GENERAL A RTICLE Quicker Than the Eye? Sleight of Hand and Cinemas of Scientific Discovery from Chronophotography to Cognitive Film Theory COLIN WILLIAMS ON This article explores the topic of scientific discovery in two cases “pre-cinematic” optical device privileged for the acuity of its of intersections between imaging technologies and sleight-of-hand mechanical vision, which offered a powerful response to the magic in the domain of nontheatrical film and media. The first case magician’s conceit of being “quicker than the eye” by produc- is the French psychologist Alfred Binet’s use of chronophotography ABSTRACT to study magicians in the 1890s. The second is the reanimation of ing still images of the apparently imperceptible quick-change Binet’s study by cognitive (neuro)scientists beginning in the early movements of the magician’s hands. These images allowed 2000s using eye-tracking cameras and other digital-imaging devices. Binet to determine precisely how magic tricks work, both The author focuses on how both cases treat the magician as a medium technically and on the level of perception. of discovery and how both use optical devices to “see” visual Although Binet’s case has been treated insightfully in processes related to the experience of wonder. the history of science and psychology by Sofie Lachapelle, as well as in film studies by Matthew Solomon, in this ar- In 2005, the British psychologist and magician Richard Wise- ticle I mine it further to foreground a curious dimension of man gave a lecture at the London Science Museum on the magic’s encounters with cinemas of scientific discovery [2]. cognitive-scientific study of sleight-of-hand magic in the 21st Specifically I focus on the topic of wonder and education at century. Wiseman historicized his subject by screening an the intersection of magicians, scientists and optical devices. early motion picture of a magician who appears to cause a With “wonder” I mean to highlight how magic tricks stage ball to vanish from his fingertips. The magician is seated in a conflict for spectators between the evidence of the senses a chair and set against a blank backdrop rather than on a and the evidence of reason. This conflict takes the form of an stage. The simplicity of the scene differs markedly from the acute uncertainty captured by the response, “I think I know, enchanted worlds created in early trick films, which typically but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless” [3]. featured magicians producing fantastic spectacles with the Binet’s identification of magic as a source of knowledge aid of cinematic effects. For Wiseman, the significance of the about human perception reveals a rich layer embedded in footage has to do less with the wondrousness of the vanish- this wonder response that transforms the popular image of ing trick and more with its status as a historical artifact. “Al- the magician as a source of entertaining deceptions. The art though only a few seconds long, the film is the earliest known historian Barbara Stafford has argued convincingly that, be- moving image of a magician—and unlike almost all films of ginning in the Enlightenment, an affiliation of magic with entertainers from this period, it is based on images created science and entertainment rather than the occult revealed for scientific research rather than public enjoyment” [1]. that “conjuring was not just mindless spectacle but a force This “moving image” is actually an animation of a series for visual education” [4]. This educative function stems from of chronophotographs—i.e. instantaneous serial photo- the magician’s ability to shape the experience of wonder as graphs—taken around 1893 by Georges Demenÿ, a colleague an opportunity of learning by using what Neil Harris calls an of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (Fig. 1). “operational aesthetic,” which invites spectators to discover Demenÿ was enlisted by the French psychologist Alfred how tricks work [5]. Binet to photograph Parisian magicians as they performed As a scientific response to this challenge, Binet’s investi- tricks in a laboratory at the Sorbonne. The camera was a gation is a curious site where photographic representations of magic served not to enchant audiences but to demystify Colin Williamson (educator), Film and Screen Studies, Pace University, 1 Pace Plaza, magicians’ wonders. My goal in revisiting Binet from this New York, NY 10038. Email: <[email protected]>. perspective is to clarify the relevance of magic to the do- See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/49/5> for supplemental files associated main of nontheatrical film and media, namely the scientific, with this issue. investigative and educational uses of optical devices. Doing ©2016 ISAST doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00810 LEONARDO, Vol. 49, No. 5, pp. 421–427, 2016 421 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_00810 by guest on 28 September 2021 Fig. 1. A chronophotographic film in 23 frames representing a sleight-of-hand trick performed by Edouard-Joseph Raynaly. Credited to Georges Demenÿ, 1891–1894. © Iconothèque de l’INSEP, reproduced with permission. this greatly expands the study of magic and the cinema be- manipulations of cognitive processes like attention. The ma- yond the trick film genre, which remains a guiding focus of gician’s use of cues—e.g. a glance, a false movement of the most outstanding film scholarship in this area. I also link hand or a phrase: Watch closely “here” or “there”—to misdi- this early case to the prominent return of magicians in recent rect the spectator’s attention away from “secret” techniques cognitive-scientific research, which uses digital-imaging de- promotes the spectator’s involuntary inattention to what is vices to visualize certain habits of vision and attention while essentially hidden in plain sight. Wonder occurs when this spectators watch moving images of magicians. Cultivating a misdirection allows for false impressions to develop, which dialogue between Binet’s study and its contemporary ana- Binet extended to explaining errors that occur regularly in logues in this way provides a basis for exploring the long our normal perceptual engagements with the world. history of magic in the cinema. The significance of the camera’s mechanical vision is latent in Binet’s reflections on the study of magic, but the experi- CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY AND ment is largely animated by the fact that the magician and the SLEIGHT-OF-HAND MAGIC camera figure as competing devices of wonder. In addition to A total of five magicians were involved in Binet’s study but providing visual evidence of how the magicians performed only two consented to being recorded: the mononymous their tricks, the detecting eye of the camera emerged as an Arnould and Edouard-Joseph Raynaly, the magician who object of wonder. With regard to photographs of another appears in Wiseman’s film [6]. Of the seven tricks that Bi- of Raynaly’s card tricks, Binet notes the camera revealed an net mentions were photographed, a record of at least five apparently imperceptible movement of the magician’s hand sequences survives. All of these photographs are taken from between the cards and the spectator’s line of sight. This rev- roughly the perspective of the magician’s audience, on the elation had the unexpected result of enlightening the magi- premise that, because the scientist and the camera both saw cian, who was astonished to see when looking at the pictures independently, the results of their perceptions of the same that the movement, of which he had not previously been phenomenon could be compared. Upon analyzing the pho- conscious, worked as it did. It is as if the camera revealed tographs, Binet discovered that many of the sleights of hand that Raynaly had achieved such mastery of the performance were indeed executed very rapidly. A movement in one of that even to him his trick techniques had become imper- Raynaly’s quick-change card tricks, for example, was timed ceptible and automatic. With an interesting resemblance to at a mere 15/100 of a second. However, because the move- early medical training films and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s ments were never actually imperceptible, Binet concluded “cyclegraphic” studies of surgeons, here the mechanical eye that spectators do not compete with the quickness of the ma- of the camera educates the “expert eye” of the practitioner, gician but rather with their own susceptibility to suggestion who in Binet’s case happens to be a magician [9]. and a propensity to error in describing their perceptions. The magician wondering at himself through an optical As in similar contemporaneous experiments by psycholo- device positions chronophotography in such a way that the gists Max Dessoir, Norman Triplett and Joseph Jastrow, the camera verges, like the magician, on being the perfect me- magician appears in Binet’s study as a medium of discovery dium—capable of detecting precisely everything that passes [7]. In his article on the experiment, Binet claims that ex- before its eye [10]. As an object of wonder, however, the plaining how tricks work “helps us understand the normal camera’s vision is also shadowed by the same kind of un- process by which the mind perceives exterior objects and certainty generated by the magic that chronophotography reveals the weak points of our knowledge” [8]. Ultimately, was employed to demystify. The device offered Binet a tech- magic aided Binet in theorizing how errors of perception nique for transporting human vision to an unprecedented are conditioned not necessarily by follies of the eye but by plane of perceptual activity in which phenomena that were 422 Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye? Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_00810 by guest on 28 September 2021 previously hidden in plain sight became newly visible.