Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows how film can create illusion. A young man (Doug Rosenthal) uses magic to conjure a feast that he then consumes. A dissolve reveals him slumped in his chair with a bloated stomach. He reacts with horror when he thinks the cat is also fat. Splashing water from a bottle onto his face, he wakes to find he has been dreaming and his little brother (Brian Maxted) is squirting him with the garden hose. He throws a book titled Magical Powers after the retreating boy. The book falls open to read ‘The End’.

Educational value points

• The theme of magic is used in the film and clip as a vehicle through which the amateur filmmaker is able to demonstrate his camera techniques. The filmmaker shows off techniques such as editing and dissolves, as well as trick photography such as reversing the film in order to show ‘magical powers’ – fruit flying into a bowl and the sudden appearance of a new car in the place of the neighbour’s car, which had broken down.

• The clip demonstrates how film can create illusion, for example when the young man conjures the bowl of fruit, the clip cuts from a shot of the empty table to one with a bowl of fruit on it. The movie camera takes a series of images, called frames, which, when played back through a projector at a certain rate, trick the viewer’s brain and eye into believing that the images are moving. Thus the cut between the empty table and the fruit bowl is imperceptible.

• A dissolve is used in this clip to indicate that the young man’s stomach expands after eating the feast. In a dissolve the first image gradually disappears and is replaced by another. Dissolves are often used to suggest a transition or the passage of time, so instead of seeing the man consume all the food, the sequence shows him starting to eat the feast and then dissolves into the shot of him slumped in the chair with a distended stomach.

• Several fairly simple techniques are used in the clip to give the impression that the young man is performing magic, for example the film is reversed so that the pears appear to ‘fly’ into the empty bowl, and similarly when the man imagines the cat has put on weight the cat is made to appear distorted. This may have been achieved by placing a thin material, such as gauze over the camera lens and moving it slightly.

• Doug Rosenthal, the actor who plays the young man, exaggerates his gestures in order to convey to the audience what is happening, which was essential in a silent film. He leans his head on his hand when he is thinking, clicks his fingers or looks at the camera and gives an overstated ‘aha’ to show he has been struck by an idea, and then exaggeratedly wipes his brow to indicate that all this conjuring has made him exhausted.

• Magical Powers, which was made in 1936, pays tribute to Charlie Chaplin, a star of the silent era whose iconic character ‘The Tramp’ was well known to contemporary audiences. Like The Tramp, the young man in this clip wears a suit and round hat, and has a similar wide-eyed, almost guileless quality to his performance.

In this black-and-white silent film, a young man seated at a table in the garden uses his new magical powers to produce a banquet of fruit, cakes and drinks. Bloated from eating all the food in front of him, he finds his stomach has expanded. He thinks he is hallucinating when he sees that his cat has also put on weight. He pours a bottle of water over himself to regain his senses, but it is revealed that the water is actually from his young brother spraying him with a hose: everything has been a dream! The young man looks around to see a motorist asleep on an old, broken-down car. Angry and confused, he throws the magical powers book at his younger brother. The book opens up to form the end credit.