The Blow Book, Performance Magic, and Early Animation: Mediating the Living Dead

Abstract

This article explores the history of early animation and modern magic in light of discourses on the cinema’s capacities for bringing inanimate objects (including the still photograph) to life. The cinema’s early encounter with a metamorphic magic book known as a blow book, which is constructed like a flip book without sequential imagery, will be considered in order to specify the terms of one form of animation and its structures of illusion and belief. The principles of modern magic will also be addressed to explain the significance of a number of trick films that featured the blow book directly as a means of demonstrating the animating ‘powers’ of the cinema. This analysis will challenge the use of animation as an umbrella concept within cinema and media studies, and provide a basis for beginning to think through the return of new media studies to 19th-century magic as a model for understanding digital illusions.

Para-animation in Practice and Theory: The Animateur, the Embodied Gesture and Enchantment

“…Scholars have examined the historical and ontological connections between early cinema, wonder and magic (Barnouw, 1981; Gunning, 1989; Solomon, 2010; Souriau, 1952). Colin Williamson (2011, 2015) has examined the shared history between magic and cinema, uncovering ‘what unifies’ them in order to answer the question ‘how and to what extent do the tricks of digital technologies resonate with the manual and mechanical magic of early cinema?’ Williamson argues that the figure of the magician has remained central to cinema, even with the technological changes brought about by digital media. Cinema is a ‘device of wonder’, which, Williamson (2011: 8–14) explains, can be described as a ‘mechanical magician’ who, like the stage magician, attracts audiences with its tricks and invites us to ‘suspend disbelief’.…”

“…The latter re-inclusion is rooted in critical frameworks developed to understand film vis-à-vis the digital medium (Cubitt, 2004, Manovich, 2001Rodowick, 2007;Youngblood, 2020) and can be described as 'animation 2.0'. Building on earlier scholarship (Furniss, 1998;Klein, 2000;Russett and Starr, 1988), a renaissance of animation studies (Buchan, 2013(Buchan, , 2014Cubitt, 2013;Richards, 2020;Williamson, 2013) has intersected with a growing interest in re-thinking media historiographies and theories from transnational and transcultural perspectives, in light of globally pervasive digital cultural shifts.…”

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

“…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.…”