, 116–123; stopmotion, 163–164, 186, 209n27; theory of, 210n3; time-lapse photography and, 75, 78–79, 84–85, 90–91; trick films and, 86–87. See also illusion of life Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), 35, 101, 116, 166, 172, 173; Maxim Gorky and, 41, 117 Artistic Creation (1901), 32, 212n36 The Artist’s Dream (magic trick), 120–121 attention: Alfred Binet and, 50, 54; cognitive science of, 59, 60; Hugo Münsterberg and, 203n22; misdirection and, 54–55, 60–62, 202n4; psychology and, 205n35 authenticity: historiography and, 183; The Illusionist (2006) and, 138; The Prestige (2006) and, 143; re-creation of magic tricks and, 134–140, 141

automation: animation and, 128; automata and, 83; special effects and, 119–122 automaton, 12, 82; animation and, 153–154, 217n51; clockwork and, 169; digital effects and, 124–128; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century magic tricks and, 82; Hugo (2011) and, 156, 163, 165–172; The Illusionist (2006) and, 135, 141, 145, 150. See also Jaquet-Droz, Pierre and Henri-Louis; Leschot, Jean-Frédéric; Maillardet, Henri Bale, Christian, 132 Barnouw, Erik, 12, 131, 147, 185, 188; and phantasmagoria, 35, 107 Barnum, P. T.: and Fiji Mermaid, 142; and hoaxes, 36, 37, 40–41; and La valise de Barnum (Velle, 1904), 114; and operational aesthetic, 216n35 Baudelaire, Charles, 155, 157, 162 Baudrillard, Jean, 83 Baum, L. Frank, 126, 213n48 Bazin, André, 34, 138–139, 158 Beckman, Karen, 190 belief, 4, 19, 23. See also suspension of disbelief Benjamin, Walter, 57 Berck, Albert Michotte van den, 118 Bergman, Ingmar, 20, 23, 24, 43, 193 Binet, Alfred: chronophotography and, 50–69; 203–204n22 Blackton, James Stuart, 102, 116, 186 Black Velvet Art method (magic trick), 32–33 blow book: animation and, 111–113, 119, 120, 125; histories of, 211n10; proto-cinema and, 110, 122; trick films and, 108–109, 114–116

223

224

Index

Brown, John Seely, 148 Bruno, Giuliana, 161 Bukatman, Scott: and automaton, 128; and autonomy and animation, 122, 153, 187; and CGI, 154 Bull, Lucien, 78 Bynum, Caroline: and history of wonder, 3; and investigation and wonder, 153; and theory of wonder, 39 Case of the Missing Hare (1942), 187 change blindness, 62–63, 205n46. See also edit blindness Channell, David, 166, 213n54, 219n21 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 52 Cholodenko, Alan, 101, 117, 166, 212n26, 219n21 Chomón, Segundo de, 5, 42, 102–104, 116, 129, 185 Christie, Ian, 176–180, 219n20 chronophotography: Alfred Binet and, 50–59, 61; Étienne-Jules Marey and, 33; nontheatrical film and, 65. See also Binet, Alfred; Muybridge, Eadweard; Regnault, Félix-Louis Cinémathèque française, 162, 171; Georges Franju and, 173; Georges Méliès and, 174; Henri Langlois and, 172 cognitive film theory, 62–63, 65, 205–206n46 computer-generated imagery (CGI), 6–7, 32, 196n8; animation and, 127–128; anxiety about, 153; Hugo (2011) and, 163, 168, 175; The Illusionist (2006) and, 81, 121; immateriality and invisibility, 131, 133, 142–145, 149; metamorphosis and, 126–128; and system opacity, 148; trickery and, 130, 136; uncertainty and, 123, 141, 146, 154. See also digital effects; special effects continuity editing, 5, 63, 205n45, 206n48 Cooke, George Albert, 25, 29, 120–121 The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901), 103 Crafton, Donald, 98, 121, 186

Crary, Jonathan, 163 Cubitt, Sean, 126; and Werner Nekes, 163 curiosity cabinet: media archaeology and, 160–161; Werner Nekes and, 162 Curtis, Scott, 202n11 cybernetics, 51 Daston, Lorraine, 17, 39 Death Defying Acts (2007), 6 Deceptive Practice (2012), 188 Deceptive Practices (consultants), 188–189 Demenÿ, Georges: Alfred Binet and, 50, 52, 65, 66; Étienne-Jules Marey and, 52 Descartes, René: theory of wonder, 38–39 Dessoir, Max, 203n15 detective: Harry Houdini as, 199n26; The Illusionist (2006) and, 16, 149; The Mad Magician (1954) and, 191; modern magic and, 4, 22, 37, 55; modern museum and, 34; P. T. Barnum and, 40–41; scientific investigation and, 51; The Wizard of Gore (1970) and, 191 Devant, David, 26, 29, 120–121, 134, 214n18 devices of wonder, 9; automata and, 82; early cinema and, 30; Hugo (2011) and, 161; media archaeology and, 201n53; modernity and, 48; proto-cinema and, 155; Werner Nekes and, 162, 184 Dick George Creatives, 168 digital effects: animation and, 126–127; denigration of, 136; detection and, 141–146; fear of, 149–154; handicraft and, 130, 135–136; and historiography, 155; labor and, 130–131; loss of wonder and, 140; nineteenth-century stage magic and, 123; nostalgia and, 137; reality effect and, 124–125; scholarship on, 7; sleight of hand and, 130; uncertainty and anxiety about, 143; wonder and, 137–138, 140–141. See also special effects Duck Amuck (1953), 187 Dulac, Germaine, 70, 73, 86, 88 During, Simon, 25 Dynamic Images and Eye Movements (DIEM) project, 61–63

Index ecstatic observation: definition of, 73, 207n3; optical devices and, 79–80; time-lapse photography and, 84, 88 edit blindness, 63, 205–206n46. See also change blindness education: automata and, 82; educational entertainment, 9, 66; modern magic and, 23, 29–37, 69; wonder and, 38–41 effects assemblage, 164 “Eisenheim the Illusionist” (Millhauser), 150–151 Eisenstein, Sergei: and animation, 101–102, 119, 126–128; computer-generated imagery and, 145; ecstasy and, 207n3 Elsaesser, Thomas, 197n23 enchanted painting films, 102 Enchanted Portfolio (magic trick), 112–113 the Enlightenment: critiques of superstition and the occult, 24, 25, 27–29, 34, 198nn8,9; modern magic and, 36; philosophical toys and, 77, 82 Epstein, Jean, 49, 57, 70, 71–72, 73, 84, 119 Everett’s Game (Rosen), 182–183 eye-tracking camera: and psychological studies of sleight-of-hand magic, 60, 62, 64–65 F for Fake (1974), 10–12, 180, 192 Fairyland; or, The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), 173–176 Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908), 126, 213n48 Fantasia (1940), 74–77, 89 Fawkes, Isaac, 53, 82, 135 Festival of Magic (1957), 188 films of tricks, 66, 67, 138. See also nonfiction film and magic Fischer, Lucy, 190 The Flower Fairy (La fée aux fleurs, 1905), 86–87 Foucault, Michel, 18 Franju, Georges, 158, 173 Franklin Institute, 170–171 Freedman, James, 134–136, 154 Freud, Sigmund: Interpretation of Dreams (1899), 220n31; the uncanny and, 117, 181 From Bud to Blossom (1910), 87–88 From the Earth to the Moon (1998), 174

225

Gaudreault, André, 18, 113, 122, 144, 160, 218n9 Gaycken, Oliver, 78, 207n8 Gertie (1914), 126 Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian: and cyclegraphic studies of surgeons, 51, 202n11 Gitelman, Lisa, 19, 197n25, 220n38 Gorky, Maxim, 41–42, 117–118, 212n24 Le Grand Méliès (1953), 158, 173 Griffiths, Alison, 191, 195n4, 221n11 The Grim Game (1919), 191 Gunning, Tom, 15; “aesthetic of astonishment,” 35, 39, 41, 116, 124, 195n2; and animation, 105; “cinema of attractions,” 87; “cultural optics,” 162; and the emergence of the cinema, 17–18; and magic and the cinema, 37, 40, 48, 160; and trick films, 113, 114, 206n48; “view aesthetic,” 139; and wonder, 44, 177, 181 hand of the artist, 98, 121, 123, 154, 186 Harris, Neil, 37, 40–41, 142, 170, 216n35. See also operational aesthetic Hayles, N. Katherine, 217n51 Heim, Michael, 148 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 53, 55 Herrmann, “Professor” Alexander, 53 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 198n9 Hokus-Pokus (blow book), 112, 113, 115, 118, 125 Houdini (2014), 6 Houdini, Harry, 5–6, 138, 139, 191, 199n26, 221n11 House of Wax (1953), 191 Hugo (2011), 6, 16, 156; curiosity cabinet and, 161–164, 175; archival materials and, 172–173; automata and, 165–172; digital 3-D and, 175–177; historiography and, 159; media archaeology and, 182–184; substitution splices and, 105, 178–181 Huhtamo, Erkki, 17, 74, 160, 163 Hume, David, 27 Illusion (1929), 6, 187 illusionism, 5, 13; narrative and, 14, 15 illusion of life: automata and, 84; in cartoon animation, 101–102; cinematic movement and, 101, 109; time-lapse photography and, 99

226

Index

The Illusionist (2006), 6, 16; critical reception of, 138; explanation and special effects in, 147–151, 153; and the Orange Tree trick, 80–81; and the phantasmagoria, 105–107; profilmic tricks in, 134–135; violence in, 192–193 The Illusionist (2010), 186 An Impossible Voyage (1904), 172 intermediality, 9, 16, 18, 160, 218n9; magic and, 189 invisible editing, 62–63, 205n45, 206n48. See also continuity editing; edit blindness Jackman, Hugh, 132 Jaquet-Droz, Pierre and Henri-Louis, 170 Jastrow, Joseph, 52–53, 54, 55–56 Jay, Ricky, 134, 188–190, 211n10 Jentsch, Ernst, 83, 126, 209n21 Kammatograph, 78 Kellar, Harry, 53 Kircher, Athanasius, 26 Klein, Norman, 133, 134 Kracauer, Siegfried, 74, 79 Kuhn, Gustav, 59–61, 63, 64 labor: automata and, 171; and mechanical and electronic devices, 98, 127, 153, 168. See also hand of the artist Lachapelle, Sofie, 52, 203n12 Langlois, Henri, 172 Last Action Hero (1993), 125–126 The Last Performance (1929), 6, 187 Leeder, Murray, 15, 196n18, 221n10 Leschot, Jean-Frédéric, 170 Life (2009–2010), 75, 93; “Plants” and, 93–97 lightning sketch, 186, 221n1 Line Describing a Cone (1973), 107 machine interest, 74, 164, 172 The Mad Magician (1954), 6, 191 magic. See modern magic; secular magic magic assemblage, 160 Magical Maestro (1952), 186 The Magic Book (Le livre magique, 1900), 110–111, 114–115, 118, 119–120, 122–123

The Magic History of Cinema (2015), 6 The Magician (1958), 20–25 magic lantern, 9, 26–28, 155, 162; and The Magician (1958), 23–24; and Pepper’s Ghost, 32–33; and the phantasmagoria, 35, 107 Magic Sketch (or Scrap) Book (magic trick), 112 Maillardet, Henri, 170, 171, 219–220n29 The Man from Beyond (1922), 6 Mangan, Michael, 198n3 Mango Tree (magic trick), 81–82, 84, 208n15 Mannoni, Laurent, 17–18, 36, 160, 163, 197n22, 199n32, 202n9, 203n13, 218n3 Manovich, Lev, 130; and digital effects, 145, 213n51; and digital simulation, 141 Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 10, 119, 180–181 The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), 32, 173 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 33, 50–53, 67–68 The Marvelous Album (L’album merveilleux, 1905), 107–108, 111, 114, 116, 119–120, 122 Maskelyne, Nevil, 25, 26, 29, 120–121, 134 The Master Mystery (1919), 5–6, 191, 199n26 McCay, Winsor, 126 media archaeology, 17–18, 155–156, 159–161, 163–164, 183, 189, 201n53 media change, 44, 220n38; demystification and, 44; magician and, 45. See also wonder Media Magica (1995–1997), 162–163 Méliès, Georges, 5, 16, 30, 110–112, 115, 120, 123, 201n52, 206n48, 220n41; Alfred Binet and, 50; and the early cinematic archive, 160–164, 172, 176, 178–181; at the Gare Montparnasse, 157–159; Hugo (2011) and, 105–106; and the substitution splice, 63, 144; and the trick film genre, 42, 129 The Melomaniac (1903), 172–173 memory theater, 160, 172 The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906), 172 metamorphosis: animation and, 113, 115, 120–121, 127–128; CGI and, 141; movement and, 101, 105; quick change and, 110–112, 119, 122, 125; time lapse and, 73, 78, 80–85; and trick films, 87

Index Metz, Christian, 47, 68 Michelson, Annette, 119, 180 misdirection, 4, 47, 54–55, 202n4 mise en abyme, 10, 103, 105 modern magic: difference from supernatural and occult, 15; education and, 29–43; explanation and, 13; history of, 22–29; live and represented, 144; science and, 25–26; self-consciousness and, 22; uncertainty and, 37; violence and, 190–194. See also Binet, Alfred; operational aesthetic; time lapse Modern Times (1936), 166, 219n21 Moore, Rachel, 15 Morin, Edgar, 100, 115, 118, 127 Münsterberg, Hugo, 54, 203–204n22 Musser, Charles, 18, 26, 28, 42 Muybridge, Eadweard: chronophotography and, 51–52 Nature’s Half Acre (1951), 90–92. See also Ott, John Ndalianis, Angela, 6, 123–127, 196n8, 213n47 Nead, Lynda, 102, 119 Nekes, Werner, 155, 162–164, 184, 218n1; and Getty Museum, 9 neuroscience, 60; the arts and, 63; scientific studies of illusions and, 63–64 new film history, 197n25 new media, 177; CGI and, 141; novelty and, 19, 119, 197n25, 220n38; uncanny and, 44. See also media change nickelodeon, 5, 25 nonfiction film and magic, 64–69, 138, 187–188. See also films of tricks North, Dan, 6; and special effects, 7, 130, 195n4, 215n26 nostalgia, 137, 145, 176, 183–186 Now You See Me (2013), 6, 13, 15 operational aesthetic, 38–43, 88, 116, 119, 121, 134, 142, 164, 170, 200n47. See also Harris, Neil; wonder optical devices, 9, 18, 28, 49, 51, 57, 62, 80, 162–163, 201n53; and education, 65–69. See also devices of wonder

227

optical unconscious, 57 Orange Tree (magic trick), 80–83, 135, 141, 145, 150, 189 Ott, John, 89–93 The Palace of the Arabian Nights (1905), 178–179 Parikka, Jussi, 17 Park, Katharine, 17, 39 Pepper, John Henry, 32–34 Pepper’s Ghost (magic trick), 32–34; Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and, 34 persistence of vision, 47, 202n3 phantasmagoria, 28, 34–37, 107, 111, 126, 131, 199–200n36 Philidor, 35–36, 199n32. See also Philipsthal, Paul de Philipsthal, Paul de, 34–36 philosophical toys, 9, 22, 32, 156, 171 Pierson, Michele, 6; and digital simulation, 141; and special effects, 7, 164, 178–179, 196n8 Pingree, Geoffrey, 19, 197n25, 220n38 plasmaticness, 126–128, 145 Porta, Giovanni Battista della, 18 posthuman, 217n51 prestidigitation: definition of, 130 The Prestige (2006), 6, 131; detective narratives and, 16; mechanical vs. digital effects, 136–140, 142, 147–154; violence in, 192 Prince, Stephen, 14, 195n4, 215n28 pro-filmic tricks: credibility and, 138–139; The Illusionist (2006) and, 134–137; The Prestige (2006) and, 136–137 proto-cinema: field of, 4, 8, 18, 23, 52, 155, 162, 182, 197n25; intermediality and, 19; time lapse and, 77, 122 Raynaly, Edouard-Joseph: chronophotography and, 49–52, 55, 57, 59 reality effect: of CGI, 125, 127; of the cinema, 41, 102, 126, 210n5 The Red Spectre (Le spectre rouge, 1907), 102–104, 116 Regnault, Félix-Louis: chronophotography and, 52

228

Index

Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène, 25–26, 31, 82–83, 112–113, 134, 135, 145, 190 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 34–36, 107 Rodowick, David, 147, 153 Rosen, Philip, 182–183 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29–30 Royal Polytechnic Institution, 31–35, 59 Sadoul, Georges, 207–208n8 Scientific American, 42, 201n52, 205n40, 215n22 Scot, Reginald, 28, 53 Scott, Henderina, 78, 208n9 screen practice, 18, 26, 42, 103, 116, 197n21 Secrets of Life (1956), 75, 90–92. See also Ott, John secular magic, 1, 12, 22, 23, 25, 29, 39, 69, 82, 160, 193. See also modern magic Sherlock Jr. (1924), 103 The Show (1927), 187 Siegel, Lee, 82, 208nn15,16 skepticism, 14, 21, 69, 149 sleight of hand, 27–28, 53, 59, 68, 141, 202n4; Alfred Binet and, 50; the cinema and, 48, 122, 129–131, 133, 139, 144; definition of, 47 Sobchack, Vivian, 98, 122, 127, 131, 153, 168, 202n5, 218n7 Solomon, Matthew, 5, 7, 18, 160, 187, 191, 199n26, 208n14, 213n52; and films of tricks, 66, 138, 139; and Méliès, 201n52, 206n48, 218n3 sound: films about magicians and, 6, 187 special effects, 2, 5, 8, 43, 130–133; difference from visual effects, 195n4; materiality and immateriality and, 143–144, 147–154; time lapse and, 93–99; trick films and, 7, 16, 87, 102, 176–177, 183–184; visible and invisible, 140–146, 148; and wonder, 8. See also digital effects the Sphinx (magic trick), 31, 33 Spiritualist movement, 160, 187; and spirit photography, 70 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 9, 63, 91, 160–161, 164, 201n53; and magic, 28, 69 Steinmeyer, Jim, 32 sublime, 63, 128, 217n51

substitution splice, 82, 113–115, 122–123, 133, 143–144, 178–181, 206n48 suggestion, 54, 203–204n22, 205n35 suspension of disbelief, 14, 199–200n36; in modern magic, 146; neuroscience and, 63–64, 146 Talbot, Frederick: and substitution splice, 120; and time-lapse films, 78, 85 Le tempestaire (1947), 70–73, 81, 97 Terminator 2: 3D Battle across Time, 124–128, 213n47 Terpak, Frances, 9, 201n53 Terror Island (1920), 6, 191 Tesla, Nikola, 132, 151, 152–154, 192 Théâtre Robert-Houdin, 173 theme parks, 107, 124–128 thick description, 19, 197n25 time lapse: as animation technique, 78–79; automata and, 80–81, 82; cartoon animation and, 74–75, 90; computer animation and, 98; digital effects and CGI and, 94–97; film theory and, 74, 75, 84, 88; Loïe Fuller and, 99; nature, power, and, 91–92, 97; operational aesthetic and, 88; popular science films and, 75, 77, 87–89; trick films and, 86–87; uncanny and, 83–85. See also Ott, John Tim’s Vermeer (2013), 6 trick film, 5, 7, 42, 102, 113–114, 120, 123, 133, 148, 201n52; and theatrical magic, 16. See also Chomón, Segundo de; Méliès, Georges; Velle, Gaston A Trip to the Moon (1902), 16, 156, 166, 172–174, 206n48 uncanny, 6, 116, 145, 153, 217n51; Ernst Jentsch and, 83, 126, 209n21; the fantastic and, 37; intellectual curiosity and, 9; optical devices and, 9, 48, 49, 57, 73; Sigmund Freud and, 117, 181; time lapse and, 71, 79, 83 uncanny valley, 145, 216n36 uncertainty, dialectic of, 37, 41, 46, 54, 127, 139, 146, 151

Index Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), 103 The Untamable Whiskers (1904), 105–106, 172 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 134 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 170 Velle, Gaston, 5, 86, 90, 107–108, 110–116, 118, 120, 129 violence, 190–193, 221n11. See also modern magic vision: modernity and, 48; sleight of hand and, 27, 46–49, 59; technology and, 55–58, 61, 65–66, 70, 74, 88, 204n32, 207n3. See also persistence of vision visual and cognitive illusions, 53–54 vital machine, 166, 214n54, 219n21

229

Weber, Michael, 134–135, 188 Welles, Orson, 1–2, 10–11, 19, 100–101, 126, 180, 188, 192 Whissel, Kristen, 14 Winter, Alison, 204n22, 205n35 The Wizard of Gore (1970), 6, 191 wonder: astonishment and, 39; definitions of, 38–40; early cinema and, 41–43; education and, 38; investigation and, 153; new media and, 43–45; operational aesthetic and, 40 Wood, Gaby, 167, 203n13 You Never Know Women (1926), 187 Zielinski, Siegfried, 17, 18, 159, 160, 161, 163

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Colin Williamson is a visiting assistant professor of film and media stud-

ies at Franklin and Marshall College. He has published essays on early animation, science and the cinema, Walter Benjamin and film theory, and special effects.