In & Of Itself

Saw In & Of Itself, a film version of a performance-art piece done by magician Derek DelGaudio.  He talks enough about his life that the description of the film usually contains 'biographical' somewhere, but the film is really about identity and labels and how they limit and free people.  There's also some great window-dressing involving fiction and story-telling which is like catnip to me.

The film is just Derek talking on stage for a while and interacting with a set of six objects behind him.  He does a magic trick every so often but mostly he talks about labels and about how we see others and ourselves.  A story about some blind men feeling an elephant is told.  Derek talks in a halting, flatly-affected way, sounding sincere, even as he explains that this is a show and every line was rehearsed.  In the show he generally tries to out-clever his audience, having his cake and eating it too, acknowledging this is artificial to make it seem more real.

This culminates in the final trick of the night, where he does a magic trick (which looks real but which we know is done via some trick) and simultaneously reaffirms the audience's perceptions of itself (which looks staged with shaking hands, celebrity cameos, and silent tears, but which may well be real.)  Derek also plays another narrative trick where he casts himself as an ally of the audience, amusing and delighting them, and simultaneously as an antagonist of them, fooling them, predicting their choices, and using their strong emotions to strengthen his show.

There's a lot of fun topics flying about here and it ultimately is fairly entertaining, if sort of stagy and self-conscious as many modern magic shows are, as they try to outwit and subvert post-modernism.  The line between what's real and not is very blurry and doubly-so since the many audience-shots pick up on well-known celebrities, heightening the feelings of unreality but, like all fiction, we know it's a trick but it manages to delight us anyway.