Trick-o-logics 1810/1910: The Magic of Tricks and Special Effects

Abstract

This chapter discusses the ambivalent attitude of German critics concerning tricks on the stage and on the screen. Starting from a transformation scene in Goethe’s Faust, it discusses the difference between an early French performance of the play in 1828, which makes use of all the possibilities it offers to recur to spectacular effects, and later German productions that shun what critics at the time called “mechanical artifices.” With respect to cinema, however, German critics rather praised its capacity to transcend the laws of causality and to depict the fantastic events in fairy tales as one of the medium’s specific qualities.