Friday, 9 November 2007
Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 620, 6:30pm-8pm
Directions to TUCC
Matthew Solomon, College of Staten Island, CUNY
“Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s”
Respondent: Karen Beckman, University of Pennsylvania
The end of stage magic’s “Golden Age” is often attributed to the popularity of cinema and the attendant decline of vaudeville. Rather than treating magic and film as competing industries, this presentation examines the apparent symbiosis that thrived between the two arts during the 1920s, when magicians like Houdini exploited moving pictures and Hollywood studios made a number of movies about magicians. What does the magic profession’s interest in feature filmmaking indicate about how ideas around visual illusionism were changing at this time? Correspondingly, what do films like You Never Know Women (1926), The Last Performance (1929), and Illusion (1929) suggest about the “magic” of Hollywood cinema during the silent period?
Three Wizards of the West (Harry Kellar, Houdini, and Irvin Willat)
Matthew Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, where he coordinates the M.A. program in Cinema and Media Studies. He has published recent articles on magic and silent film in Theatre Journal and Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Houdini, Silent Cinema, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, and the editor of Méliès’s Trip to the Moon: Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, under contract with the State University of New York Press.
Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of the History of Art and the Director of Cinema Studies. She is also a senior editor of the journal Grey Room. She received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism, and co-editor with Jean Ma of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (forthcoming, Duke UP).
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