Hans Arnold's 1949 study »the magic of film« is a central document from the early history of German film and media studies. This folklore dissertation originally handed in to Rudolf Kriss analyzes the European cinema of the 1920s and 1930s as a piece of folk culture using a broad material basis under the folklore aspect of magical practices and impacts. An original contribution to the germanophone scientific history of media and film, whose program continues along the lines of Béla Balázs' »The Visible Man« (1924) and Siegfied Kracauer's »From Caligari to Hitler« (1947), becomes accessible once more.