The Famous Box Trick (2015) for bass flute and electronics
Performer: Phoebe Bognár
The Famous Box Trick (Illusions Fantasmagoriques) is a 1898 French short black-and-white silent trick film, directed by Georges Méliès. In the words of writer Michael Brooke, the film "hearkens back to stage magic.”
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I found fascinating the hybrid texture of the “trick” which allows the spectator to position himself in between the physical magic of the stage and the virtual “magic” of cinema - the corporeal vs. the incorporeal - biological time vs. the machine time.​
The spectator is suspended in between the belief in the trick and the conscious awareness of it. This is not the case in modern cinema, where the...