UC San Diego

Through an examination of the performative work of illusionists, artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the latter half of nineteenth century France, including Robert-Houdin, the Davenport Brothers, Edgar Degas, Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Georges Méliès, I argue for the existence of a negative-space performance that is created solely within the mind of the spectator. Negative-space performance involves the spectators attempting to coalesce all of the various components of a performance, i.e. what they perceive to be taking place on stage, their own previous knowledge about the material, their own belief systems, etc. into a unique form of reality in an effort to subsequently delineate their own identity.

Within this model, there can be no singular reality, but there instead exists a complex multiverse, where new realities are consistently generated as the boundaries between spectator/performer are blurred and as the previous framework of the static and passive photograph is replaced with one of the active construction of reality. Even when perceptions of reality are challenged, as the performers I am examining routinely did, and when a spectator can no longer differentiate between what they perceive to be as “real” and as “illusion,” the subsequent fracturing that occurs is what becomes the catalyst for new forms of reality to emerge. Reality, I assert, can only exist within the two-dimensional space of the text, the photograph, or the film. I argue that the three-dimensional world is falsely considered to be the actual whereas it is in instead a simulacrum; it is a projection of two-dimensional reality.

Within my dissertation, I also attempt to counter scholarship that positions films by the Lumière brothers or by Méliès as a form of “proto-cinema” and claim that these films need to be examined outside of an encompassing film theory and instead be viewed as theatrical performances designed specifically to break down pre-conceived notions of a linear temporality and to introduce an entanglement model of time.