The Conference
Early Popular Visual Culture (formerly Living Pictures) in association with the National Fairground Archive and the University of Leeds will hold a third event examining the use and exploitation of the projected image within the fields of entertainment, education, science and the domestic environment.
The theme of this three-day conference is Magic and Illusion and will be a combination of academic papers, performance and film screenings. The conference incorporates both academic and non-academic historians, collectors and performers and will to bring together the worlds of photography, film and mass visual culture to a wider and more inclusive audience. The Conference will take place at the University of Sheffield between 15 and 17 July 2005.
As well as a range of papers from internationally renowned academics and historians the conference will also feature a day of magic curated by Eddie Dawes, Historian of the Magic Circle, popular stage illusions, a lantern show and screenings of magic and illusion films from the collections of the British Film Institute and the Nederlands Film Archive with live musical accompaniment.
There will also be a special performance of local Mitchell and Kenyon films and a launch event for the new journal, Early Popular Visual Culture.Interested in attending the conference? For information contact Simon Popple [S.E.Popple@leeds.ac.uk].
Magic and Performance Shorts
- Tom Gunning, "Now You See it, Now You Don't: The Visual Regimes of Magic Performance and Early Cinema"
- Jeremy Brooker, "Magic Lantern performance at the Royal Polytechnic Institution 1838-1881"
- Nick Tobier, "Presto's Travelling Lecture Series"
Show and Tell: Stagecraft
- Dave Wilmore, "Dramatic Machinery as Described in Abraham Rees' Cyclopaedia
- Ray Johnson, Tricks, Traps, and Transformations: Illusion in Victorian Spectacular Theatre
Magic, technique and film form
- André Gaudreault, Méliès the Magician: The Magical Magic of the Magic Image
- Dan North, Illusory Bodies
- Tony Fletcher, The Space between — 'You Can't See the Joins'
- Matthew Solomon, Houdini's Actuality Magic
Stage and Screen
- Luke McKernan, Shadows on a Screen
- Charles Musser-Kilanyi, Living Pictures and the Cinema
- Bryonny Dixon, Harlequin's new trick: the harlequinade from stage to screen
Spectoral Images
- Colin Harding, Spirits in the Glass: Sprit photography, fakery and popular belief
- Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Enchanted Pictures in Visual Media c.1900
- Peter Lamont, Conjuring Spirits
Representations and Reportage
- Catherine Pedley-Hindson, The Female Illusionist — Loïe Fuller: Fairy or Magician?
- Joe Kember, "The magician with the instantaneous lens": Conjuring as authoring in early film
- Greg Hobson. Edwardian disaster postcards
- Vanessa Toulmin, The Great Sheffield Flood and The Magic Lantern
- Stephen Bottomore, The Magician, the War Correspondent and the First Films of Warfare (1897)
Screening
- Magic and Illusion: films from the Nederlands Film Museum and the National Film and Television Archive presented by Nico de Klerk and Ian Christie
Magic Day at Visual Delights 2005
Last modified 3 May 2005