Rupturing illusionism: the bullet catch (original) (raw)

Techniques of Illusion. A Cultural and Media History of Stage Magic in the Late Nineteenth Century

2023

This book explores stage conjuring during its “golden age,” from about 1860 to 1910. It provides close readings highlighting four paradigmatic illusions of the time that stand in for different kinds of illusions typical of stage magic in the “golden age” and analyses them within their cultural and media-historical context: “Pepper’s Ghost,” the archetypical mirror illusion; “The Vanishing Lady,” staging a teleportation in a time of a dizzying acceleration of transport; “the levitation,” simulating weightlessness with the help of an extended steel machinery; and “The Second Sight,” a mind-reading illusion using up-to-date communication technologies. These close readings are completed by writings focusing on visual media and expanding the scope backwards and forwards in time, roughly to 1800 and to 2000.

Illusory Bodies: Magical Performance on Stage and Screen

This article draws upon a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of magic performance to argue that the success of an illusion was dependent upon the spectator’s engagement with the trick as a conscious application of mechanical effects. The stated aims of the magicians’ art, as evidenced by their published statements, but also by the nature of their applied techniques, was that audience response was not to be a simple form of stupefac- tion, but a lively interaction with the performance as both a meticulously composed spectac- ular sight and as a contribution to a broader fascination with technology and illusionism. Spectators were encouraged, directly or indirectly, to make comparative assessments of the illusions with which they were presented, based on their knowledge of earlier instances of the same tricks or on their awareness of published exposés of popular effects. This kind of collusive illusionism is carried into the filmic realm, as demonstrated significantly by the work of the French film-maker Georges Méliès. In adapting his popular stage illusions for incorporation into the new film medium, Méliès prompted comparisons between the different versions of the same tricks, thus highlighting the distinct and defining characteristics of each medium.

Emotional Reactions to some Illusions in Show Magic: An Exploratory Study

2020

The basis of this article is a conference presented in Marseille on April, 2nd, 2019, for the MUCEM (MUsée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée / MUseum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations). This paper presents a exploratory study conducted in Rennes (France), about emotions evoked by three stage illusions presented in show magic: (1) “Sawing in half” illusion, (2) “Escaping a straitjacket” illusion, (3) “Harrow” illusion. Results of a free association task show that the chosen illusions are perceived to produce different emotions, but mainly the negative ones. Results reveal, too, that the illusions evoked are differently evaluated on their perceived attractiveness and their perceived danger. Results show a link between the illusions, the perception of danger, and the fascination they generate. Propositions for future research are formulated, at different levels of analysis: individual and psychosocial.

Criminal Sleight of Hand: The Detective Magician as Transitional Figure

Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 2020

The detective magician, an American subgenre, was popularized by several series characters between 1935 and 1945. This decade comprises a meeting point between different strains of detective fiction: the waning years of the Golden Age, a highpoint of hard-boiled pulp detectives, and the rise of the espionage novel. Following Ernest Mandel's general chronology from Delightful Murder, I argue that the detective magician serves as a transitional figure who embodies contradictory impulses: the conflation of mystification and demystification, the supernatural and the rational, and justice and criminality. After a preliminary discussion of magic's self-dividedness, I review the overlap between magic, theology, and science in the context of the nineteenth century, moving from there to the interrelation of these threads with detective fiction. Important theoretical writers include Simon During and Michael Saler. I then explain why stage magic is an appropriate vehicle to represent t...

Magic and illusion in early cinema

Studies in French Cinema, 2001

This essay looks at the influence of nineteenth-century magic arts on early film-makers, looking particularly at Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. I hope to show that the origins of cinematic illusion lie in an earlier art form which fused science and showmanship. The historical links between magic and cinema can help us to understand early film's ambiguous relations to both art and technology. Since magic theatre was designed to remove any fearful elements from the stagecraft, the illusions took on an anti-realistic quality which would enable spectators to appreciate the artistry and the science behind a trick without ever being completely deceived. Some of the earliest film-makers engaged with both the scientific and artistic capabilities of the new medium in order to meet the expectations of such technically-literate audiences. [This was the first essay I ever published.]

Disappearing in Plain Sight: The Magic Trick and the Missed Event

Octopus: A Journal of Visual Studies, 2011

During a magic show, an audience misses the production of the trick while it occurs in plain sight. Onstage, the magician accomplishes the trick by using sleight-of-hand. Onscreen, the cut produces the illusion. Both use invisibility to achieve their effects. Using a psychoanalytic lens, this study contends the magic trick stages a fantasy of disappearance and return that mirrors Freud's concept of fort/da and Peggy Phelan's concept of performance. Cinematic representations of the trick use the stage as a metaphor for being both “gone” and “there.” Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Christopher Nolan’s [The Prestige] (2006) and Georges Méliès’s trick film [The Vanishing Lady] (1896), this essay argues the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performance—both onstage and onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event.

Toward a historiography of stage conjuring: are we entering a golden age?

Early Popular Visual Culture, 2018

In his 1906 book The Old and the New Magic, magic historian Henry Ridgely Evans (1861-1949) wrote, 'Alas, the golden age of wizardry has passed' (1906, 315). For him, as for other magicians at the turn of the twentieth century (and indeed a number of French magicians even now), 'the good old daysthe golden days' were the 'daysof Robert-Houdin' (1902, 78). Every culture and every era looks back fondly on some point in its past as a golden age and each âge d'or is, of course, a historical fiction that probably reveals more about the culture and the time period that looks back than it tells us about the 'golden age' so optimistically recalled (or constructed). At the turn of the twentieth century, Evans and many others would have, without hesitation, designated the golden age of theatrical conjuring as belonging more or less completely to Jean-Eug ène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), the so-called father of modern magic. Many French magicians in particular would maintain this claim even today. 1 From our vantage point in 2018, however, Evans was himself living through a golden age at the turn of the twentieth century that was every bit as transformational as the changes spearheaded by Robert-Houdin. We appear to have at long last arrived at a moment when the study of conjuring has reached something like a critical mass, though scholarly work on the topic is still scattered across various disciplines. With a few notable exceptions, studies of magic history continue to cluster in the established domains of practitioners, collectors and interested enthusiasts rather than being found in peer-reviewed journals or academic programs of study. Two noteworthy mavericks we know of are the journal Gibecière, published biannually by the Conjuring Arts Research Center since 2005, which at some point adopted a double-blind, peer-reviewed publication process, and Carleton University in Ottawa, which is expected to soon announce the appointment of its inaugural Allan Slaight Chair for the Conjuring Arts. These developments would seem to fill a significant and relatively long-standing void, although they remain mostly recent exceptions to the general rule of academia's more or less systematic avoidance of magic history notwithstanding occasional doctoral dissertations, journal articles and scholarly books over the years. The earliest doctoral dissertation in English devoted to conjuring appears to have been Norman Triplett's 'The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions,' completed in 1900 at Clark University (where Sigmund Freud would later give his American lectures) and CONTACT Joe Culpepper