I love seeing magic tricks in film – the way magic can ‘be’ something a bit different, depending on the context of the story, thematics, aesthetics etc.
Thien An Pham’s Inside the yellow cocoon shell (2023) is among other things a film about the invisible and the unseen. Early on there is a striking scene in which the protagonist is standing in a city street in Saigon, paying for Bánh mì sandwiches and speaking on his phone. He casually advances slowly towards the static camera, until his red t-shirt fills the entire frame. He lowers himself to the ground for no apparent reason, disappearing from view, only to stand up again, holding a small chick in his hand (see stills above).
The screen becomes itself a kind of theatrical red curtain, and the appearance of the small bird a magic feat in itself. The action of him moving close and disappearing from the camera is ‘explained’ through the appearance of the bird.
The protagonist also performs some card magic to entertain his nephew – magic as familiar social activity, a way of offering delight and comfort, but it’s a later scene that stood out to me. In a bedroom at night, the nephew asks to see more magic. We hear the faint sound of a bell: the protagonist shows his empty hand, then turns the hand around and magically causes a small bell to appear (and I must confess I rewatched the scene and can’t work out how this was achieved). The kid asks for more magic, so his uncle indicates a glass vase on the bedside table. He waves his hand, and magically the vase is now full of water. He waves his hand again, and now two little goldfish are swimming in the vase.
They switch the lights out to go to sleep. In the darkness, he lights a lighter to inspect the alarm clock, and as he does so, we notice that the fish have now disappeared from the vase, leaving only the clear water.
In a context of a film about death and the search for religious faith, set in Christian communities in Vietnam, these small moments of magic do a lot. The magical appearance of the water and fish, as well as being biblical in tone, alludes to the very real possibility of the otherworldly, the supernatural at hand. The water and fish ‘tricks’ (if that’s the right word for them) are human reproductions of larger and more mysterious forces: as below, so above (or the other way round). Though we understand that these magic tricks are just that – small dexterous feats performed by a doting uncle – the context of the film about the search for religious faith and bigger ‘meaning’ frame the magic in a particular way. I think, and this is what I’m most currently drawn to, that we see these illusions as small but highly significant moments to rehearse an experience of awe and mystery. In other words, the tricks have (a) meaning. What is more, they just might be actually magical: the appearance of water and fish is not your average pick a card trick, and so could be a moment of quasi-divine intervention, or at least the film alludes to that possibility.
This isn’t to say that magic tricks normally don’t intrinsic meaning – see the work of Juan Tamariz, in The Magic Rainbow book, about how a simple cut and restored rope connects, in an unconscious way, to archetypes of healing, repair and rebirth. Perhaps all magic performance connects to something ‘larger’. I’m grateful to Thien An Pham’s Inside the yellow cocoon shell for making me experience that.
