G E N E R A L
A R T I C L E
Quicker Than the Eye?
Sleight of Hand and Cinemas of
Scientific Discovery from Chronophotography
to Cognitive Film Theory
A BST R A C T
COLIN WILLIAMSON
This article explores the topic of scientific discovery in two cases
of intersections between imaging technologies and sleight-of-hand
magic in the domain of nontheatrical film and media. The first case
is the French psychologist Alfred Binet’s use of chronophotography
to study magicians in the 1890s. The second is the reanimation of
Binet’s study by cognitive (neuro)scientists beginning in the early
2000s using eye-tracking cameras and other digital-imaging devices.
The author focuses on how both cases treat the magician as a medium
of discovery and how both use optical devices to “see” visual
processes related to the experience of wonder.
In 2005, the British psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman gave a lecture at the London Science Museum on the
cognitive-scientific study of sleight-of-hand magic in the 21st
century. Wiseman historicized his subject by screening an
early motion picture of a magician who appears to cause a
ball to vanish from his fingertips. The magician is seated in
a chair and set against a blank backdrop rather than on a
stage. The simplicity of the scene differs markedly from the
enchanted worlds created in early trick films, which typically
featured magicians producing fantastic spectacles with the
aid of cinematic effects. For Wiseman, the significance of the
footage has to do less with the wondrousness of the vanishing trick and more with its status as a historical artifact. “Although only a few seconds long, the film is the earliest known
moving image of a magician—and unlike almost all films of
entertainers from this period, it is based on images created
for scientific research rather than public enjoyment” [1].
This “moving image” is actually an animation of a series
of chronophotographs—i.e. instantaneous serial photographs—taken around 1893 by Georges Demenÿ, a colleague
of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (Fig. 1).
Demenÿ was enlisted by the French psychologist Alfred
Binet to photograph Parisian magicians as they performed
tricks in a laboratory at the Sorbonne. The camera was a
Colin Williamson (educator), Film and Screen Studies, Pace University, 1 Pace Plaza,
New York, NY 10038. Email: <[email protected]>.
See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/49/5> for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
©2016 ISAST
doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00810
“pre-cinematic” optical device privileged for the acuity of its
mechanical vision, which offered a powerful response to the
magician’s conceit of being “quicker than the eye” by producing still images of the apparently imperceptible quick-change
movements of the magician’s hands. These images allowed
Binet to determine precisely how magic tricks work, both
technically and on the level of perception.
Although Binet’s case has been treated insightfully in
the history of science and psychology by Sofie Lachapelle,
as well as in film studies by Matthew Solomon, in this article I mine it further to foreground a curious dimension of
magic’s encounters with cinemas of scientific discovery [2].
Specifically I focus on the topic of wonder and education at
the intersection of magicians, scientists and optical devices.
With “wonder” I mean to highlight how magic tricks stage
a conflict for spectators between the evidence of the senses
and the evidence of reason. This conflict takes the form of an
acute uncertainty captured by the response, “I think I know,
but I sense the inexplicable nonetheless” [3].
Binet’s identification of magic as a source of knowledge
about human perception reveals a rich layer embedded in
this wonder response that transforms the popular image of
the magician as a source of entertaining deceptions. The art
historian Barbara Stafford has argued convincingly that, beginning in the Enlightenment, an affiliation of magic with
science and entertainment rather than the occult revealed
that “conjuring was not just mindless spectacle but a force
for visual education” [4]. This educative function stems from
the magician’s ability to shape the experience of wonder as
an opportunity of learning by using what Neil Harris calls an
“operational aesthetic,” which invites spectators to discover
how tricks work [5].
As a scientific response to this challenge, Binet’s investigation is a curious site where photographic representations
of magic served not to enchant audiences but to demystify
magicians’ wonders. My goal in revisiting Binet from this
perspective is to clarify the relevance of magic to the domain of nontheatrical film and media, namely the scientific,
investigative and educational uses of optical devices. Doing
LEONARDO, Vol. 49, No. 5, pp. 421–427, 2016 421
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 beyond the trick film genre, which remains a guiding focus of
most outstanding film scholarship in this area. I also link
this early case to the prominent return of magicians in recent
cognitive-scientific research, which uses digital-imaging devices to visualize certain habits of vision and attention while
spectators watch moving images of magicians. Cultivating a
dialogue between Binet’s study and its contemporary analogues in this way provides a basis for exploring the long
history of magic in the cinema.
CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY AND
SLEIGHT-OF-HAND MAGIC
A total of five magicians were involved in Binet’s study but
only two consented to being recorded: the mononymous
Arnould and Edouard-Joseph Raynaly, the magician who
appears in Wiseman’s film [6]. Of the seven tricks that Binet mentions were photographed, a record of at least five
sequences survives. All of these photographs are taken from
roughly the perspective of the magician’s audience, on the
premise that, because the scientist and the camera both saw
independently, the results of their perceptions of the same
phenomenon could be compared. Upon analyzing the photographs, Binet discovered that many of the sleights of hand
were indeed executed very rapidly. A movement in one of
Raynaly’s quick-change card tricks, for example, was timed
at a mere 15/100 of a second. However, because the movements were never actually imperceptible, Binet concluded
that spectators do not compete with the quickness of the magician but rather with their own susceptibility to suggestion
and a propensity to error in describing their perceptions.
As in similar contemporaneous experiments by psychologists Max Dessoir, Norman Triplett and Joseph Jastrow, the
magician appears in Binet’s study as a medium of discovery
[7]. In his article on the experiment, Binet claims that explaining how tricks work “helps us understand the normal
process by which the mind perceives exterior objects and
reveals the weak points of our knowledge” [8]. Ultimately,
magic aided Binet in theorizing how errors of perception
are conditioned not necessarily by follies of the eye but by
422 Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye?
manipulations of cognitive processes like attention. The magician’s use of cues—e.g. a glance, a false movement of the
hand or a phrase: Watch closely “here” or “there”—to misdirect the spectator’s attention away from “secret” techniques
promotes the spectator’s involuntary inattention to what is
essentially hidden in plain sight. Wonder occurs when this
misdirection allows for false impressions to develop, which
Binet extended to explaining errors that occur regularly in
our normal perceptual engagements with the world.
The significance of the camera’s mechanical vision is latent
in Binet’s reflections on the study of magic, but the experiment is largely animated by the fact that the magician and the
camera figure as competing devices of wonder. In addition to
providing visual evidence of how the magicians performed
their tricks, the detecting eye of the camera emerged as an
object of wonder. With regard to photographs of another
of Raynaly’s card tricks, Binet notes the camera revealed an
apparently imperceptible movement of the magician’s hand
between the cards and the spectator’s line of sight. This revelation had the unexpected result of enlightening the magician, who was astonished to see when looking at the pictures
that the movement, of which he had not previously been
conscious, worked as it did. It is as if the camera revealed
that Raynaly had achieved such mastery of the performance
that even to him his trick techniques had become imperceptible and automatic. With an interesting resemblance to
early medical training films and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s
“cyclegraphic” studies of surgeons, here the mechanical eye
of the camera educates the “expert eye” of the practitioner,
who in Binet’s case happens to be a magician [9].
The magician wondering at himself through an optical
device positions chronophotography in such a way that the
camera verges, like the magician, on being the perfect medium—capable of detecting precisely everything that passes
before its eye [10]. As an object of wonder, however, the
camera’s vision is also shadowed by the same kind of uncertainty generated by the magic that chronophotography
was employed to demystify. The device offered Binet a technique for transporting human vision to an unprecedented
plane of perceptual activity in which phenomena that were
previously hidden in plain sight became newly visible. This
technique of uprooting vision, an ecstatic mode of observation characterized by going beyond the body virtually to see
the unseen, exposed an unsettling gap of imperceptibility
that separates the observer from a reality that normally escapes detection by the human eye.
With regard to photographs of Raynaly performing a
vanishing-egg trick, a disparity between what the spectator
saw and what the camera recorded was enough to compel
Binet to be disturbed by the fact that “in none of the images have the hands the natural movement they should have
in grasping an object” [11]. That the camera produced such
an unnatural view was nothing new. By the 1890s instantaneous photography and serial photography, particularly as
the latter was developed by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, were well established as techniques for
discovering other worlds within reality. As cinema scholars
like Jean-Louis Comolli and Tom Gunning among others
have observed, these worlds oftentimes appeared uncanny
because they could not be reconciled with nature as seen
without the aid of optical devices [12]. The novelty of Binet’s
use of chronophotography was that it renewed how magic
was seen and understood by mechanizing the spectator’s act
of watching closely to detect how tricks work. That it did so
by producing “cinematic” views of magic prompts the question of what this case contributes to our view of magic’s relation to early cinema culture.
From a contemporary perspective, Binet’s renewal of
magic with an optical device moves significantly between
the domains of early science films and magic in early cinema
[13]. The scientific value of Binet’s photographs is readily apparent: The images lent a degree of mechanical “objectivity”
to the investigation of an art that derives its power from the
manipulation of human subjectivity [14]. Less obvious and
understandably less relevant to Binet, for whom the camera was a useful scientific tool, is the fact that the images
harbor a strong affinity for the representations of magicians
that proliferated several years later with the emergence of the
trick film genre, which used magic as a forum for displaying
wondrous new cinematic effects. Although Binet’s images
and trick films are radically different in appearance—e.g.
the former are sterilized and “scientific” whereas the latter
deal in enchantment and fantasy—the figure of the magician similarly stages chronophotography as something to be
wondered at because it, like the magician, reveals the world
we think we know to be a site of profound uncertainty.
Binet’s case thus makes its home in the interstices between science and art, education and entertainment. These
Fig. 2. Images showing spectators’ gazes plotted on video footage of Gustav Kuhn’s vanishing ball trick. In the sequence on top,
the magician looks at the imaginary trajectory of the ball; at bottom, he does not. Reproduced from Current Biology Vol. 16, No. 22,
Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land, “There’s More to Magic than Meets the Eye,” p. R951, © 2006, with permission from Elsevier.
Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye? 423
categories are unified by a discourse of wonder that the magician shapes as an opportunity for learning about the obscured and the unknown. This is evidenced by the fact that
chronophotography offered Binet a scientific technique for
demystifying his own experience of wondering at sleight-ofhand magic. Given the nature of this confluence of science,
technology and magic, we can see how Binet’s experiment
prefigures what has recently become a scientific approach to
visualizing the activities of the eye related to the experience
of wonder.
FROM BINET TO NEUROMAGIC: SEEING VISION
In the last decade, this pre-cinematic interest in magic has
returned prominently in scientific studies of visual cognition
that employ a variety of “new” media—namely digital imaging
technologies—to visualize the invisible operations of the visual system. Although Binet’s experiment is more of a specter
than a point of engagement in this research, there are several
significant analogues that reveal how the domain of magic and
science continues to be animated by the educative potential of
encounters between optical devices and magicians.
In a variation on Raynaly wondering through chronophotography at the mechanics of his performance, recent
research has been conducted by psychologists who are placing their backgrounds as magicians in the service of scientific
inquiry. These magician-psychologists have made prominent
use of specialized cameras to study habits of vision and attention that are foregrounded in watching sleight-of-hand
magic. In the early 2000s, Gustav Kuhn conducted a series
of experiments in which participants were asked to watch
videos of him performing various tricks. One of the videos
depicted an illusion in which the magician, after tossing a
ball in the air twice, causes the ball to vanish during a third
toss. According to Kuhn, despite the fact that the ball is not
actually present in the final toss, a large percentage of the
participants reported that they actually saw the ball appear in
the air and then vanish near the magician’s head [15].
To account for how participants arrived at this description of their perception, Kuhn collaborated with scientist
Michael Land and used an eye-tracking camera to plot the
eye movements of spectators as they watched the video of
the magician. The resulting footage consists of moving images of the trick overlaid with moving white markers that
map the precise paths of spectators’ gazes. To better analyze
the footage, the scientists reproduced the images in still serial format, making visible the striking resemblance between
their research and Binet’s use of chronophotography (Fig. 2).
The images revealed that, during the false third toss (Fig. 2c),
spectators typically focused on the magician’s gaze, which
was directed at the implied movement of the ball. It was
concluded from this that the magician’s ability to astonish
audiences is largely determined by the influence of expectations and social cues, like the magician’s gaze, which shape
perceptions of phenomena that may or may not have corresponding real-world referents.
Kuhn’s work is part of a larger body of research that uses
these techniques to visualize the spectator’s “attentional spotlight” or “focus of suspicion” [16]. This is demonstrated by
another of Kuhn’s image studies of a similar vanishing trick
in which the spectator’s attention to certain details within
the visual field (the dotted-line circles) causes other, more
significant details to fall out of the metaphorical spotlight of
what is consciously perceived (the solid line circles) (Fig. 3).
Along with Kuhn’s eye-tracking footage, these images conjure a significantly new dimension from the scientific vision
that chronophotography afforded Binet. By using optical
devices to analyze magicians’ techniques and to record the
act of watching closely, the spectator’s vision is literally projected, thrown forth like an image from a movie projector
and made visible, such that the scientist is able to “see vision”
during the act of viewing moving images of magic.
Scientists John Henderson and Tim Smith have expanded
this research to include studies of spectatorship in moving
image culture, broadly construed. As part of their Dynamic
Images and Eye Movements (DIEM) project, Henderson and
Smith have produced some fascinating empirical demonstrations of how vision and attention work while watching a film
[17]. A recent example, which has garnered the interest of
cinema scholar David Bordwell, is the use of infrared eyetracking cameras to visualize the behaviors of spectators’ eyes
as they watched a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s narrative film There Will Be Blood (2007). An analysis of the scene
is beyond the scope of this essay, but the technical aspects
of the study are relevant. In a moving image of the combined eye-tracking data for 11 spectators, circles representing
the movements of the eyes actually grow in size relative to
Fig. 3. Diagram showing zones of attention and inattention during Gustav Kuhn’s vanishing cigarette trick. Reprinted from Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Vol. 12, No. 9, Gustav Kuhn, Alym Amlani, and Ronald Rensink, “Towards a Science of Magic,” p. 350. © 2008, with permission from Elsevier.
424 Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye?
Fig. 4. Screen capture of eye-tracking footage produced by DIEM researchers in 2010 showing the gaze locations of 11 spectators watching
a scene from There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007). © 2010 (CC-SA-NC) The DIEM Project, reproduced with permission from the DIEM Project
Internet database at <http://vimeo.com/19788132>.
the length of time a detail in the image holds the attention
(Fig. 4). Smith has interpreted this data using “dynamic heat
maps,” which transform the eye-tracking images into zones
of attention (represented by the warmer colors) and inattention (represented by the cooler colors and the black) (Color
Plate C). In both cases optical devices revealed that, as in
the perception of tricks, shifts in spectators’ “attentional
spotlights” corresponded strongly with cues given by actors’
movements and gazes.
To be precise, what is being measured is the behavior of
the human eye, which Smith and Bordwell see as useful for
developing a better understanding of how spectators experience film and for scientifically “testing” cognitive film theory.
Smith’s analyses generated visual evidence of how techniques
of staging—e.g. the positioning and framing of actors, the
timing and objects of actors’ gazes—control a spectator’s vision so as to guide the attention to the most important story
information and, ultimately, to “direct” the interpretation of
a film. As with the ability of the magician to manipulate vision and attention, visual cues were revealed to be strikingly
powerful, as the eye movements of the 11 spectators watching
the scene were mostly “synchronized” by where the actors
were looking. However, Smith’s footage also revealed that this
power to manipulate spectators was complemented by the
fact that spectators’ eyes were constantly scanning the scene
independently of dominant visual cues. This activity confirmed Bordwell’s idea that vision in the cinema is active and
influenced significantly by desires, expectations and “tasks”
that are set by the mind every second. Because one of the primary tasks in watching most movies is the comprehension of
narrative, the scanning of the scene from There Will Be Blood
was interpreted as evidence of the spectators searching, like
detectives, for relevant story information [18].
DIEM research also has significant implications for the
study of classical continuity or “invisible” editing techniques.
Among these techniques are matching characters’ movements between shots—e.g. if a character exits a shot to the
right of the screen, in the next shot she will enter the screen
from the left—and matching characters’ gazes to objects or
other characters within the story world. These techniques
allow the spatial and temporal continuity of a scene to unfold across “cuts”—where two different sequences of images
are joined—in such a way that the editing goes unnoticed
[19]. Henderson and Smith have used eye-tracking cameras
to analyze the related phenomenon of “edit blindness,” the
spectator’s failure to detect cuts or notice changes between
shots if the changes are not disorienting and do not “violate
expectations” [20]. Because continuity edits are never undetectable but rather promote the impression of continuity,
Smith has noted the resemblance between how these edits
work and the magician’s ability to manipulate the spectator’s
gaze and attention away from the labor involved in performing a trick. The crucial difference is that in continuity editing
the transitions between shots remain hidden in plain sight
because the goal, unlike in the magic performance, is not to
cause spectators to wonder at how continuity is achieved [21].
Interestingly, related neuroscientific studies of magic—or
“neuromagic”—are aiming the gaze of imaging technologies
inward to visualize the brain activities associated with the
experience of watching magicians. Along with scientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Kuhn and his
colleagues have been exploring how magicians’ violations of
expectations about cause-and-effect relations affect the brain.
In one experiment participants were studied with fMRI technology as they watched video clips of magic tricks. The resulting neuroimages were used to develop a “neurobiology
of disbelief ”—an account of those parts of the brain that are
activated by the conflict that magicians stage between the
evidence of the senses and the evidence of reason [22]. As a
poignant variation on the idea that the magician is “a force
for visual education,” the scientists claim that this investigation of magic provides insight into both the brain’s rapid
negotiation of uncertain visual phenomena and the processes
related to “learning from novel/unexpected events” [23].
Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye? 425
CONCLUSION
Although recent attempts to theorize the mind through
magic mark an exciting new phase in a long genealogy of
which Binet’s case is only a part, the cinematic value of these
cases warrants further consideration. Shadowing this genealogy is the fact that optical devices have consistently been
used to study spectators’ encounters with “representations”
of magicians rather than with “live” performances of magic.
Whether the distinction is relevant from a scientific perspective is unclear, but it confirms that these cases occupy
an important if underexplored place in cinema and media
studies. Additionally, that science and magic continue to
converge around optical devices suggests that this field has
much to contribute to the pursuit of understanding the human through representational technologies, a project that
has been central to developments in cinematic media for
more than a century.
Without denying the scientific values of investigating
magic, an equally rich dimension is the potential for these
cases to greatly expand the field of magic and the cinema. Whereas film historian Jacques Deslandes identified
Demenÿ’s photographs as the first trick films ever made,
these images also harbor a strong affinity for what Matthew
Solomon calls “films of tricks.” For Solomon, films of tricks
dating back to 1896 are distinguished by the fact that, unlike
Acknowledgments
I would very sincerely like to thank Tom Gunning, James Lastra, Peter
Bloom, Murray Pomerance and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on this project. I am also grateful for the support of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and l’Institut National du
Sport, de l’Expertise et de la Performance in Paris, France.
References and Notes
1 Richard Wiseman, “The First Film of a Magician,” Genii Vol. 69,
No. 4 (April 2006) p. 36.
2 Sofie Lachapelle, “From the Stage to the Laboratory: Magicians,
Psychologists, and the Science of Illusion,” Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences Vol. 44, No. 4 (Autumn 2008) pp. 319–334;
Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the
New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2010) pp. 20–24.
3 Tom Gunning uses this idea in his seminal theory of early film spectatorship when he claims that the cinema was received like a trick
with an “I know, but yet I see” response. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic
of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in
Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williamson (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995) p. 117. I have added the
term “inexplicable” to emphasize an impulse to explain how tricks
work.
4 Barbara Maria Stafford, “Conjuring: How the Virtuoso Romantic
Learned from the Enlightened Charlatan,” Art Journal Vol. 52, No. 2
(Summer 1993) p. 28.
5 See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) pp. 59–89.
6 Binet also lists the magicians Pierre, Dickson and Georges Méliès.
Alfred Binet, “La Psychologie de la prestidigitation,” Revue des deux
mondes Vol. 54, No. 125 (October 1894) p. 904. For the English trans-
426 Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye?
trick films, they do not use magic to display novel cinematic
trick techniques; rather they preserve magic tricks as attractions in and of themselves by representing the magician in
the mode of an actuality [24]. Although preserving tricks is
not the objective in scientific studies of magic, considering
such scientific images to be part of a long genealogy of films
of tricks is useful for exploring other histories of magic in
the cinema, namely representations of magicians produced
not for theatrical effect but for research and educational
purposes.
These representations offer an opportunity to rediscover a
dimension of magic that remains somewhat marginalized in
cinema and media studies. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the figure of the “magic professor” circulated widely as
part of magicians’ attempts to garner the respectability of the
scientific and academic communities. Although this title is
largely considered to be superficial, scientific investigations
of magic suggest that magicians have much to teach us about
how we see and come to know the world through technology. Acknowledging this allows us in turn to see magicians,
particularly in the domain of cinema and related media, both
as entertainers and as educators, whose potential as “media”
of discovery mirrors that of the optical devices used to investigate and represent them.
lation, see Alfred Binet, “Psychology of Prestidigitation,” Smithsonian Report (1896) p. 555. All quotations are my translations. The page
numbers refer to the French version.
7 Max Dessoir, “The Psychology of Legerdemain,” The Open Court
(23 March–20 April, 1893); Norman Triplett, “The Psychology of
Conjuring Deceptions,” The American Journal of Psychology Vol. 11,
No. 4 (July 1900) pp. 439–510; Joseph Jastrow, “Psychological Notes
Upon Sleight-of-Hand Experts,” Science Vol. 3, No. 71 (May 1896) pp.
685–689; and Joseph Jastrow, “The Psychology of Deception,” The
Popular Science Monthly Vol. 34, No. 10 (December 1888) pp. 145–157.
8 Binet [6] p. 904. In the original French, “cette étude nous renseigne
sur la marche ordinaire de notre pensée pendant que nous percevons
les objects extérieurs, et nous découvre les points faibles de notre
connaissance.”
9 My reference to the “expert eye” is from Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, eds. Vinzenz Hediger and
Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009)
pp. 85–99. See also Scott Curtis, “Dissecting the Medical Training
Film,” in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of
Early Cinema, eds. Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore
and Louis Pelletier (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing Ltd.,
2012) pp. 161–167. On related uses of film by the French surgeon
Eugène Louis Doyen, see Thierry Lefebvre, La Chair et le celluloïd:
le cinéma chirurgical du docteur Doyen (Brionne: Jean Doyen, 2004).
10 Binet [6] pp. 921–922.
11 Binet [6] p. 922. Original French: “Dans aucune des images les mains
n’ont la position réelle qu’elles devraient avoir pour saisir un object.”
12 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic
Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1980) pp. 121–142; Tom Gunning, “Never Seen
This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in Muybridge and
the Instantaneous Photography Movement, by Phillip Prodger (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp. 222–272; and Tom Gunning,
“Invisible Worlds, Visible Media,” in Brought to Light: Photography
and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008) pp. 51–63.
13 Laurent Le Forestier notes the fluid boundaries between trick films
and popular science films in the early 1900s. See Laurent Le Forestier,
“Une Disparition instructive: Quelques hypothèses sur l’évolution
des ‘scènes à trucs’ chez Pathé,” 1895: Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinema No. 27 (September 1999)
pp. 61–73.
14 For more on issues of scientific objectivity see Lorraine Daston and
Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
15 See Gustav Kuhn, Alym Amlani, and Ronald Rensink, “Towards
a Science of Magic,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 12 (2008)
pp. 349–354.
16 See Stephen Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins,
Teller, John Thompson, and Susana Martinez-Conde, “Attention and
Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research,” Nature
Reviews Neuroscience Vol. 9, No. 11 (November 2008) pp. 871–879;
and Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, “Magic and
the Brain,” Scientific American Vol. 299, No. 6 (December 2008)
pp. 72–79.
17 See <http://thediemproject.wordpress.com/>.
18 See Bordwell’s series of blog postings at: <www.davidbordwell.net
/blog/2008/02/13/hands-and-faces-across-the-table/> <www.david
bordwell.net/blog/2011/02/06/the-eyes-mind/> <www.david
bordwell.net/blog/2011/02/14/watching-you-watch-there-will-be
-blood/>.
19 On classical continuity editing, see David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th Edition (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2012).
20 John Henderson and Tim Smith, “Edit Blindness: The Relationship Between Attention and Global Change Blindness in Dynamic
Scenes,” Journal of Eye Movement Research Vol. 2, No. 2 (2008)
pp. 1–17; Tim Smith, “The Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity,” Projections Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012) pp. 1–27; and Tim Smith, “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Cognitive Film
Theory,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed.
Arthur P. Shimamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
pp. 165–191.
21 Tim Smith, “An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing” (PhD
diss., University of Edinburgh, 2006) pp. 87–88.
22 Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind:
What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010); and Ben A. Parris, Gustav Kuhn, Guy Mizon, Abdelmalek Benattayallah, and Tim
Hodgson, “Imaging the Impossible: An fMRI Study of Impossible
Causal Relationships in Magic Tricks,” NeuroImage Vol. 45 (2009)
pp. 1033–1039.
23 Parris et al. [22] p. 1038.
24 Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges
Méliès (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963) p. 17; and Solomon [2] p. 65.
Manuscript received 13 August 2013.
Colin Williamson is an assistant professor of Film and
Screen Studies at Pace University. He received his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2013.
This article was supported by a fellowship from the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. The article is also based on
research that appears in his first book, Hidden in Plain Sight:
An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Williamson, Quicker Than the Eye? 427
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Using infrared eye-tracking cameras to visualize the behaviors of spectators’ eyes as they watched
a scene in a movie and then interpreting this data using “dynamic heat maps,” which transform the eye-tracking
images into zones of attention (represented by the warmer colors) and inattention (represented by the cooler
colors and the black), DIEM researchers in 2010 transformed the footage from Fig. 4 (page 425) to create
this screen capture. (© 2010 [CC-SA-NC] The DIEM Project, reproduced with permission from the DIEM Project
Internet database at <http://vimeo.com/19677876>.) (See article in this issue by Colin Williamson.)
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