Magic in Early Cinema

David Devant producing a rabbit in 1896

The early years of animated pictures were years of invention: a primitive technology was played with – “hacked” if we want to use a modern term – to become more reliable, safer, cheaper, of better quality. The presentation of moving pictures was a great novelty for public entertainment and it will eventually, in slightly more than 20 years from its inception, kill those live performances that had provided light entertainment for all social classes since the mid of the 19th century.

With the invention of motion picture cameras in the 1890s, films, under one minute length, started to be shown by itinerant performers, or used as acts in a variety (vaudeville) programme, in between live performances. The novelty of cinema attracted conjurers to it, from Georges Méliès, the major technical innovator of special effects in the early history of cinema, to various travelling performers who rented or built their own projecting machines to show films, to David Devant, the premier British illusionist of the time and the subject of this article.

The boxes where magic happens

“Dissecting Drawer Box” from the Marco Pusterla Collection. Most images, when clicked on, will show the picture in higher definition.

One of the most enduring magic tricks, with which almost any magician, amateur or professional, has at least once played with, must be the “drawer box“, a wooden parallelepiped with a drawer which can be shown empty, closed, opened again, and shown to contain some objects that have mysteriously materialized. Today, this box is often found made in plastic, churned out in hundreds of thousands of copies by some company in China, and sold as a toy for children, as a commercial gadget to promote products, or as part of a magic set for aspiring magicians.

The object doesn’t really look like anything existing in this time and age, and it often looks like what it is: a suspicious magic device, hiding some clever mechanism to befuddle the unwary. On doing a quick search for images of contemporary drawer boxes on the Internet, one sees an interesting gallery of the most variegated, multi-coloured, collection of boxes.

Being Danté and Being Rejected

I often think about the hard life touring magicians had at the turn of the century, with tons of material packed in heavy crates, to be loaded on trucks or ships, driven to the back of a theatre, carried in the wings to be unpacked and prepared for the evening show, and all this repeated week in and week out, with the constant fear that the audience would not accept the illusionist, that the publicity was not enough, that inclement weather would keep patrons away.

I have already talked about the weight of magical apparatus, something that had to be considered not only when the illusionist was travelling, but also when he was stopped in a city, waiting for the next engagement. Sometimes, the engagement would not arrive: the illusionist would be rejected by a theatre. We rarely have a view of any missed engagement, but in this article, for once, we will be able to add a small bit of information – inconsequential as it may be – to the life of one of the great magicians of the 20^th century.

A new (old) magic magazine: Ye Olde Magic Mag

Magazines, newspapers, journals, newsletters: the sources for recent historical research. When records of current events began to appear in the 17^th century in what we now call “newspapers,” and began to be printed in hundreds, then thousands of copies, maybe nobody realized how important these papers would have been a couple of centuries down the line for all kind of historical research.

The popularity of this new media inspired the creation of journals dedicated to specific subjects, mainly literary or political, and indeed even conjurers put their hands to the new media. The first magical magazine in the English language was The Conjuror’s Magazine, or Magical and Physiognomical Mirror published in England from 1791 to 1793 by one William Locke. The title was slightly deceiving for a magician, as very little conjuring was contained in its pages, the subject having mainly to do with astrology.

The Secret Book of Practical Illusions

Regardless of what some intellectuals of the field may say, for the Art of Magic to touch the human spirit it has to rely on the sense of mystery, otherwise it can’t be “magic.” You see, if you can figure out the method by which a magical effect is created, then you haven’t seen magic. When you watch a juggler, you can see exactly how he has to coordinate the throws of his balls to give a pleasant display of objects floating in the air. You may not be able to duplicate his display, but still you realize that long hours of practice are what allow him to do his tricks.

Similarly, if you see a magician showing a box empty by quickly opening the front door over a black interior, to then close it again and produce from it a white, fluffy bunny, you may be surprised, charmed and entertained, even if there is probably no great sense of mystery in you, no feeling of having witnessed magic. But what if this box, held upside down by a magician in the middle of a cabaret floor

When the Nazis stole a Magic Poster

Posters advertising Chung Ling Soo‘s performance at The Palace (Bristol, UK), circa 1910.

Before the times of the internet, radio and television, advertisement was done with the help of what we call “posters,” placards and bills that were posted on walls to inform the passer-by of events or products. Theatre shows, plays and indeed also magic shows were thus advertised. Most of the posters before 1870 were textual or just printed with black ink: it was with the perfection of colour lithography that economical, mass production of colour posters became available. Between posters advertising products or political ideas, those relating to entertainment were a common fixture on city walls and every theatre printed posters weekly to try to entice the paying public to the show.

Magicians, especially travelling ones, had been using posters for generations: many travelled with their own printing blocks and had new posters created in every city where they managed to give one or more performances. With the advent of lithography, magicians started to make good use of the technology to produce colourful images, with which to plaster walls, as it can be seen in the photo above, announcing a week’s performance of (fake) Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo in Bristol, showing 31 different pictorial posters (and two with the week’s “bill” at the theatre). These were only a small part of the posters used by Chung Ling Soo…

Spies, Magic, Manuscripts

A good magician is a keeper of secrets. Secrets are at the base of magic: it is only because the magician knows the secrets behind his tricks that he can fool you. A good magic trick contains many different layers of secrets: there may be the mechanical secret that operates a box; the hidden sleight of nimble fingers that causes cards to fly from the pack; the psychological secrets that cause the audience to look in a different place just when the “secret” maneuver happens. All these elements must be coordinated to ensure the magic trick is successful.

Magicians are not the only keepers of secrets: since antiquity the practice to hide information of knowledge from another party has been used by governments, groups of people and individual to both protect themselves and to get some kind of advantage over another party. Espionage is documented to ancient civilizations and what is not often known is that some spies had a public or, more often, private attraction to the Art of Magic. I have already mentioned Hieronimo Scoto as a spy for the Duke of Parma in the European courts of the XVI century, but only recently I acquired an unknown magic manuscript of a modern spy…

Yours Truly on MagicSeen

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Mark Leveridge, the editor of MagicSeen, a magic magazine for the younger and cooler side of the magic profession. Mark wanted to publish an article about magic collecting and, having found my blog interesting, decided to interview myself and Fergus Roy, the noted collector, organizer of magic collecting events, scholar, magic historian and part of the well-known Davenport family, on why magic collecting is important.

Another Magic Table; Another Forgotten Illusionist

World War II had, as it is well known, a huge impact on Europe, on its geography, on its political ideas, on the relations between different countries. And it also had a large impact on magic. When the war ended, in 1945, diffidence and mistrust was rife in all European countries. One of the few exceptions was in the world of magic: magicians are a friendly group, looking for contacts, friendship, novelties from other lovers of the art, anywhere in the world. While Europe was busy rebuilding trades, houses and families, a group of magicians from different countries made a significant step towards the reunion of magic lovers: the first international (actually, pan-European) magic convention. In 1946, three-hundred magicians from all around Europe descended to Amsterdam, Holland, for the first magic meeting after the war.

The following year, the event was repeated in Paris, France, with the attendance of more than five-hundred conjurers from Europe and abroad, and the base was set for the creation of FISM, the International Federation of Magic Societies that, since then, has been organizing regular conventions and, especially, the most prestigious magic competition in the World, which every three years crowns the best magician in the world. While in recent years the number of competitors has swelled, in 1947 only 70 magicians competed for a handful of prizes in only three categories: some competitors were also performing in the gala shows for the attendees! One of the categories was “Presentation” which was to recognize the most original performers of classic magic tricks. The first prize winner was Englishman Willane (William H. Lane), a popular author of magic books for the fraternity. The winner of the third prize was an obscure Dutch magician, a popular illusionist in Holland in the years after the war, and the subject of this story: Conchito.

A Stash of Old Magic Posters

Linga Singh – the Indian Conjurer

Every collector of antique memorabilia has a dream, a single dream common to all those whose passion for a subject has turned into an obsession: the dream is to find a large amount of material that has lied untouched and forgotten for years. It doesn’t matter what the subject of your collection is: cars, photographs, stamps, old masters’ paintings, magic tricks… every collector daydreams about finding a dark attic, a barn, a cellar, filled with unheard-of treasures, dusty but potentially unique.

There are many stories of finds just like that: a couple of years ago, in a barn in the town where I live, was discovered a fleet of luxury cars which hadn’t seen the light of day in twenty years (this is not the hoax of the fleet of cars in Portugal, which, while existing, has not actually been “found”). Magicians are well aware of how the show of Charles Carter re-surfaced after forty years in a barn, or how a large collection of magic posters was recently found in a downtown attic, including a rare Houdini poster.

However, this is for most collectors just a dream. For most collectors, indeed. But sometimes, just some times, dreams may come true…