From magician to metal brain: the embodiment of illusion in early European film theory

Abstract

This article engages with a pervasive leitmotif within the criticism and theory of early European cinema: the increasingly corporeal situation of cinematic illusion. In particular, this text investigates a crucial shift from the mode of the ‘cinema of attractions’, into an account of film which demands a much more comprehensive implication of the human perceiver into the diegesis of the film. By first examining the broad terrain of illusion of the former tradition exemplified by cinemagician Georges Méliès and his deployment of the precedent of the phantasmagoric deceptions of the nineteenth century, this investigation turns to the case study of a crucial but largely neglected film by Jean Renoir, La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes/The Little Match Girl (1928), a work which seems, in startlingly innovative ways, to dramatise and ground in cinematic production the transformation of bodily realities so central to contemporary theoretical debates. This remarkable film, suffused with archaic and modern modes of cinematic trickery, serves as an historically aware conduit between early cinema and the avantgarde, and helps us to navigate the progressively sophisticated account of the relationship between human and cinematic vision that was to form a central preoccupation of the most innovative film production of the 1920s.