Author: Houdini was a pioneer filmmaker and promoter, as well as magician
When most people think of the magician Harry Houdini, they think of his legendary escapes -- from handcuffs, locked cabinets full of water, milk canisters, submerged packing crates.
But Matthew Solomon, associate professor of media culture at CUNY’s College of Staten Island, thinks of Houdini as something else -- a media pioneer.
Solomon is the author of “Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century,” published early this year. He spoke to an audience of about 80 people at the East Brunswick Public Library on Thursday night.
Author Matthew Solomon showed the audience films and images of Harry Houdini and his famous escape tricks.
Houdini, who rose to fame just as moving pictures were taking hold in the popular culture, used the new medium of film to advance his career and reputation. He incorporated films into his live appearances, and he filmed many of his public stunts and wove them into movies that blended fact and fantasy.
Solomon likened it to an early 20th Century version of Reality TV.
“Houdini is a magician of the media, and he’s ahead of his time in that way,” Solomon said.
Houdini -- who was born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874 -- began rising to fame as a magician about twenty years later. Around the same time, in 1896, moving pictures were first publicly exhibited.
“Interestingly enough, Houdini is right there at the beginning,” Solomon said. Houdini performed some of his first escapes around the same time that he traveled with a motion picture show through Wisconsin, his adopted home state.
Within a few years, Houdini was working in Europe, where his performances also coincided with motion picture shows. While in France, he bought and no doubt learned from some early films by a French filmmaker. And in 1906, Houdini began using films in his own act.
“This to me proves that Houdini’s appeal was not based on liveness,” Solomon said. While danger and the possibility of death accompanied his live stunts, Houdini also showed his audiences filmed stunts that he had clearly already survived.
A 1907 New York Times article, for example, mentioned a performance by Houdini where he showed a film of one of his bridge jumps. Solomon also showed one of those early films, in which Houdini strips to his boxers, is handcuffed and climbs to the upper girders of a bridge. He leaps off and emerges from the water moments later with his arms free, and swims to shore.
“He knew he was being photographed, he knew he was being filmed as he does these stunts, so it becomes really a kind of movie-making,” Solomon said. Filming the stunts was also a way to record them for posterity.
Eventually, through film editing, Houdini was able to weave the filmed stunts into fictional movies -- to “take a real piece of actuality and build a story around it,” Solomon said. He also began to be more transparent about the tricks themselves, filming them and sharing with viewers some of his techniques for escape.
“This is a move toward a more visible magic, something that didn’t need to be concealed,” Solomon said.
For example, in one of his later films, Houdini is shown being held by a captor, his arms tied to the wall above his head. Houdini swings himself up to wrap his legs around his captor’s neck, rendering him unconscious. He then wriggles his feet out of his shoes and socks -- without using his hands -- and uses his toes to fish a key from his unconscious captor’s pocket. He uses the key to open a nearby door, and swings himself up to rest his weight on the top of the door while using his teeth to untie his restraints.
In 1918, Houdini performed in a film serial called “The Master Mystery.” He eventually moved to Hollywood and began making his own feature-length movies, surrounding himself with luminaries like Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
The movies extended Houdini’s fame around the globe, showing in countries such as India and Japan. Houdini himself traveled to Australia.
But respect in Hollywood eluded Houdini, and his film projects were not financially successful. Solomon said this has to do less with Houdini’s acumen as an actor than with his insistence on writing, acting in and promoting the films, and his lack of a studio-style machine for distribution.
Houdini died in 1926, from a burst appendix.
While Solomon said his father gave him a book about Houdini when he was a child, he confessed to being less interested in the magic than in Houdini’s role in the history of modern media. As a gifted promoter and showman, “he fits so much the definition of the self-made man, and the American of the early 20th Century who could do anything,” Solomon said.
He also pointed out that modern magicians such as Criss Angel and David Blaine perform stunts that descend from Houdini’s repertoire.
Some audience members asked whether Houdini’s physique allowed him to perform his escapes, through double-jointedness or an ability to dislocate joints. But Solomon said there are no indications that differences in Houdini’s body enabled his talents, while his media-savvy skills were what really led to his fame.
“It’s interesting to me that we’re looking for something in the man that’s different, in his body,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to find Houdini there.”