Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century

Disappearing Tricks revisits the golden age of theatrical magic and silent film to reveal how professional magicians shaped the early history of cinema. Where others have called upon magic as merely an evocative metaphor for the wonders of cinema, Matthew Solomon focuses on the work of the professional illusionists who actually made magic with moving pictures between 1895 and 1929. The first to reveal fully how powerfully magic impacted the development of cinema, the book combines film and theater history to uncover new evidence of the exchanges between magic and filmmaking in the United States and France during the silent period. Chapters detailing the stage and screen work of Harry Houdini and Georges MÉliÈs show how each transformed theatrical magic to create innovative cinematic effects and thrilling new exploits for twentieth-century mass audiences. The book also considers the previously overlooked roles of anti-spiritualism and presentational performance in silent film. Highlighting early cinema's relationship to the performing body, visual deception, storytelling, and the occult, Solomon treats cinema and stage magic as overlapping practices that together revise our understanding of the origins of motion pictures and cinematic spectacle.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction; 1 An Anti-Spiritualist Medium: Stage Magic and the Beginnings of Cinema; 2 The Death of Magic? Presentational Performance and Early Film; 3 Behind the Curtain: Melies at the Theatre Robert-Houdin; 4 Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film; 5 Houdini's Actuality Magic: Escaping the "Ghost House" with Moving Pictures; 6 Lost in Transition: Sensational Fiction and the Limits of Narrative Integration Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index

About the Author :
Matthew Solomon is an associate professor of cinema studies in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Review :
"A fascinating enquiry into the early history of film, especially as it involved magicians and magic tricks. Matthew Solomon explores spiritualism and suspension of disbelief in a compelling investigation of the integration of cinema into mainstream entertainment." - Hugh Hudson (Chair), Peter Bradshaw and Sir Christopher Frayling, Judges of the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards "Students of magic history, film history, the intersection of both, and of Houdini's film career in particular, will all find much to enlarge their insight and understanding of these subjects." - GENII "Conjuring up an amazing trick of his own with this engaged scholarship, Solomon provides a fresh, fascinating display of theory applied to film history. This is one of the most succinct, scintillating books of the year. Essential." - Choice "Along with intriguing insights into the early development of film, Disappearing Tricks is a reminder that magic and movies involve playing with perceptions and making the appearance of reality seem malleable." - ExpressMilwaukee.com "A truly important and impressive book, the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of the interaction between magicians and cinema that anyone has offered or is likely to offer." - Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity "Employing a "comparative media approach", Solomon's book explores the ways in which "magic and cinema were in fact overlapping sets of practices that renewed, incorporated, and responded to each other historically" (6). The magical new medium of film initially posed a serious threat to magicians, since, "While stage magic always involves concealing the work that goes into a trick (and concealing how the work has been concealed), mechanical tricks ran the risk of effacing the magician altogether, leaving only the illusion" (29). Nevertheless, as Solomon recounts, cinema was quickly incorporated into magic shows as a novel component of the performers' technical armoury, while at the same time, as the commercial potential of cinema became evident, "Magicians took key roles in the emerging industry"." - Bruce Bennett, Scope, Issue 24, October