Papers by Matthew Solomon
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2018
In his 1906 book The Old and the New Magic, magic historian Henry Ridgely Evans (1861-1949) wrote... more In his 1906 book The Old and the New Magic, magic historian Henry Ridgely Evans (1861-1949) wrote, 'Alas, the golden age of wizardry has passed' (1906, 315). For him, as for other magicians at the turn of the twentieth century (and indeed a number of French magicians even now), 'the good old daysthe golden days' were the 'daysof Robert-Houdin' (1902, 78). Every culture and every era looks back fondly on some point in its past as a golden age and each âge d'or is, of course, a historical fiction that probably reveals more about the culture and the time period that looks back than it tells us about the 'golden age' so optimistically recalled (or constructed). At the turn of the twentieth century, Evans and many others would have, without hesitation, designated the golden age of theatrical conjuring as belonging more or less completely to Jean-Eug ène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), the so-called father of modern magic. Many French magicians in particular would maintain this claim even today. 1 From our vantage point in 2018, however, Evans was himself living through a golden age at the turn of the twentieth century that was every bit as transformational as the changes spearheaded by Robert-Houdin. We appear to have at long last arrived at a moment when the study of conjuring has reached something like a critical mass, though scholarly work on the topic is still scattered across various disciplines. With a few notable exceptions, studies of magic history continue to cluster in the established domains of practitioners, collectors and interested enthusiasts rather than being found in peer-reviewed journals or academic programs of study. Two noteworthy mavericks we know of are the journal Gibecière, published biannually by the Conjuring Arts Research Center since 2005, which at some point adopted a double-blind, peer-reviewed publication process, and Carleton University in Ottawa, which is expected to soon announce the appointment of its inaugural Allan Slaight Chair for the Conjuring Arts. These developments would seem to fill a significant and relatively long-standing void, although they remain mostly recent exceptions to the general rule of academia's more or less systematic avoidance of magic history notwithstanding occasional doctoral dissertations, journal articles and scholarly books over the years. The earliest doctoral dissertation in English devoted to conjuring appears to have been Norman Triplett's 'The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions,' completed in 1900 at Clark University (where Sigmund Freud would later give his American lectures) and CONTACT Joe Culpepper
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012
Performing Magic on the Western Stage, 2008
Choice Reviews Online, 2004
... What, one wonders, did audiences in the 'industrial houses' make of Sir Joh... more ... What, one wonders, did audiences in the 'industrial houses' make of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Sir Frank Benson in potted silent versions of Shakespearean plays?1 CharlesOakley asked this question in 1964, and the answer seemed to him quite self-evident: the ...
Framework, Oct 1, 2004
Women of Early Cinema A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Neg... more Women of Early Cinema A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, Duke University Press, 2002. Unlike previous anthologies on early cinema that have focused on the first decade or two of film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema takes a longer and more inclusive view of the period. Films considered here span the entire silent era, from Alice Guy-Blache's La fee aux choux/The Cabbage Fairy (France, 1896)-sometimes identified as the first entirely fictional film-to Yinmu yanshi/An Amorous History of the Silent Screen (Zhang Shichuan, China, 1931), a reflexive melodrama of the Shanghai film industry. Editor Jennifer Bean explains, "By choosing to employ 'early cinema' as a term more or less coextensive with silent cinema," the collection emphasizes that the far-reaching transformations of early film history do not simply end at some point in the 1910s, or entirely with the coming of sound. Together, the twenty-one essays in this thick volume make for an intriguing and eclectic exploration of women's roles during the first thirty-five years of international cinema. The book breaks new ground with original contributions on previously unknown subjects and fresh approaches to somewhat more familiar topics. Extending the period of "early cinema" forces one to contemplate the historical diminution of women's authority in film production. By the early 1930s, Dorothy Arzner stood as one of a handful of exceptions to the unwritten rule of the male director, yet this book reminds us that such glaring gender inequity had not always been the case in film industries around the world. Guy-Blache, who is the subject of two essays, supervised all of Gaumont's film productions until 1907, then numerous others for the Solax Company she founded in New York in 1910. "In fact, she was responsible for the production of more than seven hundred films," Amelie Hastie reports, "most of which have also disappeared." Another prominent female producer-director of the teens receiving attention is Lois Weber. Constance Balides and Shelley Stamp discuss the relationship between Weber's Shoes (U.S.A., 1916), Where Are My Children? (U.S.A., 1916), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (U.S.A., 1917), and Progressiveera social movements to reform working conditions and birth control. Many more women headed their own production companies prior to the consolidation of the studio system and its relatively strict division of labor. In the United States, female entrepreneurs like LuIe Warrenton, Gene Gauntier, Cleo Madison, Mabel Normand, and others combined producing with directing, performing, writing, and/or editing. Jane Gaines comments, "The existence of so many companies points, if nothing else, to the numerical importance of women at this stage and yet this knowledge has yet to have an influence on the film history we are teaching." The film history that is taught is largely a product of the film histories that have been written, and one hopes that A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema will have an impact in both areas. Various essays draw attention not only to women who worked behind the camera, but also to the astonishing spectrum of roles women took in front of the camera. Angela Dalle Vacche introduces us to the Amazonian Astrea, who abandoned the Venetian aristocracy to perform in the circus and cinema, where she was paired with a much smaller man in a series of Italian action comedies. Dalle Vacche contrasts Astrea's grotesque physicality with the arabesque movements of Italian film divas and early twentieth-century aviators, tracing a series of intriguing intersections between futurism, fashion, fiction, and flying in early Italian film culture. An interest in coming to terms with cinema's capacity to showcase movement is also taken up by Lori Landay, who focuses on the flapper films of Colleen Moore, Joan Crawford, and Clara Bow. Turning a perceptive eye to such films as Our Dandng Daughters (Harry Beaumont, U. …
Framework the Journal of Cinema and Media, 2013
Theatre Journal, 2006
During the first decade of the twentieth century, "up-to-date magic" was a theatrical a... more During the first decade of the twentieth century, "up-to-date magic" was a theatrical and cinematic phenomenon that entertained audiences around the world. This article traces an integrated history of stage and screen that connects the styles of magic performed in turn-of-the-century ...
The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 2012
Screen, 2005
The second decade of cinema history was marked by a great many changes that altogether reshaped t... more The second decade of cinema history was marked by a great many changes that altogether reshaped the form, length, and mode of address of motion pictures, resulting in new types of films, new sites for film exhibition and new audiences for films. Storyfilmsbecame increasingly ...
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 1997
... Sorry, Wrong Number Matthew Solomon Film history often makes it easy to forget that cinema is... more ... Sorry, Wrong Number Matthew Solomon Film history often makes it easy to forget that cinema is but one of several mass ... MATTHEW SOLOMON is a graduate student in the Critical Studies Program in Film and Television at the University of California at Los Angeles. ...
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 2006
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012
New Book Series from The University of California Press
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Papers by Matthew Solomon