Watching closely with turn-of-the-century eyes: Obscured histories of magic, science, and animation in the cinema

My dissertation examines the relevance of nineteenth-century "modern" stage magic's early intersections with the cinema to understanding where and how magic fits in contemporary cinema culture and the study of digital effects, animation, and spectatorship. Engaging the recent return of modern magic in films like THE ILLUSIONIST (2006), THE PRESTIGE (2006), and HUGO (2011), as well as in scholarship on computer-generated imagery (CGI), I conduct a rigorous historical and theoretical analysis of the relationship between the invocation of magic and the process of media change from "old" to "new." My guide is the relatively unexplored fact that, throughout the history of the cinema, magic has endured as a representational and theoretical refrain that has consistently coincided with periods of wonder and innovation in the medium. The significance of this endurance, I argue, resides less in that it confirms the magic performance's suitability for "showcasing" the novelty of the cinema at the end of the nineteenth century or of the digital at the end of the twentieth, and more in that it speaks to magic's role in "mediating" the effects of those changes on how we think about the cinema, its history, and its future.;Drawing on historian Neil Harris' theory of the "operational aesthetic," I trace a genealogy of trickery that has significant roots in medieval discourses of wonder, Enlightenment critiques of the occult, and modern scientific modes of investigation and popular visual education. Using a media-archaeological approach to trace this genealogy, I orient digital effects in a long history of magic in which the experience of wonder takes the form of what I call, in chapter 1, sleight-of-hand education. By displaying new media as devices of wonder, modern stage magic conditions the reception of those media with the question of "how it's done" and compels investigations of the sometimes baffling experiences generated by new technologies and techniques of representation. This invitation to investigation, I argue, bears directly on the discursive identification of media as "old" and "new," and on the cycling of magic's invocation during periods of cinematic change. By highlighting what I consider to be the enlightening potential of the representation of modern stage magic, I demonstrate how magic tricks perform work; that is, in a sense, how they mediate media. This work forms the basis of a channel by which the return to fin-de-siecle magic in new media studies is made not only possible but also, in my opinion, the most sound.;At the center of my project is the fact that the prominence of early trick films has obscured other viable histories of magic in the cinema. In chapter 2, I address the role of modern magic at the turns of the last two centuries in the laboratories of experimental psychologists and cognitive (neuro)scientists who investigated tricks using the chronophotograph, eye-tracking camera technologies, and neuroimaging devices. Magicians' tricks have also shadowed the long history of the wondrous in non-fiction film, particularly in the use of time-lapse photography, and have been used to mediate quick-change practices and experiences related to animation, the subjects of chapters 3 and 4 respectively. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how the discourses on vision, detection, epistemology, and wonder circulating in these cases converge around the representation of stage magicians in THE ILLUSIONIST and THE PRESTIGE and reveal how an "older" category of trickery becomes quite slippery and elusive in digital cinema. Chapter 6 explores how the various layers of trickery in these films and HUGO invite investigations of the archaeology of magic in the cinema in terms of obscured continuities between "new" and "old" forms of media magic. I shed light on these obscured histories in order to expand (not to challenge) the study of magic in early cinema and to account for what links this period to the return to/of magic in contemporary cinema. I do this, moreover, on the premise that the nature and significance of this return beg further inquiry, both because the return itself is underexplored, and because of its potential to help renew the historiography of magic in the cinema and the relevance of this history to theorizing spectatorship, aesthetics, and epistemology in an increasingly digital cinema.