Special effects in nonfiction have always been a way of thinking—not just a way of finishing. At a moment when AI can generate nearly any image on demand and the spectacular has become increasingly ordinary, what might older, slower forms of illusion reveal about the hand, the labor, and the ethics behind an image?

In this two-hour artist talk, filmmaker Carl Elsaesser expands upon the ideas explored in his recent UnionDocs workshop The Magical Image. Rockaway-based magician Cardone will give a presentation on magic, illusion, and the unstable boundary between the real and the manufactured, considering how the magician’s craft might help us understand our desire to believe in images.

Elsaesser will then present material from his work-in-progress feature film, tracing the role that special effects have played throughout the project’s evolving form. Combining nonfiction video diaries, reenactment, rear projection, compositing, optical effects, archival research, and deliberately visible seams, the film explores a Maine family alongside a history of technologies invented to see, transmit, and interpret one another.

Rather than treating effects as a departure from documentary truth, the talk considers them as methods for approaching experiences that cannot be represented directly: memory, intimacy, queer becoming, family history, and the limits of what an image can reveal. The program asks what illusion allows us to see—and how an image can announce its own construction while still producing something emotionally and politically real.