Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998)

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Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006)

There haven’t been all that many successful movies made about magicians. Not white-bearded wizards or spellcasting warlocks, mind you – I’m talking about realistic illusionists. The movies are there, don’t get me wrong, but if you compare the number of movies strictly about magicians with just about any other subject matter, you’ll find the department in question … lacking.

It’s not difficult to see why making a decent movie about magicians is near impossible. The ONE thing that magicians have going for them is their ability to seemingly defy natural law right in front of an audience’s eyes. That’s just what they do. Unfortunately, a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to evoke a similar sense of awe and amazement in a movie about magicians because today’s society doesn’t trust what they see on a screen anymore. Since the dawn of modern special effects, we’ve had to abandon any notion that something amazing in a movie actually happened. Any trick that a magician could perform could be so easily replicated with special effects, it wouldn’t be worth an audience’s attention.

Keeping this in mind, you can tell why Christopher Nolan (Memento, Dark Knight trilogy) was the perfect man for the job of making an amazing movie about magic. When The Prestige was released in 2006, it had to compete with the precedent set by Neil Burger’s The Illusionist which had hit theaters just two months prior. Burger gave moviegoers a dramatic love story – sure, he used a conjurer as the vehicle by which he could tell it, but it was centrally a love story. Burger recognized that creating a good tale strictly about magic was doomed to fail and created an entirely different set of tensions within the plot. I actually really enjoyed The Illusionist, but in my mind it was nothing compared to The Prestige.

And that’s because Nolan figures out how to make a successful movie about magicians. Instead of trying to make a movie about magic tricks, he makes his own magic trick. The Prestige itself is one big artifice. I think that’s part of what makes it such an enjoyable movie. Probably the most significant lines from the movie are spoken by the magicians’ stage engineer, Cutter:

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge.’ The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course … it probably isn't. The second act is called ‘The Turn.’ The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret … but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige.’"

I won’t ruin the plot by explaining exactly how the movie fits perfectly into Cutter’s explanation of what makes a great trick, but I promise that it does. Nolan doesn’t try to amaze us with tricks performed by the magicians (although I loved the way he showed how some of their tricks were performed); instead he amazes us with the trick of his own while actually managing to focus entirely on the lives of two magicians throughout the story. By doing this, Nolan is finally able to evoke that sense of open-jawed bewilderment in his audience that no other movie about magic could ever accomplish. He brings the awe of watching a magic trick in person to the big screen, which is why I call The Prestige one of his greatest works.

Christian Koch
Film Club Co-President

Costa-Gravras’s Z (1969)

What is “Z”?

“Z” is a massive cross-breed. It’s in French, takes place in Algeria, and its director is Greek. More importantly, it combines two rarely crossed genres: politics and thrillers. Political films are often deeply grounded in the reality of a situation, looking at things in the simplest format. Thrillers often move far beyond logical motivation, showing only what will send the most adrenaline into our bloodstream. “Z” not only combines these genres, it makes them brilliant.

“Z” was shockingly relevant at the time of its release. It was not the average politically connected film that immortalized political situations fifty or five hundred years ago. “Z” looked at the death of the politician Grigoris Lambrakis under circumstances still being debated at the time. Its worldwide recognition, complete with a Cannes Palme D’Or, spread the word about Lambrakis.

“Z” is entertaining. Jean Louis Trintignant won awards for his performance as The Examinating Magistrate. Mikis Theodorakis’ score made him a household name (Mr. McVeety brought his vinyl copy of the soundtrack to school, referring to it as “a relic”), along with “Zorba the Greek.” It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, extremely rare for both foreign and experimental films.

“Z” is a landmark. Ty Burr, Boston-based film writer, notes its “slick cinematic urgency” and its “ease with genre filmmaking.” Most films that deal so poignantly with political themes do so with dull period piece work and Hollywood gloss. “Z” stands apart from all these films.

The title comes from a Greek word meaning “He is alive,” a protest phrase relating to Lambrakis’ death. Despite the fact that this film, too, is out of political relevance, as a work, it is still very much alive.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club