Di sappeari ng i n Pl ai n Si ght:

The Magic Trick and the Missed Event

Rachel Joseph



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. Both use invisibility to achieve their effects. Using a psychoanalytic lens, this study
contends the magic trick stages a fantasy of disappearance and return that mirrors Freuds concept of
fort/da and Peggy Phelans concept of performance. Cinematic representations of the trick use the stage as
a metaphor for being both gone and there. Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Christopher
Nolans [The Prestige] (2006) and Georges Mliss trick film [The Vanishing Lady] (1896), this
essay argues the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performanceboth onstage and
onscreenwhich always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event.



Invisibility cloaks that which is there and not at the same time. It hovers at the edge of sight,
palpably present but still unknown, a trick of vision. One particularly poignant example of this
phenomenon occurs in Christopher Nolans film, The Prestige (2006). Illusion designer Harry
Cutter performs a magic trick for a child. He makes a bird disappear and then reappear. The
underside of the trick involves literally killing the bird by smashing it in a collapsible cage and
then replacing it with a double. In order to execute the trick, sleight-of-hand requires the
violence of repressing the method of production in such a way that the audience misses its
essential nature.
1



1
The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (2006: Burbank CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment,
2007), DVD.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
The magic trick requires an act by the magician that exceeds what audiences can or want to
perceive. The smashed bird hidden from sight operates as this invisible excess, the unseen
remainder. A voiceover before the films beginning makes the stakes explicit: Are you watching
closely?
2
Perhaps in response to the traumatic nature of the trick, the question should be Do
you want to watch closely? According to illusion designer Cutter, missing the sleight-of-hand
is a choice of the spectator: Now you are looking for the secret, but you wont find it because
youre not really looking. You dont really want to know. You want to be fooled.
3
Ann
Heilmann points out that, We want to be fooled because the truth may be more than we have
bargained for.
4
What is more than what we have bargained for becomes apparent when
examining the mechanics of the trick. Performed onstage, the magicians sleight-of-hand
remains invisible but occurs in plain sight, enacting the traumatic core of performance. As Alice
Rayner theorizes about the stage, The curtain veils appearances at the same time that it frames
attention and makes the invisible visible.
5
The audience both sees and fails to see the event.
Although the trick we see in The Prestige is designed for the stage, what we are seeing is filtered
through the cinematic. No birds died in the making of the film. To create the illusion of the
birds violent disappearance, the film uses the cut, the seemingly invisible yet visible split at the
heart of narrative film. The magic trick renders visible the traumatic aspects of both stage and
screen through invisibility.

The late nineteenth-century milieu of The Prestige takes place during the same time period that
magician, inventor, performer, painter, and filmmaker Georges Mlis produced the first trick
films. Early cinemas trick films showcased magic acts and feats of the camera such as cuts,
substitution splices, cross-dissolves, and double exposure, often using a stage setting.
6
Using
examples from The Prestige and Mlis 1896 trick film The Vanishing Lady, I suggest the
ontology of the trick sheds light on the relationship between invisibility onstage and onscreen.
Psychoanalysis supplies a useful paradigm for making sense of invisibility. Both Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan offer frameworks for understanding the interplay between loss and presence
at work in the trick. Freuds concept of fort/da, based on his grandsons game of hide and seek
with a toy while saying fort, gone, and da, there, rehearses what it means to be gone and
there in a similar way that cinema grapples with simultaneous presence and absence. Lacans
concept of the unknowable Real and its remainder, the object a, illuminates the invisible core of
the tricktrauma. The truth that the dead bird from The Prestige represents, I contend,
mirrors the traumatic nature of the present moment, one the live event makes explicit and that
the cinematic can never achieve. For this reason, the spectator misses the production of the
trick onstage and onscreen, unconsciously unwilling to see the truth in the illusion and the
visible in the invisible.

Discourse on the relationship between theatre and cinema has ranged from the ontological
explorations of Andr Bazin and Susan Sontag to theatre and early cinema scholarships
historical analyses of the variety of ways the two forms borrowed and learned from one

2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ann Heilmann, Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige
and The Illusionist, Neo-Victorian Studies 2:2 (Winter 2009-2010): 24.
5
Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Deaths Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 157.
6
Matthew Solomon, Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film, Theatre Journal
58.4 (December 2006): 602.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
another.
7
Charles Musser has argued for a history of theatrical culture which includes both
stage and screen.
8
Seldom, however, do these discussions offer sustained explorations of the
questions raised by representations of theatre and performance within film.
9
Siegfried Kracauer
briefly points to stage interludes as instances of a break in the flow of life of the narrative.
10

Laura Mulveys groundbreaking essay Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema in part
argues that when a woman performs onstage in film she attracts the male gaze and that these
moments become pure spectacle outside of narrative time.
11
Film scholarship engages with the
theatrical nature of the early cinema in relationship to its first exhibitions in fairgrounds,
vaudeville, and variety shows.
12
The stage frames the trick and conjures the illusion of presence
in a spectacle framed and set off from the rest of the attraction or narrative. The magic act
onscreen and onstage manifests an impossible yearning for presence embodied in the tricks
structure of vanishing and appearance.

The Tri ck of Fi l m
The relationship between spectacle and narrative in early cinema has been explored extensively
in the scholarship surrounding Tom Gunning and Andr Gaudreaults theory of the cinema of
attractionsthe exhibitionist and theatrical cinema before 1906.
13
This essay focuses more
specifically on the ways cinema and the cinematic trick represent and interact with the sleight-
of-hand of live magic. Cinematic magic requires the repression of the deadness of the form
itself. Through the sleight-of-hand of cinematic representation, the live is continually
represented yet remains invisible, obscured behind cinemas various tricks. This repression
surfaces in the invoking of theatre and performance onscreen. Trick films based on magic acts

7
For examples, see Andr Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (1967), trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 76-124; Susan Sontag, Film and Theatre, in Theater and
Film: A Comparative Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005), 134-151; A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1949); Ben Brewster
and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
8
Charles Musser, Towards a History of Theatrical Culture: Imagining an Integrated History of Stage
and Screen, in Screen Culture, History, Textuality, ed. John Fullerton (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey,
2004), 3-19.
9
Representation analysis of theatre within film often focuses on screen musicals and occasional thematic
explorations. For examples, see Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical: Second Edition (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993); Martin Rubin, Showstoppers (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993); Alenka Zupani, A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcocks Films, in Everything You
Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj iek (London and
New York: Verso, 2010), 73-105.
10
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 73.
11
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26.
12
For examples, see essays in Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini,
and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois
Press, 2010).
13
Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, Wide
Angle 8.3/4 (1986): 229-235 and Andr Gaudreault, Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality:
Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Mlis, trans. Paul Attallah, Journal of Popular Film and
Television15.3 (1987): 110-119. Also see, Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
specifically make use of the structure of vanishing and appearance within the trick in order to
come to terms with a lack of presence through the illusion of presence.
14


Gunning argues the cinema of attractions creates a sudden burst of presence.
15
The structure
of attractions mimics the vanishing and reappearing acts of the magic show in that the
attraction can appear or disappear and generally needs to do both.
16
According to Gunning,
the trick films of Mlis are emblematic of the cinema of attractions.
17
He points to the fact
that the person watching attractions plays a very different game of presence/absence, one
strongly lacking predictability or a sense of mastery.
18
These moments produce an overall effect
of traumatic shock and surprise.
19


As a frequent trope of early cinema, the inclusion of the magic show and its ability to show
something also requires a considerable investment in the invisible.
20
Gunning distinguishes the
cinema of attractions from narrative film by pointing to a fundamental quest for visibility and
self-consciousness in the relationship between the performer, the camera, and the spectator
viewing the film. Yet, invisibility drives magician-themed trick films both in the illusion
produced and its method of production. Invisibility runs the show so that the production of the
trick remains out of view. Matthew Solomon asserts that in Mlis trick film The Vanishing
Lady, concealment is key to the cinematic trick: like cinema itself, the mechanism of which is a
continual oscillation between concealment and revelation as the shutter covers and then
uncovers each frame as the film is advanced within the camera and the projector.
21
In a similar
vein, Ren Thoreau Bruckner observes about film, The image disappears in order to
appear.
22
Despite the cinema of attractions quest for visibility, it is invisibility that produces
the illusion. As a form, the cinema of attractions operates as a realm of excess that is unable to
be assimilated. The seamlessness of narrative film is absent here. The invisibility of the camera
and cinemas methods of production is exposed in an attempt to make the invisible visible.

Mlis trick films illustrate the essential nature of the trick both onstage and onscreen. His
involvement appears between cinemas beginnings and the continuing evolution of theatre,
particularly in popular magic-shows of the nineteenth century. Mlis owned and operated the
Robert-Houdin Theatre in Paris where he performed magic shows in the tradition of the
theatres famous namesake.
23
During these shows, magic lantern showsprecursors to early

14
For a detailed theoretical and historical look at the relationship of temporality, presence, and early
cinema, particularly in actuality films, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).
15
Gunning, Now you See it, Now You Dont: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions, in The
Silent Cinema Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45.
16
Ibid., 47.
17
Ibid., 46.
18
Ibid., 49.
19
Ibid.
20
Gunning, Cinema of Attraction, 230.
21
Matthew Soloman, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth
Century (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 34.
22
Ren Thoreau Bruckner, The Instant and the Dark: Cinemas Momentum, Octopus 2 (Fall 2006): 22,
accessed April 23, 2011, http://www.theoctopusjournal.org/volume-2/.
23
For a historical account of Mlis work, see Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and
the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, 40-59, and Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Mlis (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8-10.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
cinemapremiered new projection technology, which he invented himself by modifying
existing machines, and he performed magic-shows with illusions of his own creation.
24
Later,
after his interest in the new technologies of cinema intensified, Mlis created the first film
studio where he worked at creating his movies during the day while performing and sketching
material for his cinematic creations at night in his theatre.
25


Mlis replaces the sleight-of-hand of live performance with the cinematic.
26
The fact that the
trick becomes so clearly entwined with cinemas origins offers important insight into early
cinemas self-conception: cinema-as-trick, a medium that performs a trick. Solomon notes, At
the turn of the twentieth century, every major international moving-picture manufacturer
offered a selection of what were variously termed magic, magical, mysterious, mystery,
mystical, phantasmagoric, or trick subjects for sale to its clients.
27
Early cinema artists
obsessed over appearance and disappearance in that what appears to happen right in front of
the viewer on the screen in actuality occurs as just a shadow of an event that has happened at
some other time and place.
28


The key to Mlis trick films resides in newly discovered assemblage techniques. Mlis
successfully transforms live magics sleight-of-hand into sleight-of-the-cut, substitution splice,
and the cross dissolve. What is particular about Mlis is his adherence to the conventions of
the live magic show with only the removal of the sleight-of-hand element. The mechanics of the
trick are displaced from the live performer to the cameraman and postproduction work.
Solomon points to this fact and argues that the advent of the trick film created the death of the
trick onstage.
29
Gaudreault isolates two distinct moments in the structure of the trick film
creating its illusions: first, during filming the camera is stopped and reality is arranged to give
the illusion of disappearance or appearance, and second, Mlis manipulates the film by
removing frames to match the actors movements in postproduction.
30
When magic shows
are represented in the trick films of Mlis, they are most often shown in the context of a stage
performance.
31
This fact offers up not only the importance of the trick itself, but also the image
of the trick as something happening live and onstage.
Mlis early trick film The Vanishing Lady provides the first example of Mlis discovery that
by stopping then restarting the camera and either removing or substituting persons or objects

24
Ezra, 8-13.
25
Mlis the Magician, directed by Jacques Meny (Sodaperaga, La Sept/ARTE, 1997; Facets Multimedia,
2002), DVD.
26
Solomon, Up-to-Date Magic, 596-7.
27
Ibid., 596.
28
For more on early cinemas reception, see Mulvey, Uncertainty: Natural Magic and the Art of
Deception, in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books Ltd.,
2006), 33-53; Gunning An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,
in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1995), 114-33; and Musser, A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment:
Spectatorship, Intertextuality, and Attractions in the 1890s, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded,
159-179.
29
See Solomon, 595-615.
30
Gaudreault, Mlis the Magician: The magical magic of the magic image, Early Popular Visual
Culture, Vol. 5, No.2 (July 2007): 167-8.
31
Solomon, 596-7.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
the illusion is created of disappearance or appearance.
32
In postproduction, Mlis uses the
substitution splice to further highlight the films illusion. Gaudreault observes, Mlis magic
wand was, first and foremost, a pair of scissors.
33
The obvious traces of glue on the upper part
of the frames remained because like every good magician, Mlis knewone must draw the
viewers attention towards areas where nothing is happening but where everything appears to be
happening in order, as he must, not to reveal his secret.
34
Gaudreault goes on to highlight the
fact that the first Mlis film to use the stop-camera technique for magic purposes was a
disappearing act.
35
Liveness itself stands as the real vanishing object while its return is
continually desired and fantasized through cinema. The magic of editing and assemblage
replaces the magic (and presence) of sleight-of-hand.

The Vanishing Ladys plot combines two stage illusions to create the impression of vanishing
and reappearance.
36
A magician performed by Mlis bows to an invisible audience. He then
opens the door and gestures for a woman to enter. The woman sits in the chair. Mlis picks up
a large piece of fabric and places it over the woman so she is completely covered. With a gesture,
he removes the fabric, revealing an empty chair. After making a theatrical movement with his
hands, a skeleton suddenly appears in the chair. He tries to get rid of it by covering the skeleton
in the fabric. With another gesture he lifts the fabric, revealing the woman once again. Both
bow to the unseen audience, exit the stage, and then return for a second curtain call.
37


It is notable that the woman within the film changes first into a skeleton and then is restored to
her beginning form. The trick of the appearance and disappearance rests on the womans
skeleton vanishing and transformation back to life. Once again, as in The Prestige, the tricks
relationship to the invisible asserts itself through death. The missed smashing of the bird and
the invisibility of its corpse are laid bare in The Vanishing Lady. The appearing and vanishing
skeleton exposes the missed core of the trickthe performers body. At the origins of cinema,
the body being visible yet absent presented spectators, directors, and actors with a new
phenomenon: the work of the artistic production was separated from its presentation. Walter
Benjamin addresses this separation in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility. The aura, as defined by Benjamin, is a concept of authenticity,
origin, and singularity that sets the original work of art apart from the mechanical repetition of
images produced endlessly in the photographic and filmic arts. Perhaps in no other place does
this change affect the cinematic more than in the role of the performer. Benjamin specifies that
the actor in a film becomes a shadow that can move from place to place without further
enactment of the fiction, divorcing the actor from her body and voice in a way not seen before.
38

The cinematic trick gestures to a lost presence that can never be recoveredit is a past event

32
Gaudreault, 171.
33
Ibid., 167.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., 172.
36
Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 33.
37
The Vanishing Lady, directed by Georges Mlis, YouTube video from Star Films, 1896, posted by
AudioSkore on May 1, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4MnFACzKfQ.
38
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, (1936), trans.
Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard, Eiland, et al. in The Work of Art In the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty,
and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008), 31-33.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
not accessible in the present except through its trace on film. The stage trick gestures to liveness
that the spectator can never completely experience.

The loss of presence of the performer onscreen may account for the continued use of the
conventions of the stage throughout the film as a way to make an absent presence, set apart and
framed, seem present. Liveness, invisible, but felt, is impossible to capture within cinema, and
yet its makers longingly try. The magicians entrance and fluid gesturing to an unseen audience
along with the curtain call suggest a cinematic medium that not only relies on the conventions
of the stage, but that also aspires to it as a form. The actors bowing to an unseen audience belies
the fact that they will not be making a live appearance at the end of the film. There is an
unsettling sense of disembodiment with this new technology and the images on the screen both
being present and absent at the same time.

The structure of the trick film with its vanishings and appearances highlights the trauma (as
well as the possibilities) inherent in recorded media. Mlis, as the magician, appears as both
performer and creator, and among the things he conjures is the reproduction of the experience
of the live event, although this is a gesture to the impossible. In invoking the space and
parameters of theatrical convention, however, Mlis creates the image of theatre as displayed
by cinema as if it is an artifact flattened yet gesturing to be seen by the spectator. The stage itself
offers the screen an appearance of depth that tricks the eye into seeing past the flatness of the
screen, rendering the screen invisible.

The use of the magic show in both The Prestige and The Vanishing Lady focuses attention on
the traumatic relationship between the live and reproduced. The ontological stakes of
examining the two films together can be found in the similarities and differences of their
representations of disappearing in plain sight. In The Vanishing Lady, there is the burst of
presence that Gunning speaks of that is achieved through attraction. The Prestige is set in the
same time period as cinema of attractions but its scenes of magic shows are not attractions;
instead they are part of the films narrative. The attraction disrupts and shocks the viewer,
whereas narrative smoothes the edges and hides the films method of production. The
Vanishing Lady is a recreation of Mlis performed magic onstage. The transformation of the
trick from the stage to reproducibility offers something of a merging of stage and screen, much
like a cross-dissolve between the two. This merging brings to mind Benjamins use of the
analogy of the surgeon and the magician in The Work of Art. When discussing the
differences inherent in film, painting, and the stage, Benjamin describes the gap between the
reproduced object and original as akin to the distance in the relationship between the surgeon
and magician: Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains
in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into
its tissue.
39
The magician onstage maintains a distance from the audience yet performs the
trick live in such a way that the audience misses its method of production, whereas the trick of
the magician onscreen occurs technologically by the stopping of the camera and the cut or
substitution splice.
40
The trick remains unseen because the cut is hidden in a place away from

39
Benjamin, 35.
40
See also Brigitte Peuckers discussion of the relationship of aura and the actors body to the magician
and surgeon in Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1995), 42-44. Samuel Weber reads the surgeon and the magician next to the violent vocabulary used to
describe the process of filmmaking in Mass Mediauras: form technics media (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 90-1.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
the portion of the frame that attracts the audiences attention. The invoking of magic with its
relationship to the unexplainable and illusion provokes both the cinematic desire for the live
and the wonder of cinematic representation itself.

The Mi ssed Event
The magician uses the trick, an act that deceives the viewer, to create the illusion of various
phenomena such as vanishing and appearance (think of a rabbit being pulled from a hat),
fragments being made whole (think of the sawing the girl in half), confinement and escape
(think of Houdini escaping from the straightjacket), and levitation (think of the magicians
assistant suspended in mid-air). The use of the word trick in the context of the magic show
offers an important clue; the viewer expects to be deceived, and part of the fun is trying to figure
out how the performer does the deceiving. More importantly, on a theoretical level the trick
plays with vision: what the naked eye sees and what remains invisible. The trick enacts the
trauma of appearance and disappearance.

The most striking aspect of performance, as has been theorized by Peggy Phelan, resides in its
unique singularity. This singularity makes its essential ontology one that becomes itself
through disappearance.
41
A performance is unrepeatable: once it is gone it is gone for good
and therefore escapes the economy of reproduction.
42
As a performance disappears, the
audience necessarily misses its essential nature. The cinematic trick gestures to a lost presence
that can never be recoveredit is a past event not accessible in the present except through its
trace on film. The stage trick gestures to liveness that the spectator can never completely
experience.

Psychoanalysis teaches that the present moment always emerges with whole fragments
unperceived. These missed moments, particularly the ways in which they are reenacted, contain
the roots of trauma. Cathy Caruth reminds us:

Trauma is not only the repetition of the missed encounter with death, but the missed
encounter of ones own survival. It is the incomprehensible act of survivingof waking
into lifethat repeats and bears witness to what remains ungrasped within the
encounter with death.
43


The narrative structure of the trick enacts this encounter by beginning with the undisturbed
object or person, moving to the trick of disappearance, which is successful only when the
audience fails to see the moment completely, and, finally, ending with the return of the object
to the opening position, the performance ready to be repeated once again. During The Prestige
this narrative is defined like a play in three acts. Cutter defines each act of the trick:

The first part is called the pledge. A magician shows you something ordinary, a deck of
cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object, perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to
see that it is indeed real, normal. But of course it probably isnt The second act is

41
Peggy Phelan, The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction, in Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.
42
Several other scholars have offered different analyses of the relationship between liveness and
reproducibility. For a detailed example see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized
Culture. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
43
Cathy Caruth, Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival, Cultural Values 5.1 (January 2001): 10.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something
extraordinary. Now you are looking for the secret, but you wont find it because, of
course youre not really lookingyou dont really want to know. You want to be
fooled. But you wouldnt clap yet because making something disappear isnt enough.
You have to bring it back. Thats why every magic trick has a third actthe hardest
part, the part we call the prestige.
44


Failing to see the mechanics of the trick is not only due to the skill of the magician, but also in
part because of the spectators inability to literally take it all in. The hardest part, the prestige,
demands exactly what is impossible in performanceits return. Once a performance has passed
it is gone forever. In the magic trick the instant of return becomes embodied. Thus the trick
stages the fantasy of reappearance with the truth (disappearance) hidden from view. The trick
overwhelms vision and the invisible becomes a respite from a traumatic Real.

Anal yzi ng the Tri ck
The desire for bodily and psychic wholeness, as materially represented in the magic trick
through the enactment of the vanished objects return, connects the narratives of such magic
acts to the idea of the psychoanalytic cure. The analyst could be thought of as taking the role of
a magician who through transference magically gives wholeness to a subject who appears in a
state of fragmentation. The very psychic material of psychoanalysis operates in the register of
excess: excess of memory and affect leading to repetition through the symptom. The repetition
of disappearance and reappearance in the magic trick directly materializes what Slavoj iek
might call the psychic coordinates of trauma.
45


There are two separate parts of a magicians performance that have special bearing here. The
first consists of the illusion the magic trick produces: the appearance and disappearance that
comes and goes like Freuds anecdote of his grandson repeatedly throwing and retrieving a spool
on a string past the curtains surrounding his mothers bed saying, fort (gone) da (there) in
an attempt to cope with her absence.
46
The repetition of the act of disappearance and
appearance conjures the fantasy of the others return. Fort/da operates as practice for the child
as he learns to internalize the images of the other. Phelan observes that the structure of fort/da is
a carefully rehearsed performance.
47
The play of the spool is structured around an invisible
others traumatic vanishing and return.
In a magic act, making objects or people disappear and reappear offers an effect of astonishment
followed by the desire to know how such magic could occur. The audience positions itself in
suspended disbelief, pretending to believe in the illusion, yet still actively trying to see what it
has somehow missed. Adults, although they can hold internal images of the other that tell them
that they will return, still deal with the important aspect of vanishing in terms of death: the
object that will never return. The magic tricks structure of there and gone embodies the

44
Nolan and Nolan, 2006.
45
iek often refers to psychic coordinates when speaking of the ways by which a subject structures
reality. See The Perverts Guide to Cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3, directed by Sophia Fiennes (2006; A Lone Star,
Mischief Films Amoeba Film Production; P Guide, 2006), DVD.
46
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principal, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W.
Norton, 1961), 12-17.
47
Phelan, Converging Glances: A Response to Cathy Caruths Parting Words, Culture Values 5.1
(January 2001): 27-40. See also Afterword: notes on hope in Unmarked, 167-180.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
very essence of what Phelan has theorized: But it may well be that theatre and performance
respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death.
48
Although Phelan
specifies that performance is a rehearsal for an object that never returns, the object that
disappears into thin air and then suddenly reappears could be seen as an elaborate fantasy of
eternal return.
The vanishing act as represented in Mlis The Vanishing Lady, when examined within the
psychoanalytic frame, cannot help but be compared to Freuds fort/da and Phelans analyses of
fort/das relationship to theatre and performance. Cinema in 1896 was in the very beginnings as
a new technology, and as such, the new art was grappling with its possibilities and limitations.
Can the play of fort/da be said to be rehearsing a new way of viewing what it means to be gone
while simultaneously being there in the context of cinema? Did performers who were present
on screen yet, in reality, were also a trace and shadow, not really there at all, redefine the
essential meaning of what it means to be gone or there?

The second crucial part of the magic trick is misdirection, a technique made up of what
Heilmann defines as showing but hiding.
49
At the beginning of the trick the magician
gestures the audience to look in one direction while he accomplishes the trick unseen.
Misdirection offers a vantage point from which to view the relationship between what has been
missed in the event to the event itself. The technique of showing but hiding occupies two
spaces simultaneouslythe level of what is seen and the place where the show occurs in plain
sight but invisible. Misdirection leads the eye somewhere other than where the invisible resides.

This place where the invisible resides could be theorized as belonging to the Lacanian register of
the Real. Lacan asks in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Where do we meet
the real? For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential
encounteran appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us.
50
iek
claims that the Real exists as a purely formal category and as such is impossible to integrate or
define completely.
51
The Real operates as excess that cannot be assimilated. This excess, the
object a of the Lacanian Real, iek calls the unfathomable something.
52
The invisible excess
of the magicians performance (the dead bird) is the object a, Lacans term for the remainder and
materialization of the Real. The materiality of the performer grounds the theatrical within a
corporeal space of the impossible-Real (the Real as a category is always impossible). This
simultaneous split between an impossible-Real and the performance invites a destabilizing
affect for the spectator, as part of what she is seeing is always missed.

In The Prestige, the horror of the film comes from the savagery of the tricks themselves and a
narrative dealing with dueling magicians ruthlessly sabotaging and exposing one anothers
magic acts. Moments in the film when the death that is at the core of the trick comes to the

48
Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
49
Heilmann, 19.
50
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1978), 53.
51
See ieks discussion of the Real in The Perverts Guide to Cinema and Looking Awry: An Introduction
to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: An October Book,
MIT Press, 1992), 1-47.
52
iek, Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien in How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W.
Norton 2007), accessed April 1, 2011, http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
surface bring to light the trauma of seeing a glimpse of the Real. Part of this seeing involves not
being tricked by misdirection. When another young child sees the vanishing bird trick he is
not convinced of the illusion, but rather starts sobbing, He killed it.
53
Heilmann observes that
in the film a child is instantly and painfully aware of the cruelty that lies beneath the bird
dis/reappearance trick.
54
The childs seeing past the trickery of the illusion allows him to see
the Real of the trick. Similarly, when the magician Angiers wife drowns in front of a live
audience during an escape trick gone wrong, suddenly the entire traumatic core comes to the
fore, much like the skeletons appearance in The Vanishing Lady. What is exposed in both
examples is the mechanical underbelly and illusion of corporeal presence that cinema usually
makes disappear in plain sight.

Gone and There
What is the difference between tricks on stage and tricks onscreen, and how does that
difference expand our understanding of invisibility? Technically speaking, the trick on stage
requires that the performer utilize elements of optical illusion in the present moment. Either by
techniques of misdirection, sleight of hand, or technological innovations, the trick occurs in
front of the audience even though the spectator misses its method of production. The trick
consists of getting the audience to see the narrative the magician wishes while remaining blind
to the mechanics of the deception occurring simultaneously. Cinema allows for a fundamental
shift in this structure. Although the trick appears nearly exactly the same, the method of its
production happens quite differently onscreen than it does onstage through the use of the
substitution splice, cut, or dissolve.

Psychoanalysis serves as an instructive space in which the live analytic encounter and the
recorded, in the form of memory, emerge simultaneously: the present engulfed in the past and
the past confronted with presence. Film can be defined by being the trace of reality and only the
trace. In this way, film aligns itself with memory. Theatre offers a somewhat different
alignment, one that more directly confronts the Lacanian Real through what Phelan has termed
the unreproducable event, an event that cannot be isolated or grasped, that in some way
escapes the gaze and therefore frustrates analysis.
55
Psychoanalysis provides insight into this
blindness precisely because of its preoccupation with what remains unknown, unseen and
unspoken within the subject. Yet, even though the gap between the two forms remains easily
observable, important technological differences fundamentally block the recognition of the
multiple ways theatre asserts its presence through cinema, and conversely, the ways cinema
reveals itself within theatre.

The trick of theatre within cinema requires the viewer to miss the essential component of the
live. The fact that the live theatrical event becomes smashed and hidden out of view, much
like the bird in The Prestige, points to something important in the relationship between
represented images of the theatrical onscreen and their live counterparts. The represented
image of the stage (in this case in the form of the magic show) necessarily must repress its
existence as a dead image. The illusion of liveness becomes what is shown onscreen. The dead
bird underneath exists as excess when the trick-of-theatre appears screened as a cinematic
image. The traumatic nature of the trick both onstage and onscreen points to the limits of

53
Nolan and Nolan, 2006.
54
Heilmann, 22-3.
55
Phelan, Ontology of Performance, 146.
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disappearing in plain sight joseph
vision, what we see and what we choose to repress. The question, Are you watching closely?
asks if the viewer is ready to see what is gone and there. The trick stages a fantasy of return
wherein invisible excess conceals that which will never reappear.


Rachel Joseph is an instructor of Theatre and English at Trinity University in San Antonio,
Texas. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009. Portions of Disappearing in
Plain Sight: The Magic Trick and the Missed Event appeared in a different form in her
dissertation Screened Stages: Representation of Theatre Within Film. The study analyzes filmic
representations of theatre and theatricality as they have occurred throughout the history of
cinema focusing on the ways in which they construct presence and absence.


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