Resource Review: Disappearing Tricks
Teaching myself about film comedy history involves more than just watching movies, which I love to do. Fortunately for me, I also love reading nonfiction and this project has opened up a whole new library of titles and authors to explore. I’m lucky enough that I’m also getting an opportunity to interview some of the authors of the resources I’m using for the Acting Funny project. So, from time to time here on the blog, I will share a quick review for you of a resource I used for a recent episode. See my disclosures page for comments on my review policy.
When movie magic was real magic.
Dr. Matthew Solomon’s excellent history of the relationship between stage magic and early cinema, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, was featured in Season 01, Episode 02: “Who were the early adopters of film and comedy? (1896)”
I grew up as a kid in the 1970s in what turned out to be something of a golden age for magicians on television. There were magicians on Saturday morning TV. There were magicians with variety show specials. There were magicians performing on late night television. You could see other less magical celebrities try their hand at stage magic on proto-reality shows such as Circus of the Stars. There were mentalists, illusionists, sleight of hand tricksters, and hypnotists. Before I was 10 years old, I probably had seen hundreds of ladies sawed in half from the comfort of my living room sofa. And it never grew old.
I knew their names: Henning, Blackstone Jr., Copperfield, among others. But one name stood out from the rest, and I never saw him perform even once. Yet, if I heard anyone mention the name Houdini, I stopped whatever I was doing and stayed in front of the screen. Never mind that Harry Houdini had been dead for more than forty years before I was even born. I knew his legend. I knew his story- or at least as much as a 10-year-old kid in the late 70s could know about a star performer of vaudeville. And if someone was going to even talk about Houdini, much less attempt to do one of his famous tricks, I was all in.
Some forty years later, when I embarked on this project to learn about the history of film comedy, I was delighted to see my early love of magic and magicians return to me in an unexpected way.
As I started to learn about the life of Georges Méliès and his role in the early days of film, I began to pick up on the thread that magicians and people like Méliès who inhabited the world of stage magic, were key players in the earliest days of film’s emergence. That realization led me to Dr. Matthew Solomon and his book, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century.
While Dr. Solomon’s book title name drops the great Harry Houdini, this book is just as much- and rightfully so- about the work and legacy of film pioneer Georges Méliès. Solomon’s thorough research also brings to light names and contributions of other magicians from the late 19th and early 20th century who played an important role in the intertwined evolving histories of stage magic and cinema.
Solomon’s work begins with a look at the emergence of spiritualism in the Victorian era and that era’s ongoing fascination with death and the hereafter. Intriguingly, the author illustrates how the world of magicians coalesced around the notion of exposing fraudulent behavior from con artists posing as psychics, mediums, and others. This effort at anti-spiritualism would inform the design of new tricks and new evolutions in stage magic performance. As Solomon illustrates, these new techniques and performances would also find their way into early film narratives of the 1890s.
This introduction to the competition between magicians and spiritualists was fascinating to read and helped me better understand the context of the history I would witness in early films. Solomon’s book then takes us on a journey through the parallel timelines of Méliès and Houdini in France and the USA, as they learn to adapt to and embrace the emerging technology of cinema as a component of or complement to their performances, up to Houdini’s own appearances in films in the teens and twenties.
Disappearing Tricks was crucial to me in researching the 1896 episode, and remains a resource I refer to as I continue to move forward in time to the early 20th century. And, while academic in nature, the book itself is an enjoyable read with Solomon developing a logical narrative to tie together the various key achievements and personalities. I would happily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading histories in general, but especially to anyone with an interest in early film history, magic and vaudeville history, and pop culture history, as it will certainly illuminate new connections for the reader on how those three areas overlap so easily at the beginning of the 20th century. It also includes a comprehensive bibliography to help you track down other potential resources to explore and, a favorite feature of mine in any book like this, an excellent index to help me find a specific topic or personality I want to easily access for future reference in my own research.
Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century was originally published in 2010 by the University of Illinois Press. It received the Best Moving Image Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation in 2011, and was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2011 by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Dr. Solomon is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is currently working on a book about Georges Méliès.