The magic of a good story: Cinema, illusionists and the delight of a great reveal

There’s a well-known story about the first screening of the Lumiere brothers’ 1896 short film, L’arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.

It was a 50-second single, unedited shot of a train pulling into a train station, moving directly towards the camera. As the audience watched the life-size projection, some started to panic, some screamed and ran for the back of the room, believing an actual train must have been coming straight at them.

It was nothing short of magic. How could those images have moved like that?

By the time the Lumiere brothers were doing public showings of what was then called “actualities”, the moving picture projection was almost two decades in the making, thanks to the likes of Thomas Edison in the US and Eadweard Muybridge in the UK.

Whether the story of the train screening is true or a myth, it boosted the idea those early short films were absolutely revolutionary, and audiences were bowled over, almost literally. It’s like the tales even now of patrons being so viscerally terrified by horror movies they vomit or faint right there in the theatre.

Cinema has always been entwined with magic, and what is a moving picture if not the extension of a stage illusion? You won’t believe what you’re seeing!

What we understand as magic tricks or illusions, sometimes involving complex engineering, have their roots going back millennia, but the modern stage shows we associate with contemporaries such as Penn & Teller, David Copperfield and David Blaine really came to the fore in the mid-19th century.

Its growth coincided with the latter stage of the industrial revolution as well as increased world travel to “exotic” cultures, giving rise to what might be possible. The public were primed to believe what they could never before fathom, at least outside of the context of “drown that witch!”.

One of the most famous early silent films with an enduring legacy today is Le voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), written and directed by Georges Melies, a Frenchman who used his background as a stage magician to become the first special effects master with techniques such as splicing, time-lapse and multiple exposures. Buster Keaton owes a lot to Melies.

With its story of astronomer explorers, inspired by Jules Verne, and anthropomorphic celestial bodies, A Trip to the Moon was magical in theme and ambition.

Given the intrinsic link between the birth of cinema and stage magic, it’s surprising there haven’t been more films and TV shows about illusionists. There have been plenty of TV specials centred on famous personalities but it in terms of scripted, narrative features, it’s an exclusive club.

Adding to the limited coterie is the announcement today that Jude Law and Andrew Garfield have been cast as Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn in an upcoming miniseries about the famed Las Vegas magicians.

Law will play Fischbacher while Garfield will take on the role of Horn. The show is being written by John Hoffman, best known for Only Murders in the Building, and was based on the podcast Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy.

The German-American showmen started working together after meeting on a cruise ship in 1959 and were an inseparable pair until a career-ending incident in 2003 when one of their white tigers attacked Horn during a show. Horn was left with permanent partial paralysis.

At that point, Siegfried & Roy had been working in Vegas since 1967. Horn died in 2020 while Fischbacher died in 2021.

The series will go into production in the Northern Hemisphere autumn, which means it will be beaten to release by Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the third instalment following the 2013 and 2016 heist movies about a group of illusionists.

Most of the original cast is returning, including Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman and Isla Fisher (who wasn’t in the second film), and this time, their target is a wealthy crime syndicate boss played by Rosamund Pike. They intend to steal a super-pricey diamond.

The Now You See Me movies are a hell of a lot of fun, as implausible as it is, and it gives you just enough of a peek behind the curtains but moves so fast you barely have time to digest the information. Why ruin the magic?

One of the great joys is the discovery, the aha moment, or as Michael Caine’s character explains in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige of the three acts to a magic trick – the pledge, the turn and the prestige.

Nolan’s film, which stars Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as rival illusionists in late-Victorian era London, is one of the more memorable entries in the genre. The reveals at the end, the horrifying secret behind Angier’s Transported Man trick, and the simple explanation for Borden’s double-trouble act, were delicious.

It weirdly came out the same year as another, The Illusionist, as these things are wont to do. The latter and less lauded film starred Edward Norton and Jessica Biel in a 1889-set story involving European royalty.

More peripherally, The Greatest Showman and The Wizard of Oz are about egomaniacal men using tricks and illusions to prop up self-styled narratives of power, and there is something there about our willingness to have the wool pulled over our eyes, to be sold a story that sounds nice.

We want to believe in something we can’t understand, but there is more magic in knowing how it all works.