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

By Colin Williamson

What does it mean to describe cinematic effects as “movie magic,” to compare filmmakers to magicians, or to say that the cinema is all a “trick”? The heyday of stage illusionism was over a century ago, so why do such performances still serve as a key reference point for understanding filmmaking, especially now that so much of the cinema rests on the use of computers?
 
To answer these questions, Colin Williamson situates film within a long tradition of magical practices that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke two forms of wonder—both awe at the illusion displayed and curiosity about how it was performed. He thus considers how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also inspire them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images. Tracing the overlaps between the worlds of magic and filmmaking, Hidden in Plain Sight examines how professional illusionists and their tricks have been represented onscreen, while also considering stage magicians who have stepped behind the camera, from Georges Méliès to Ricky Jay.
 
Williamson offers an insightful, wide-ranging investigation of how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, Hidden in Plain Sight provides an eye-opening look at the powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813572550

Book preview

HIDDEN IN PLAIN 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

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema

COLIN WILLIAMSON

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY 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

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

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Watching Closely

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

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

3. Second Sight: Time Lapse and the Cinema as Seer

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

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

6. Through Digital Eyes: Reanimating Early Cinema

Conclusion: Other Obscurities and Illuminations

Notes

Index

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 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 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 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 PLAIN 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 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 . . . ?

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 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 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, 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 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