Between science fact and science fiction: Spielberg's digital dinosaurs, possible worlds, and the new aesthetic realism

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 177-192

  Buckland, Warren ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042594635     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/40.2.177     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Quentin Curtis on The Lost World, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 1997, p. 24
2. Steven Spielberg, quoted in the press kit for Jurassic Park (Universal Studios, 1993)
3. Jean Douchet, quoted in Thomas Elsaesser, 'Louis Lumière: the cinema's first virtualist?', in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), p. 45
4. Fereydoun Hoveyda, 'Nicholas Ray's reply: Party Girl', in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma: the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 123
5. François Truffaut, 'A certain tendency of the French cinema', in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 224-37
6. Stephen Heath, 'Narrative space', in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: a Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 379-420
7. editors of Cahiers du cinéma, 'John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln', in Rosen (ed), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 444-82
8. Derek Malcolm, 'Monster munch', The Guardian, 18 July 1997, p. 8
9. Hoveyda, 'Nicholas Ray's reply', p. 130
10. Leland Poague has developed a deconstructionist type of film criticism that also concentrates on 'inessential' details. See 'Links in the chain: Psycho and film classicism', in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 340-49
11. See also Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
12. The issue is more complex, because different philosophers ascribe a different ontological status to possible worlds. At one extreme, modal realists such as David Lewis argue that possible worlds have the same physical status as the actual world. At the other extreme, antirealists such as Nelson Goodman argue that all worlds only have a virtual existence. The view of possible worlds I outline in the text is called moderate realism, and is developed by Alvin Plantinga, Robert Stalnaker and Saul Kripke, among others. They avoid the extreme claims made by modal realists and antirealists by setting up a hierarchy between actual and possible worlds. See the authors' contributions in Michael Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979)
13. David Lewis, 'Possible worlds', in Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual, p. 182
14. Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964)
15. Niall Ferguson (ed), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997)
16. Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 25
17. Spielberg and the Dinosaurs, tx 12 July 1993, BBC1
18. Douglas Palmer, 'Dr Faustus meets the dinosaurs', New Scientist, vol. 139, no. 1880 (1993), p. 43
19. Ben Macintyre, 'Mad scientists on the loose', The Times, 25 June 1993, p. 14
20. Nigel Hawkes, 'Reviving rex', The Times Magazine, 12 June 1993, p. 32
21. Joseph Natoli, Hauntings: Popular Film and American Culture 1990-1992 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 3-4
22. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 105
23. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 56
24. Lucia Santella Braga, 'The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic', in Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), p. 125
25. Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
26. André Bazin, Orson Welles: a Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991), p. 80
27. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), esp. Chapter 3
28. André Bazin, 'The virtues and limitations of montage', in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 41-52
29. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 100-107
30. Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (London: Virgin Publishing, 1996), p. 123
31. Motion control is a technique mat creates repeatable camera movement by programming the movement into a computer. For an account of the way motion control is combined with live action and digital special effects, see Alison McMahan, 'E-motional control', Millimeter (November 1989), pp. 123-32
32. Joseph Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: an Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996)
33. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985)
34. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
35. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
36. Ed Tan, Emotions and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996)
37. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 48