ABSTRACT
During a magic show, an audience misses the production of the trick while it occurs in plain sight. Onstage, the magician accomplishes the trick by using sleight-of-hand. Onscreen, the cut produces the illusion. Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Georges Méliès's trick film The Vanishing Lady (1896), Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006), this chapter argues that the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performance—both onstage and onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event. The magic show trick film privileges spectacle over narrative. The second half of the chapter argues that the Hollywood style does the opposite. Hollywood film nearly always foregrounds plot even when it still features spectacle. After the theatrical “cinema of attraction,” D.W. Griffith (along with Eisenstein and others) seemingly severed the relationship between theatre and cinema through cinematic innovations such as montage, cross-cutting, flashbacks, and narrative cohesion that transformed the film industry of which Griffith arguably shaped into the Hollywood style.
