Article on the relationship between magic and movies

[kestrell]

Hugo and the magic of film trickery
J Hoberman
guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/24/hugo-martin-scorsese-oscars-georges-melies

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With Georges Méliès as its subject, Martin Scorsese's Hugo – up for 11 Oscars – is a film that gives meaning to the cliché 'the magic of the movies'

Should you stay up for the Oscars, here's a surefire way to be hammered by the end: pour yourself a drink each time you hear the word "magic", and you'll be watching the winner's tearful acceptance speech in an alcoholic haze.
Is there a phrase more hackneyed than "the magic of the movies"? From the moment of their invention at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have been perceived as simultaneously hyper natural and supernatural.
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Comments

[jesse_the_k]

So, what's your favorite storytelling medium? Human voice, computer voice, interpretive dance, music, movies, theater, tapestry?

[kestrell]

My favorite arrative medium, by far, is text, using text-to-speech, which my brain basically internalizes as my inner reading voice. However, I also love theatre (shakespeare, Tom Stoppard) and the human voice (radio programs, readings, and recordings), especially people who have a sense of music and, even when not singing, are just amazing story tellers. I love blues and jazz musicians almost as much as books, because they can tell stories about anything. New Orleans musicians in particular are just amazing storytellers--it's a culture where talking to other people, be it related to the music, oral history, or just shooting the shit--is still important. I also love movies, mostly classic ones, because it seems to me that during the period of the 1930s and 1940s, when a lot of writers had made the transition from radio to film, the dialogue was sharper and wittier, because the writers had been writing for a medium which had toconvey action without the use of pictures to show what was happening. Try a film such as "Out of the Past"--like Shakespeare and Stoppard, the actions and expessions for the actors are indicated in the text. I like some audiobooks, usually more for the narrator or because the use of a narrator complements the story--I actually prefer Anne Rice novels and the Harry Dresden stories in audiobook format. I used to read a lot of audiobooks narrated by Tim Curry, who has done a lot of Anne Rice and Umberto Eco audiobooks, and James Marters (Spike from "Buffy") does the Harry Dresden audiobooks. I think the element I really prize in radio, audiobooks, and music recordings, is a sense of liveness. Most audiobooks have to be so scripted that the human voice tends, in my mind, to lose this sense of liveness and spontaneity, so I lose interest. I also don't like the fact that a human narrator imposes his or her own sense of the story, but for action-based stories, such as the fantasy-noir of Harry Dresden, there isn't a lot of ways to read the text other than the straight way the human narrator is reading it.

[capri0mni]

I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which is the origin of the movie), and it was so perfect I have no desire to see the film version -- especially since the film version is in color and 3-D, and the story is about early black and white film-making-- and the illustrations match that.*

That said, I do believe storytelling (movies and otherwise) is magic -- in a very literal sense. They "Make with Belief," which has always been the sorcerer's art: pulling the unreal out of the ether and making it real.

*it was the first middle-grade chapter book to ever win a Caldecott Medal for illustration...