Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film

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 vaudeville and music-hall theatres to the modes of cinematic illusion seen in contemporaneous trick films. Attention is paid to the work of Georges Méliès and Gaston Velle—French magicians who became prolific early filmmakers—to exhibition contexts where live illusions were seen alongside trick films, and to the divide that opened between conjuring and cinema as a result of differing attitudes toward the importance of mystery and secrecy.