Book review: Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and Cinema

Magicians and magic performances played a pivotal role in the formation of cinema and animation in the late Victorian period. Most prominently, the early career of Georges Méliès as a magician underpinned his adoption of moving images and innovations in trick film techniques. Similar careers in stage magic shaped the work of other early film pioneers, such as Walter Booth and Albert E Smith (business partner of James Stuart Blackton), resulting in those trick film techniques being extended to what would become known as animation. Film historians, including Eric Barnouw (1981) and Matthew Solomon (2010), have previously explored in detail the immediate historical connections and aesthetic consequences the intersections of magic and cinema have had.

Colin Williamson’s engaging and thought-provoking book Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and Cinema provides an original and timely contribution to the exploration of this field. As well as a carefully researched consideration of the direct impact of magical performances on early cinema and the representation of magicians in later films, Williamson reveals the conceptual and theoretical implications of this intermedial encounter, especially for contemporary special effects cinema. As a result of this expanded ambition, his corpus encompasses not only the early magic trick films of Méliès and Gaston Velle, but also European art cinema (The Magician, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1958; The Storm Tamer, dir. Jean Epstein, 1947), recent Hollywood films featuring digital effects (The Illusionist, dir. Neil Burger, 2006; The Prestige, dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006; Hugo, dir. Martin Scorsese, 2011) and natural history films and animation (Fantasia, dir. James Algar et al., 1940). Of particular interest to readers of this journal, these latter examples also provide a point of departure for theorizing animation more broadly. Nevertheless, magic, as a cultural category, remains the touchstone and centre of this book.

Williamson’s core argument is encapsulated in his phrase ‘I think I know, but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless’ (p. 3). He cogently argues that modern or secular magical performances provoke this twofold response in an audience as they are asked to reconcile the events they see with their knowledge of the world. In being presented as magic, a performance is neither accepted with unthinking credulity, nor dismissed as false, and neither does it depend upon a simple suspension of disbelief. Rather, the audience is aware that what they see depends on something ‘hidden in plain sight’, as his title puts it, engendering a search for the underlying mechanism, a very particular position of spectatorship.

After an introduction that provides a summary and overview of the book, chapter 1 sets out this viewing disposition through the concept of ‘wonder’. Williamson tracks the 19th-century emergence of secular magic, a respectable entertainment form rooted in enlightened scientific rationality, distinct from sorcery, witchcraft or necromancy (p. 25). Magic entailed an educational stance, encouraging not belief but a desire to understand (p. 37). If the magician becomes a ‘professor’ here (p. 30), the spectators become detectives, whose wondering position entails a search for explanation (p. 37). Williams identifies this viewing mode in early cinema and its audiences, linking it with Tom Gunning’s (1989) account of their ‘astonishment’ (p. 41). Yet he also sees it being renewed throughout cinema history, forming the foundation for later chapters.

Chapter 2 addresses the relationships between cinema, science and vision. Here Williamson establishes a productive analogy between the figure of the magician and the cinematic apparatus, both of which perform ‘tricks’ that play upon, and also thereby draw attention to, perception (p. 56). He explores the fascinating and unduly neglected use of chronophotography by French psychologist Alfred Binet, in the 1890s (pp. 49–58), finding close parallels with present-day use of eye-tracking technologies to investigate both magic tricks and the illusionism of continuity editing (pp. 58–64). Williamson concludes that ‘encountering a trick, whether it is performed by the cinema or by a magician, can thus be like encountering the very nature and limitations of human perception’ (p. 68).

The capacity of cinema to simultaneously reveal and enchant is explored in chapter 3 through a case study of time-lapse photography, especially those examples that feature the growth of plants. Animation as both technique and idea become central here. Analysed examples include hand-drawn cel-animated plant life in Fantasia (pp. 74–77) and John Ott’s painstaking time-lapse photography for Disney’s Secrets of Life (1956), as well as his work for other films and television shows (pp. 89–93). These are all animated because, like earlier magic tricks involving flowers, animals and plants, they ‘breathe life into an apparently inanimate object’ (p. 78). This highlights the capacity of cinematic technology to not simply mediate nature, but to itself become the object of wonder. This is prominent in recent uses of time-lapse photography in conjunction with digital manipulation, such as the BBC nature documentary series Life (2009), where audiences marvel at the capacity of cinematic technology as much as the natural world.

Chapter 4 sees Williamson return to more direct interactions between stage magic and cinema, as well as ‘cinema’s most basic trick: the illusion of motion’ and the ‘wondrousness of the metamorphosis from stillness to movement’ (p. 101), making animation theory crucial to his arguments. Williamson posits that the magician, the animator and cinematic technology all produce wonder at their capacity to imbue movement and life. Revisiting early cinema, Williamson provides a critical insight into a number of early trick films made by, and featuring, magicians and utilizing extensions of the ‘blow book’, which Williamson has previously explored in the pages of this journal (Williamson, 2011). Magical trick films by Méliès and Velle (pp. 105–113) provide a basis for more expansive theorization of ‘the screen as a magical threshold on which the intermittent movement between the animate and inanimate takes place’ (p. 118). As in other chapters, these historical examples from pre- and early cinema are then connected with the present-day examples, in this case theme-park attractions.

The technological and spectatorial parallels and distinctions between early cinema and more recent digital imaging provide the focus for chapter 5. Williamson scrutinizes The Prestige and The Illusionist, both films released in 2006 that depict 19th-century stage magic and use this historical period to negotiate their mix of longstanding physical special effects and digital manipulation or computer-generated imagery. Williamson finds that these films, both through their narrative representation of stage magic and in the paratextual discussion of their production in publicity material, negotiate the ‘opacity of the digital’ (p. 148). Where examples discussed earlier in the book evoked wonder by offering the hope of catching ‘how it is done’, CGI simply produces ‘a blatant and persistent void’ (p. 149). Here Williamson echoes critical views of digital imaging given by Dudley Andrew and Vivian Sobchack (p. 153). These can be contrasted with other accounts that see more evidence of production labour in CGI, such as Christopher Holliday’s idea of the ‘digital thumbprint’ (Holliday, 2018). Nevertheless, for Williamson, these two films provide evidence that magic, and the wonder it evokes, remain compelling tools for understanding and shaping what media are (p. 154).

The final chapter demonstrates this through its detailed consideration of Hugo and the way present-day cinema can reanimate historical early cinema antecedents and reinvigorate the wonder moving images began with. Drawing on Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of ‘deep time’, Williamson sees Hugo offering a meditation on film history and its relationships with magic (p. 159). Particularly insightful in this regard is the way Williamson describes the film encouraging the audience to not only wonder at early cinema, but also to wonder at the process of investigating and rediscovering it. ‘“Doing film history” is being offered up as something to be wondered at’ (p. 175).

Williamson’s project offers a valuable account of the interactions between magic and cinema. In his conclusion, he points towards the further potential for exploring this topic, for instance the extensive history of magic on television, an area Max Sexton (2017) has addressed in a book published after Williamson’s. Yet, this book offers much more than just a finite history as it opens up a space in which the ‘wondering’ position of the spectator of magic can be used as a way to understand changing media identities. For this reason, the book will be a valuable addition to teaching not only early cinema, but also media history and theory more generally. The historical and geographical range of examples addressed will make the ideas raised applicable in varied contexts, although that broad scope is not fully critically engaged in the book. For instance, the differing national and industrial contexts of American and European films are not considered closely. The book raises complex topics but is always written in a careful and straightforward manner that will be accessible for students.

For readers of this journal who are researching, teaching and practising animation, Williamson’s book should be embraced. Despite the absence of animation in its title, this can very much be considered an animation book. Williamson offers a valuable corrective to the well-worn accounts of the relationship between animation and pre-cinematic stage performances and technologies. Williamson avoids the tired mechanistic account that traces animation history to optical toys. This common claim has been derived from very old sources, such as EG Lutz’s (1920) ‘how-to’ book Animated Cartoons and the 1955 Disneyland television episode ‘The Story of the Animated Drawing’. These assume, with little evidence, a technical lineage from pre-cinema to what later became known as animation. Despite Donald Crafton’s (1982) careful warning about such claims, this origin story is all too frequently repeated in more recent animation studies publications with little scrutiny applied. In contrast, Williamson instead uses rigorous primary research, such as the archival material on Binet, to establish precise causal connections between 19th-century visual technologies, magic, cinema and animation. At the same time, he uses this historical research as a platform for sophisticated theorization that considers animation encompassing many forms of cinema. Like the magical films he analyses, Williamson offers us ‘an object lesson in the animating powers of the medium . . . a lesson in the wondrousness of the cinema’s “miracle” of movement where there is basically only stasis: still images come to life’ (p. 115).