Metempsycose shows were popular in fairgrounds in France and Belgium in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, staging mutating ghosts and the supposed migration of the soul as optical ill...

Métempsycose as attraction on the fairground: the migration of a ghost

The central contention of this article is that from an institutional perspective, the important point about intermediality, and especially about the appearance of new media, is that it is almost always productive, generating discontinuities, ellipses, and anxieties that can be worked upon within media texts and creatively worked through by those who produce, exhibit, and consume them. Working through two case studies focused upon the idea of the ‘trick’ within magic theatre and early film at the turn of the nineteenth century, the article therefore seeks to address questions of medium principally in terms of the material practices enacted at the shows themselves.

Productive intermediality and the expert audiences of magic theatre and early film

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Reality & Effect: A Cultural History of Visual Effects

In "The Essence of Laughter," Charles Baudelaire asks why we burst out laughing when witnessing another's physical accidents, such as the "sight of a man falling on the ice or in the street."1 The poet speculates that such laughter "an involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze" is produced by the collision between competing senses of "infinite grandeur" and "infinite misery"; an "unconscious pride" born of a sense of superiority, as well as a fundamental insecurity regarding our frailty and exposure to forces beyond our grasp and control.2 The laughing spectator's haughty proclamation "Look at me! I am not falling!" is haunted by the thoughts for the moment or this time? Baudelaire qualifies his hypothesis by noting: "The man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired, by habit, the power of rapid self-division and thus of witnessing the phenomena of his own ego as a disinterested spectator."4 The essence of Baudelaire's laughing philosopher the acquired ability to perform a rapid and mirthful auto-analysis, to face the self as other in a split second, and to think the unsublimated copresence of contradictory forces and ideas is distilled by spectacular scenes of an unexpected fall and falling apart occasioned by the accident. Avital Ronell's compact reading of Baudelaire's essay cites the ability to laugh at oneself accidentally falling as the constitutive

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/41371524

How It Feels to Be Run Over: Early Film Accidents

This article addresses the relationship between early cinema and the tradition of spiritualist exposes. The latter were spectacular shows performed by stage magicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which aimed to debunk the tricks employed by spiritualist mediums in their seances. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the dispositif, this article shows how early cinema renewed and reinterpreted the tradition of the exposes. Focusing in particular on Hugo Munsterberg’s work, moreover, it addresses the connections between early film theory and psychological studies that debunked the illusions performed in spiritualist seances and stage magic. In the conclusion, the article proposes to employ the concept of “cinema of exposure” in order to address how early cinema invited spectators to acknowledge their own perceptual delusion.

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The Cinema of Exposure: Spiritualist Exposés, Technology, and the Dispositif of Early Cinema

(1987). Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Melies. Journal of Popular Film and Television: Vol. 15, The Silent Cinema, pp. 110-119.

André Gaudreault

Papers

Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès