That Old-Fashioned Magic on the Big Screen

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This is the second movie of recent months to take up the subject of old-time magic. The other is Neil Burger's The Illusionist, in which Edward Norton plays a low-born magician who uses his conjuror's mastery to reclaim his lost love from aristocratic decadence in Old Vienna. It is a more immediately appealing (and slightly more straight-forward) romance — much less gnarly in its development than The Prestige, which is much more ambitious intellectually.

No matter which one captures your imagination, both of them attractively stress the fact that the theater of a century and more ago was a superbly cinematic place, at once glowing, shadowy and hinting at flummeries both awesome and amusing. Both films remind devoted cinephiles that in those days the ancient art of necromancy and the new art of the movies exercised a fascination for each other. The most basic thing to remember about film is that its often overwhelming technology is based on a simple optical defect, persistence of vision, which grants movies the ability to create the illusion of movement through the rapid projection of still photographs. Beyond that movies have the capacity to induce, through other forms of optical trickery, a range of illusory effects that are far beyond the capacities of figures like Cutter. The first generation of movie makers - among them the sublime Georges Mlis - contained many stage magicians attracted to the efficiency with which they could create fabulous special effects. Some of them incorporated movies into their routines. Others drifted over to the new medium. But in any case the magical capacities of film have only increased over the decades, especially in our own digital era. And the fact that The Prestige (and The Illusionist) remind at least some of us of the movies' roots in magic-in the subtle yet spectacular art of the awesome — is a special delight of both films.