Magic and illusion in early cinema

Dan North
Abstract
This essay looks at the influence of nineteenth-century magic arts on early film-makers, looking
particularly at Georges Mlis and the Lumire 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 films 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.

Magic shows and the technological apparatus

Tom Gunning has supplied us with a theory of what he terms the cinema of attraction,
arguing that filmed entertainment from 1895 to 1907 was not driven by narrative, but
provided a technological spectacle the machine which made the pictures move was the
source of fascination rather than the themes and stories represented by the pictures
themselves. He describes how early cinema functioned to engage the spectator without
recourse to storytelling:
Rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy with character
psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film
image engaging the viewers curiosity. The spectator does not get lost in a fictional
world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of
curiosity and its fulfilment (Gunning 1995: 121; see also Gunning 1986).

By foregrounding technological spectacle, early cinema can be seen to exhibit the same
characteristics which still prevail in the kind of special effects-driven Hollywood product
which dominates global film markets today. There is the same self-conscious solicitation
of the spectators gaze, the same fascination with pushing the technical boundaries of the
film-making apparatus, often to the detriment of narrativity and characterisation. Filmic
special effects have always relied on the viewers complicity in the illusion, the essential
awareness that the effect is the product of applied science and artistry. To make an effect
entirely undetectable is to negate its purpose as spectacle and to undermine any
justification for the expense involved in its production. In examining the tricks and
illusions of early cinema, it is important to appreciate that this partial illusionism has been
a constant factor throughout cinema history.
The subordination of narrative in early film is one way to stress cinemas role as a
technological, rather than an artistic attraction at its inception, but studies of cinemas
origins need also to take into account the influence of nineteenth-century magic shows
in establishing a context in which films were first received. While discourses around early
cinema have often revolved around assessments of the importance of either story or
spectacle, I would like to look at the nature of the earliest special effects and their roots
as a continuation of ideas conceived in magic theatres in the nineteenth century.

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Gunning has commented that the magic theatre laboured to make visual that which it
was impossible to believe(Gunning 1995: 117), which effectively summarises the
attitude with which spectators at magic shows approached illusions aware that what
they seemed to be witnessing was a fabrication, and therefore able to appreciate the
technique behind it.
The input of magicians and their stage illusions is frequently overlooked or
downplayed in historical accounts of cinemas invention, which often locate the
beginnings of film exhibition between the realms of science and visual culture, with
Auguste and Louis Lumire put forward as the heroic pioneers who brought the two
together by making their scientific invention a focus of public fascination. The
Cinmatographe was launched as the front runner in a crowded race to take
chronophotography to its logical conclusion and to extract the principle of Edisons
Kinetoscope and present it to an audience, but the full story should include reference to
the interest in magical science in the nineteenth century. It is the arena of Victorian
magic which can help to explain the ambiguous relationship between films scientific and
theatrical applications.
Magic shows and magicians were crucial components in the establishment of a
cinematic industry and art. At the first public demonstration of the Cinmatographe at
the Grand Caf (28 December 1895), Mlis was famously present, as were mile and
Vincent Isola, two magicians from Algeria who had been impressed by Robert-Houdins
politically-motivated performances that were staged there (see below), and who had
established their own Thtre Isola in Paris in 1892. Their Isolatograph projector,1 based
on one of the imitation Kinetoscopes made by British pioneer R.W. Paul, who had
named his machine the Theatrograph, was being used to show films less than a week
after Mlis himself presented moving pictures at the Thtre Robert-Houdin on 4 April
1896, using a Theatrograph but showing Edisons Kinetoscope films.
The first UK demonstration of the Cinmatographe was overseen not by the
Lumire Brothers, but by one of their associates, Flicien Trewey, a magician, and the
most famous shadowgrapher in France. Treweys shows began at the London Polytechnic
on 20 February 1896, which, incidentally, was the same day that R.W. Paul was showing
his Theatrograph at Finsbury Technical College. The Polytechnic, on Regent Street, had
opened in 1838, and was an institution where a mostly middle-class section of the public
could go to see demonstrations of the latest technological artefacts, whether they were
new forms of automata, steam engines or other mechanical devices. There were also two
theatres on the premises, one used for lectures and parlour conjuring, the other given
over to optical entertainments, the most popular of which would have been magic
lantern shows. It was in this environment that science and popular entertainment
bonded, and in which film shows received some of their earliest audiences in the UK
Witnessing one of the first of Treweys shows at the Polytechnic was David Devant,
the most popular conjuror at Londons Egyptian Hall, who tried to buy the machine
following its demonstration. The machine was not for sale (the Lumires did not sell the
Cinmatographe until 1897), and Devant could not afford the 100 per week rental fee
for its inclusion in his act. The Polytechnic shows were aimed at theatre managers, and
the Empire at Leicester Square acquired the London rights to the Cinmatographe.
Devant could not convince John Nevil Maskelyne,2 then director of Londons Egyptian
Hall, to invest in the invention and include film shows on the playbill. Maskelyne
predicted, wrongly (as it later transpired) but just as the Lumire Brothers had before
him, that moving pictures would be a short-lived attraction.
Devant turned to R.W. Paul, who had invited him to a showing of his

Magic and illusion in early cinema

71

1 Many of the
Theatrographs which
Paul sold were presented
under different names,
perhaps with slight
modifications.
Imitations of the
Cinmatographe and
Kinetoscope appeared
rapidly, including the
Electrograph,
Eknetographe,
Eidoloscope, Actograph,
Ikonographe,
Biactographe,
Polyscope,
Scenematographe,
Andersonoscopographe
and the PhotoMotoscope, to name
but a few.

2 Nevil Maskelyne, son of

magician John Nevil
Maskelyne, later worked
on producing film cameras, and patented his
Mutagraph in 1897. He
also experimented with
high-speed photography
and produced a camera
capable of capturing the
motion of artillery shells
in flight.

Theatrograph, and the pair made a deal. Devant purchased, for 100, one Theatrograph
for himself, and was to receive commission for selling others to his friends in the
business. Of course, once film shows became an essential component in a magicians
repertoire, Devant had no trouble selling two machines to Georges Mlis and one to
Carl Hertz, an American illusionist. Mlis would prove to be a significant film-maker,
and I shall presently consider some of his major contributions to cinema history, but
Hertz was instrumental in spreading knowledge of moving pictures around the world.

Film technology and magic

Hertz bought his Theatrograph on 27 March 1896, and, having embarked on a voyage
to South Africa the next day, was showing films on the ship, the SS Norman, within days
of his purchase. During an extensive tour, Hertz presented the first film shows in
Johannesburg, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Colombo, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore,
Manila, Java, Borneo, Saigon, Hong Kong, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Osaka, Yokohama, Tokyo,
Fiji and Honolulu. Audiences in all of these places would have witnessed moving
pictures for the first time in the context of a magic show (see Hertz 1924).
Films of magic tricks meant that the act could be presented to wider, larger
audiences and preserved indefinitely. However, the ease of diffusing filmed
entertainments slowly eradicated the demand for live performance, and many magicians
were gradually forced out of business by the technology which, as
scientifically/technically-minded artists, they had been amongst the first to embrace.
The nineteenth century had seen the establishment of many theatres devoted
specifically to magic shows, and magicians enjoyed respect and admiration on the stage
entertainment circuits. In 1845, Jean-Eugne Robert-Houdin founded the Thtre
Robert-Houdin in Paris. Robert-Houdin was perhaps Frances most celebrated
magician, and a particular inspiration to a young Hungarian named Erich Weisz, who
took on the stage name Harry Houdini when he embarked upon his own magic career
(he began performing professionally at the age of seventeen, principally as an expert in
sleight-of-hand card tricks).
Throughout his own career, Houdini would often reveal the secrets of his stage act,
whether in a conversation or in the books which he wrote on the subject. This was
partly a way of deterring imitators, but also of emphasizing his own talent. It was also
typical of performers such as Houdini, David Devant and John Nevil Maskelyne to
distance themselves from any charlatanry which might undermine appreciation of the
mastery of technique required to perform most tricks. They would avoid claims of
supernatural abilities, preferring to present their tricks as skilful applications of science,
mechanics, logic and sleight-of-hand. Magic was an art which had been shrouded in
superstition and which often precipitated charges of heresy or witchcraft against its
practitioners, and part of the process of popularising it involved the partial removal of
mystery and the suggestion of threat.
Even though Houdini had renamed himself after Robert-Houdin, he did not
restrain himself from a full, frank and at times fierce criticism of his idol and inspiration,
in his book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin published in 1904. Robert-Houdin was a
showman who exploited new technological developments in order to amaze audiences.
Erik Barnouw remarks that in the nineteenth century, the magician made it his business
to stay a step or two ahead of public understanding of science (Barnouw 1981: 11), and
Robert-Houdin demonstrated this when he was sent to Algeria in 1856 to perform
magic in front of crowds whom the French government considered dangerously close to
an uprising, stirred to a rebellious state by wonder-performing holy men. If Algerian

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magicians were proclaiming the magical power and strength of the nations people, the
French colonists saw fit to use the same device by sending in one of their own magic
men to prove that the foreign rulers had even greater supernatural force on their side.
Robert-Houdins use of electromagnets and automata in his act was reportedly successful
in convincing the primitives of how advanced their colonial masters were.3
What emerges from an observation of magic culture in the nineteenth century is the
fact that it was not simply an exploitation of public superstitions and suspicions of
supernatural forces. It was an exploration of the limits of human skill to amaze and baffle
using a combination of practised artistry and scientifically advanced (or obscure)
mechanisms. Positive response from the audience was reliant upon the performers ability
to deceive the eye as well as the mind the viewer tries hard to discern the mechanism
of the illusion visually, and when the sight is deceived the illusion is complete. Just as
modern audiences are sufficiently cine-literate that they can identify special effects and
assess the quality of their execution, audiences at Victorian magic shows were already
familiar with the conventions of magical performance and so could assess a performers
skill based on comparisons with similar shows they had witnessed previously. For
example, towards the end of 1897, when the Lumires finally began to sell the
Cinmatographe to interested buyers, one of the first buyers was Leopoldo Fregoli, an
Italian impersonator, prestidigitator and character performer. He featured the machine in
his magic acts and, using techniques such as reversal and match cuts, could appear, on
film, to be performing a rapid succession of characters, with instantaneous costume
changes. The actual physicality of his act, however, no matter how intense, could not
compare to those performed by his screen alter ego.
Henry Ridgely Evans has quoted Robert-Houdin as proclaiming there to be only
five types of magic trick:
1 Feats of dexterity: the hands and tongue being the only means used for the
production of these illusions.
2 Experiments in natural magic: experiments devised from the sciences, and
which are worked in combination with feats of dexterity, the combined result
constituting conjuring tricks.
3 Mental conjuring: a control acquired over the will of the spectator; secret
thought read by an ingenious system of diagnosis, and sometimes compelled to take
a particular direction by certain subtle artifices.
4 Pretended mesmerism: imitation of mesmeric phenomena, second-sight,
clairvoyance, divination, trance, catalepsy.
5 Mediumship: spiritualism or pretended evocation of spirits, table-turning,
rapping and writing, mysterious cabinets etc.
(Evans 1977: 2)

Since there are so few forms of magic trick, the skill lies in the presentation, in the artists
ability to captivate the audience with a miniature narrative which traces, for instance, an
objects selection, presentation, disappearance and reappearance. Gunning quotes Mlis
as saying that he thought little or nothing of the stories behind his films, using a scenario
only as a pretext for the stage effects, the tricks, or for a nicely arranged
tableau(Gunning 1986: 2). To Gunning, Le Voyage dans la lune, which premired in
France on 1 September 1902, is a special-effects movie with a narrative deployed only as
a means of linking set-pieces. But the story, however slender, is far more integral than
that a progressive narrative framework is an essential part of the trick, a way of hooking

Magic and illusion in early cinema

73

3 This is a highly indicative story, included here

as part of a demonstration of the uses to
which magic shows may
have been put, exploiting people who were
seen as having little
knowledge of, or
contact with new scientific inventions.
However, its facts must
be put into question by
the success of the Isola
Brothers, who had seen
in Robert-Houdins
performances an inspiring showmanship rather
than a frightening
display of superhuman
capabilities.

the audience, entertaining them while subtly undermining their faculties of discernment.
This was a skill which Mlis would have transplanted from his stage act to his filmmaking. He understood that a trick without a setting or theme would be too bland, too
easily recognizable as being a basic example of one of the five generic magical feats in
any magicians repertoire.
Georges Mlis (18611938), a former magician credited as director of up to 1200
short films, was not only one of the most prominent and elegant film-makers of the early
period (he produced and directed films from 18961913), but also an artist who blended
story and spectacle in a way which can be seen as prescient of todays cinematic specialeffects attractions. It was Mlis in particular who innovated in-camera techniques such
as multiple-exposure (which were common enough in still photography a trend for
spirit photography had begun at the end of the eighteenth century when the
possibilities of double exposure techniques were first discovered), dissolves, fades and
wipes to exploit the technical possibilities of the cinematographic equipment to produce
visual effects which rendered physical impossibilities on the screen.
Although he had been a popular and successful stage illusionist at the Thtre
Robert-Houdin, Mlis found that his stage performances did not translate directly to
the screen. When he filmed one of his tricks Escamotage dune femme chez Robert-Houdin
(1896), he filmed it in a single take, precisely as it had been designed for the stage. The
films viewers were, according to Mlis, underwhelmed: Evidently the whole thing
appeared childish on the screen. The audience could only see a lot of smoke and flames.
They did not get the idea (Mlis quoted in Legg 1967: 9).
Perhaps the audience were too preoccupied with marvelling at the technology itself
to be amazed by a trick contained within the film it displayed. Perhaps they were, even
in the earliest days of cinema, already expecting to see its application as a source of
actualities, of environments beyond the theatre. Mlis developed his special effects as a
way of using the mechanical potential of the camera for its own effects. He could
manipulate what the viewer saw, and preclude the need for the smokescreens and
curtains which were usually deployed to mask the mechanism of the trick. Mlis
needed to design facilities which would allow him control of all elements of film
production if he was to create motion pictures which were distinct from his stage work.
A story has it that Mlis built his first indoor studio to accommodate the pedantic
whims of the opera singer Paulus, who had asked to be filmed in one of his leading roles
in order to promote his career (the silence of the film seemed not to be a concern).
Paulus refused to suffer the indignity of being filmed outdoors in full make-up and
costume, so Mlis shot the film indoors with available light and a painted backdrop
(Mlis quoted in Legg 1967: 10).
When Mlis built his studio at Montreuil a few months later, it was about 90 feet
long, almost 40 feet wide and equipped with trapdoors and moving panels to enable the
easy conjuring and disappearances of performers. It had all the capstans, winches and
pulleys of a small theatre, purpose-built for staging fantasy sequences and mechanical
effects. Once we acknowledge the restrictions and repetitions to which a film-maker will
be subject while shooting hundreds of scenes within the same confined space, we can see
how a distinctive style and mise-en-scne quickly emerged in Mliss work. The
repetitions of particular tricks (to make full use of the equipment designed specifically for
particular effects) invited comparisons between each instance of the same effect, and
effectively de-realized the sensation of the trick and encouraged a critical appreciation of
the technical artistry involved. Compare, for instance, the many ways in which he
presents the illusion of severed limbs in Un homme de ttes (1898, in which Mlis

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Dan North

Figure 1. Mlis: The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906).

removes his own head and throws it in the air), LHomme la tte en caoutchouc (1901, in
which Mliss own head appears to inflate until it explodes), and Le Mlomane (1903,
where Mlis places six disembodied versions of his own head onto a musical stave).
A talk given by Mlis in 1906 and published in the Annuaire gnral et
international de la photographie the following year was aimed at viewers curious about
how certain special effects were produced, a curiosity which Mlis considered very
justifiable and natural in intelligent people who always seek to know the explanations
behind what they are looking at (Mlis 1988: 36). Rather than as a threat to the secrets
of his art, he saw such inquiry as vital in fostering an appreciation of it. Just as RobertHoudin described the five types of magic trick around which minor variations could be
arranged, so Mlis defines four types of cinematographic views; natural views, scientific
views, views of composed subjects and transformations. He mostly concerned himself
with the latter.
Mlis invented the principle of stop-motion effects when the camera jammed as he
was photographing a street scene at Place de lOpra in Paris (Mlis 1988: 44). The
projected image showed the passers-by changing position in an instant. He first applied
this principle to a staged narrative film in Le Manoir du diable (1896), as well as in
Cinderella (1899) (transforming a pumpkin into a coach, for example). The glitch in the
camera which had provoked the accidental stop-motion effect at Place de lOpra
embodied the principles of filmed illusion, but was only visible as a trick and not as a
technical fault when resituated within a narrative which establishes it as a picturing of a
magical event. Mlis himself remarks that:
It is the trick, used in the most intelligent manner, that allows the supernatural, the
imaginary, even the impossible to be rendered visually and produces truly artistic
tableaux that provide a veritable pleasure for those who understand that all branches
of art contribute to their realization (Mlis 1988: 45).

Mlis talks of his meticulous manipulation of mise-en-scne. Backdrops were painted in

greyscale, including everyday objects which were painted grey or made sufficiently
translucent on film to be hand-painted later. As Abel points out in a footnote:
Orthochromatic filmstock was sensitive to the purple-to-green portion of the spectrum,
so that objects in these colours showed up as white or light grey in film. It was not

Magic and illusion in early cinema

75

4 Even this, one of the

first films ever made,
reveals the factory
origins of the
equipment and financial
means of creating the
film. It is, amongst
other things, a
supremely self-reflexive
moment in cinema history.

sensitive, however, to yellow and red, and objects in these colours showed up as dark
grey or even black (Mlis 1988: 41)
The appreciation of artistry is not just for the sake of commemorating the hard work
of technicians, but an essential part of comprehension and digestion of the work as a
whole. It is a way of differentiating between the technical error and the narratively
significant, of acknowledging the deliberateness of the stop motion.

Film Technology: space and time

Viewing a selection of the earliest films will give the impression that the camera was
turned on anything which moved sufficiently to demonstrate the ability of the
equipment to capture it. Street scenes could provide multitudinous lines of movement,
the outdoor locations suggesting boundless off-screen space. It was with Georges Mlis
that studio film-making began to achieve the purpose for which it was designed
increased control over the technical elements of shooting, and eventually the
introduction of narrative. But this was not the dominant practice. Indeed, the
introduction of central narrativity as we understand it (the establishment of a plot,
followed by its development and resolution) was not fostered by the nature of the earliest
film-making equipment. What the technology did make possible was the filming of a
series of events contained within a prescribed time frame which could also be
manipulated artistically.
Inspection of the Lumire Brothers first films, such as Repas de bb (1895) or Sortie
des usines Lumire (1895),4 suggests that there was sufficient interest at least in the early
days of cinema-going in the sight of moving photographic representations of everyday
events to exclude the need for narrative devices. Film was attempting to find its own
ways of showing, unfettered by the requirements of script or story. This category of film
essentially foregrounded the technology (that is, the apparatus rather than what it could
achieve, as with Mlis). The technical limitations of the Cinmatographe were such that
narrative and character development were constrained by the absence of recorded,
synchronized sound, and the short length of each reel. The Lumires film-strips were 17
metres long (16 metres in the prototype), 35 millimetres wide and able to hold up to 900
photographic images in succession. This meant that films lasted for approximately 50
seconds, denying the viewer the necessary time for deep narrative immersion. Cinematic
exhibitions therefore showed a diversity of views, which encouraged variety and
experimentation within a prescribed technical frame of possibility.
Occasionally, the Lumire films demonstrate an awareness of even an exploitation of
the time constraint. Child walking has an infant walking from the background to the
foreground, where her toy is lying on the pavement. As the toddler teeters and sways on
her short mission, the suspense soon builds as to whether or not she will reach the toy
before the end of the film. Familiarity with the standard length of films at the time adds
the time limit as a border of narrative closure and therefore provides the film with its
meaning a small-scale suspense story which requires consideration of film form and
technological boundaries for its full effect. This highly self-conscious film-making
acknowledges the audiences ability to compare, by anticipating the length of the film,
their experience of this view within their own broad frame of reference.
Dmolition dun mur (1896), for which Louis Lumire filmed his brother Auguste
assisting in the demolition of a wall in the grounds of their factory, is a prime example of
the Lumires attempts to integrate appreciation of the technical and artistic properties of
the cinematic apparatus. This film contains a miniature narrative: the men have a goal
(knock down the wall), and there is suspense provided by the walls initial resistance to

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Dan North

the blows from several sledgehammers. The wall falls, and the men have achieved their
aim. It is a simple story with a beginning and an end, encasing a moment of time which
holds particular interest due to the fact that an action begins and ends within its span.
This is also one of the films which, famously, the Lumires would show twice at their
shows the second time in reverse. This has the effect of linking the narrative explicitly
to the technology which makes it comprehensible. When the viewer watches the film
being played backwards, with the pieces of the wall reassembling themselves, at least two
things are occurring to them. First, they understand that the film is being run in reverse.
That is to say, viewers do not think that a simulation of a wall magically healing its
wounds has been produced. This is a special effect produced by the projection
equipment and not manufactured by the camera at the shooting stage. Second, viewers
also recognize that they are watching the same scene, and therefore that the narrative will
be exactly the same in reverse; they can predict the ending of this new remix of the
same film.
Viewers must have experienced a mixture of amazement and amusement; it is an
obvious comedic device to show human activities reversed, to provide an opportunity to
examine human movement from the vantage point of an impossible time frame. What
the Lumires did was to subvert the narrative thread which viewers had followed,
demonstrating in the process cinemas singular capacity for toying with representations of
chronology, for showing the unshowable.
However, narrative or non-narrative, Demolition dun mur is usually categorized as an
actuality film, since it records an event which was to have taken place had the cameras
not been there; to what extent it was orchestrated to facilitate the filming is uncertain. It
transcends this categorization and subverts films capacity for realism when it is projected
backwards, turning the apparatus of recording and exhibiting (the Cinmatographe was
both a camera and a projector) into the focus of attention. Whatever it can teach us
about wall-demolition techniques is of secondary importance to its ability to
demonstrate explicitly the fundamental properties of film and film technology as a
manipulation of time and space which is dependent upon a director or operator for at
least some of its subjective meaning.
A fine example of an early film which manipulates the recording apparatus to present
a subjective time frame is Jean Durands Onsime horloger, produced for Gaumont in 1912.
This places it outside the era which Gunning defined as cinema of attraction (ending
around 1907), but it displays some magnificent uses of early special effects. The plot
concerns a man named Onsime5 who tampers with the regulator of Pariss central
clock, thus speeding up time so that he can receive his inheritance sooner. After the
establishment of this narrative device, the rest of the film consists of a series of setpieces,
all shot with an under-cranked camera to give the impression of increased speed.
Rather than precipitating the slapstick chaos which is normally made to seem
comedically-enhanced by speeding up the film, Onsimes prank makes the city more
efficient, more beautiful as an inter-title tells us. Commuting on public transport
becomes less time-consuming, court cases are settled swiftly, children pass through
adolescence to adulthood with no time for the turbulence of youth to cause upset to the
rest of the populace. Especially interesting is the scene in which a group of builders
construct a brick wall in a matter of seconds, the bricks flying into the hands from offscreen space. Close inspection reveals that the scene was filmed in reverse, with the
bricks being removed and thrown off-camera by the cast, but the speed of the film makes
the trick difficult to fathom at first. Durand clearly realized that one optical effect could
be used to cover the evidence of another.

Magic and illusion in early cinema

77

5 French director Jean

Durand (18821946)
used the character of
Onsime, played by
Ernest Bourbon, in several other films,
including Onsime
(1912), Onsime sur le
sentier de guerre (1913)
and Onsime et le coeur de
tzigane.

Most importantly, Durands film skilfully combines social comment with a striking
visual effect. Vitagraphs Liquid electricity; or, The inventors galvanic fluid (1907) also used
deliberate under-cranking in its tale of a scientist whose galvanic fluid causes bursts of
energy and speed in those upon which it is sprayed, but Onsime horlogers satirical
commentary on the inefficiency of modern society is inextricably linked to its
technique, unlike Liquid electricitys foregrounded comic spectacle. It allows film
technology to transform what it records into an improved reality and finds parodic value
through the use of an optical effect. Thus, when unified with a narrative, the special
effect can gain some status as a necessary and meaningful component of film production
rather than as mere adornment.
In relation to early cinema, it is interesting to note that not everybody was
overwhelmed by the first moving pictures. Amongst the underwhelmed was the Russian
writer Maxim Gorky, whose eloquent dismissal of the illusory capabilities of film will
provide a closing point for this article. With the enigmatic and enticing opening line:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows, Gorky (which is, entirely incidentally,
Russian for bitter) goes on to describe what he saw as a grim and depressing spectacle,
an imitation of life rather than a faithful recording of its characteristics:
Everything here the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air is dipped
in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces,
and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not
motion but its soundless spectre (Gorky 1960: 409).

Gorky grudgingly accepts the scientific worth of the innovation (it could probably be
applied to the general ends of science; Gorky 1960: 409), although he has seen it in a
non-scientific entertainment context, Aumonts, an apparently disreputable theatrical
salon, and regrets the incongruity of screening scenes of family meals (Repas de bb) and
departing workers (La sortie des usines Lumire) to an audience of prostitutes and the
unemployed. His main complaint is that the moving pictures are too unlike real life to
capture its essential characteristics. While Rudolf Arnheim used these same discrepancies
between life and film to defend film as a distinctive art form, Gorky uses them to dismiss
its claim to worth as an instrument of reflection. What he touches upon succinctly is the
notion that film is, as Arnheim put it, a partial illusion, and at this point (4 July 1896),
it was far from developing its potentials, but existed in its most raw form. He never
accepts it as realistic, but just an image. Gorky represents a voice of dissent,
demonstrating that critical thinking was already being applied to examinations of the
phenomenon of film.

Conclusion
This article has highlighted how the study of the Victorian magic show can provide an
insight into the context in which motion pictures were first experienced, and gives an
idea of the kind of critical criteria the earliest spectators may have applied. Viewers
accustomed to watching a stage illusion without being deceived, but being invited to
locate the mechanism behind a cloak of narrative immersion and showmans flourishes,
would find artistic and technical nourishment when asked to view a film-show
introduced by a magician as part of a repertoire of magic tricks. The historical links
between magic and cinema can help us understand early cinemas ambiguous relations to
both art and technology. In the work of Georges Mlis and the Lumire Brothers, we

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Dan North

can see how some of early cinema considered and adapted to the expectations of such
technically literate viewers.

References
Legg, Stuart (1967), Magician of the movies, Homage to Georges Mlis, Push Pin Graphic, New
York, pp. 813.
Barnouw, E. (1981), The magician and the cinema, New York, Oxford University Press.
Evans, H. R. (1977), Introduction, Magic: stage illusions and scientific diversions, (ed. A.Hopkins),
New York, Arno Press.
Gorky, M. (1960), A review of the Lumire programme at the Nizhi-Novgorod Fair,
(reproduced from Nizhegorodski listok, 4 July 1896. Appendix 2.
Leyda, J. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet film, London, George Allen & Unwin,
pp. 407409.
Gunning, T. (1986), The cinema of attraction: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde, Wide
Angle 8: 34, pp. 6370.
Gunning, T. (1995), An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator,
Viewing positions: ways of seeing film, (ed. L. Williams), New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers
University Press.
Hertz, C. (1924), A Modern Mystery Merchant, London, Hutchinson.
Mlis, M. (1988), Cinematographic views, R. Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A
History/Anthology, Volume 1: 19071929, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press,
pp. 3547.

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