![]() ![]() In his 2016 cultural history of Polaroid photography, The Camera Does the Rest, Peter Buse shows how terminology derived from magic, and in particular conjuring, was continually associated with Land and his company’s products. A 1938 Reader’s Digest article entitled “The Magic of Polaroid” opens with a description of Land’s “strange new product” and its use within the observation car of the Union Pacific’s railway streamliner City of Los Angeles, whose circular “magic windows” could be variably adjusted to control the passage of light. Land’s later pioneering photographic work tends to eclipse his first, and arguably more pervasive, invention: the glare-reducing polarizing technology found on windows, car windshields, and sunglasses worldwide. McElheny, the inventor’s early interest in science was encouraged by his fascination with optical toys, in particular during visits to his hometown library where Land later recalled that “the chief delight” had been a Brewster stereoscope. ![]() Schreiber wrote in 1936 that “the greatest magician-and a magician who succeeds in everything and who can make anything happen-is probably film.” While this curious statement appears to prioritize the moving image above magic as a tool for re-envisioning the world, it also suggests that Schreiber felt that the two mediums might somehow coalesce through his own activities.Īccording to Edwin Land’s biographer Victor K. This positioned Schreiber, then “the virtual czar of conjuring” in Germany, at the very center of the country’s film production in the buildup to, and throughout, the war. In 1942, within the newly nationalized German film industry, he was promoted by Reichsminister Goebbels to production chief of Bavaria Filmkunst in Munich, and at the same time appointed to the advisory board of the Reich’s film academy. ![]() Before the outbreak of World War II, Schreiber held a position at Tobis Filmkunst, where, in 1939, he produced Robert und Bertram, the only anti-Semitic musical of the Nazi era. However, it was his early interest in film production, particularly the stop-motion techniques of French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès, that shaped his early career. An avid conjurer from an early age, Schreiber was the editor of the German magazine Magie between 19, and the president of the German Magic Circle from 1936 to 1945. Helmut Schreiber’s understanding of the darkened performance space of the theater and the photographic darkroom developed simultaneously. ![]()
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