Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar012

1945-2314

Lea Jacobs,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Matthew Solomon's well-researched history of magic and silent film is the second of two important books on this topic. The first, Erik Barnouw's The Magician and the Cinema (1981), provides what is still the standard account of the trick film, an important early genre. While there are many variants, trick films famously employ splicing and substitution to create spectacular and sometimes-humorous transformations: women instantaneously turn into butterflies or skeletons, tired travelers in hotels are bedeviled by disappearing beds. Barnouw contextualized the trick film within the early nineteenth-century tradition of fantasmagorie, in which magicians utilized concealed magic lanterns to project slides of ghosts and other apparitions. By the late nineteenth century, magic-lantern technology was used for spectacular effects in magic sketches at venues such as the Egyptian Hall in London and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. Their work with magic lanterns and interest in narratively motivated illusions predisposed magicians to the new technology of cinema, and they became some of the medium's early adapters.