School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemFrom spirits to the screen: a cultural history of magic and magical entertainment( 2010)This thesis examines the history of magic in Western culture, particularly focusing upon the contemporary period in which magic is performed within a context of secular entertainment such as that of cinema. It begins with a conceptual discussion of magic that defines the term through the cultural attributions of its performance, namely, that magic is a descriptive term used to make sense of unknown or ambiguous phenomena. This thesis then goes on to ground this assertion historically, by suggesting that magic is a culturally contingent term that has been defined through two main phases. These are the periods of Spiritual Magic, a pre-Enlightenment context in which magic was an efficacious principle of causality, and that of Entertainment Magic, in which the belief that once gave magic its efficacious powers is eliminated by the secular turn of culture and magical performance becomes a form of entertainment. Entertainment Magic relies upon the conjuring of magical appearances and experiences, or effects and affects, through illusion. This thesis examines one strand of this illusion making: that of screen displays which instrumentally construct projected visual illusions as magical appearances. These instruments, which include the Camera Obscura, Magic Lantern, Phantasmagoria and the Kinetoscope, provide the technical legacies of illusion making and magical performance that come to inform the cinematic medium as the apotheosis of this form of visual illusion making. The final section of this thesis examines the films of Georges Méliès to explore cinema as a medium of magic that is comprised of effects and affects. The trick film demonstrates that cinema’s magical effects are part instrumental, based upon technological special effects that create magic through visual illusions, and part narratival, for it is a narrative context that gives meaning to illusions and encourages the spectator to suspend their disbelief in illusory effects. Further, however, the status of cinema as a magical entertainment is also based upon its ability to affect the spectator, to conjure the conditions of magical experiences through the mediums imaginary appearances.