The Autology of Illusionism

Rating: 10/10 (23 October 2009)

Illusionism means basically that you must force yourself not to believe to be real what you see. However, for most people, this is a problem, because they define truth through their eye-sight: What I saw, is true, since I saw it (happen) with my own eyes. The whole witness-system of the world-wide police is based on this thoroughly illogical conception of truth. If you have the luck to meet an illusionist, what you see may be false because you see it with your own eyes - and opposite, it may be true because you must not believe in what you see.
However, there is another problem, and nowhere it is portrayed in a more illustrious way than in "The Illusonist" (2006): People who go to an illusionist's show, must assume from the beginning that what they will see is not true: the world "illusion" alone says it. However, if what they see is so strikingly convincing to be true, but now true against their better knowledge, then these people must be able to come behind the trick by which falseness is presented so splendidly as truth. Now, the reality looks so, that most people are unable to find out the trick. The do not only see - they look and watch (intentionally) - and they do not find a hint, although they know (or believe to know?) that what they see is false - so does this prove now that what they see is true? Here lies the main root of the superstition of people: Because they are unable to find out which the trick is that lets them believe the falseness for truth and vice versa, they rather convince themselves that there is no trick and start to believe what they see - as they do normally because they define to be true what they see. The movie shows this so simple and at the same time so complex mechanism of truth and falseness in the context of Illusionism in such a way that the audience gets the other public of Eisenheim - together with his proper public in his theaters. After all, the whole movie is itself an illusion - in order to find out why, you will have to watch the end carefully. Thus, this movie is what is called in logic auto-logical.