Following Disappearing Tricks‘ recent win of the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award, prize judge Peter Bradshaw raves about the book on the Guardian Film Blog.

Solomon’s excellent book shows how the “magic of the movies” is a phrase with real historical meaning, and makes Harry Houdini’s career an object lesson in appreciating this. The new tricks of the cinematograph became deeply absorbed into cinematic language, and early audiences’ initial candid appreciation of their unreality survived, residually, as a kind of sensuous, almost erotic pleasure.