Williamson offers an insightful, wide-ranging investigation of how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, Hidden in Plain Sight provides an eye-opening look at the powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.
—Stephen Prince, author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality