everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Am I Missing Something?

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

There is a continuing popular misconception about early films that treats early film-makers as some kind of naive neophytes for whom allowances have continually to be made and treats audiences as a bunch of idiots who were happy to watch anything that was put on the screen. It is a misconception, alas, that certain modern critics, the pseudo-revisionists, have tendered to pander to by treating early films as "a cinema of attractions." Posterity, as the celebrated witticism has it, may not have done anything for us but the past has done a great deal and does not deserve to be patronised in this way. Do we think medieval or Renaissance art (even cave art for that matter) is good "only for its time" or do we appreciate it for its intrinsic value? Let us try and give early film the same respect.None of this means that all early film is good and it remains necessary to make distinctions. The habit of "making allowances" often in practice obscures this fact.From quite early on, long before Trip to the Moon made Georges Méliès internationally famous, Edison, who kept a wary eye on film production in Europe, was aware of the films being made by the French pioneer and set his film-makers to produce similar trick-films. Those films tend all to be credited to Edwin S. Porter but there is no certainty that they were actually made by him and this little film is a case in point.The plain fact is that this film is not merely crude by the standards of 2015, it is crude by the standards of 1900 and one simply has to look at the contemporary films of Méliès to appreciate that. Colour (hand-colour but often of high quality) was of course perfectly possible but rarely used by the US film-makers (in part through meanness but in part, perhaps. through a genuine concern that it involved rather exploitative labour for the women involved.Nor were practitioners of screen magic any kind of absolute beginners. They could draw on a vast and sophisticated history of illusionism (the pre-cinema French magician Robert-Houdin remains one of the greatest magicians of all time) and Méliès was particularly well-placed to draw upon that tradition and adapt it to the screen. He was after all a professional magician himself and, as it happens, the owner of the theatre in Paris that had previously belonged to the great Robert-Houdin.Edwin S.Porter started his career as a projectionist, moved on to being a cinematographer of sorts and ended up as a rather successful director of films. Very few of the US film-makers had the kind of background either in professional design of visual spectacle (like Méliès or Trwey and Georges Hatot chez Lumière) nor as professional photographers (like Louis Lumière himself or Eugène Pirou or Maurice-Clément). Porter's first cameraman, William Heise, was fairly inept (compare his films with those that the Lumière cinematographer, Alexandre Promio, made in the US at the same period)and Porter, at the outset, was not a great improvement.So in the early years of cinema, French films are of considerably higher quality as compositions than those of their US counterparts and it was several years before the US was able to make up this deficit.So let us be critics and make distinctions rather than allowances. This film is a pitifully poor and lifeless copy of the work being produced at this time in France by Méliès (or indeed the Lumières who also produced such films).

In the early years of cinema, film studios routinely stole material from each other. It got so bad that some studios, like American Biograph, begin putting a prominent A-B symbol on the sets so other studios wouldn't 'borrow' portions of their film. And, in many cases, you have multiple versions of films that are practically impossible to tell apart! While "The Magician" isn't quite that blatant a rip-off, it is still a rip-off. This is because the style and techniques used in the film were developed in 1896 by Georges Méliès and the Edison Studio folks are trying to make their own version of this sort of magical show.As far as the style and quality go, this is actually a pretty good film and I am pretty sure folks back in the day enjoyed it and were mystified when things appeared and disappeared. This was achieved simply by stopping and starting the camera--but audiences of the day didn't realize this. A crowd-pleaser but a rip-off.

Magician, The (1900) ** (out of 4) Fair Edison film lasts just under a minute. A magician walks onto a stage and does a couple tricks. Yep, that's pretty much the entire story to this film. I guess it should be noted that he does perform tricks involving a handkerchief and another involving tissue paper. George Melies was a major import in America back in 1900 and every studio here was trying to copy his success and I can only guess that this film was meant to rip him off. Not only do we get the same type of magic tricks but even the magician himself looks like Melies. The history of this film would probably be mildly interesting to silent film buffs and I'm sure the studio had a purpose. A lot of these movies would be sold to the public as being made by a name they recognize so you have to wonder if Edison pushed this off as a real Melies film. The quality from the magician isn't nearly as good and the "tricks" aren't nearly as effective. A mild curio at best but stick with Melies.

If you compare this film with others made a hundred years later, it of course appears weaker. No color? (introduced 1938) No sound? (introduced 1929)This museum piece is from 1900. Twelve years after the oldest extant film (Roundhay Garden Scene), four years after movies really started rolling in 1896 (Melies, Lumiere etc.) Of course it is dated. But try to imagine what effects it must have had on audiences back then...The "magic" seems to have been done with stop-motion. But I think, somehow it's still magic today.And this comment will have ten lines, however they are counted..