One of the biggest projects during the last ten years of his life was a full length film entitled The Magic Show, in which Welles wanted to take the spectator through the world of magic and spells, and clearly wanted to elaborate on old images taken from his career. The story of Abu Kahn was supposed to take up a good deal of space. Abu Kahn hypnotized people on stage and took them into a deep sleep, hitting them – without the public noticing – behind the curtain with a large wooden mallet. The mallet mistakenly hit Abu Kahn when he had just split a young virgin girl. While Abu Kahn tried to remember how to put the girl back together, two policemen went around the theater trying to explain the mysterious case. The available material contains various episodes already edited with sound: The Light Box, Abu Khan’s Levitation Trick, The Magic Mummy, Chung Ling Soo and The Thread Trick, as well as The Duck Trick – as a prologue –  which was filmed in 1970. The initial material was original negative 35mm and positive 35 and 16 mm material, which was all duped. The magnetic was mixed and re-recorded in optical sound.

Stefan Droessler