CGI effects in Hollywood science-fiction cinema 1989-95: The wonder years

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 158-176

  Pierson, Michele ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049277004     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/40.2.158     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. I am indebted to Daren Tofts's essay on Australian artist Troy Innocent for directing me to Mandelbrot. Describing the computer-generated imagery in Innocent's work, Tofts writes: The overwhelming sensation is of "plastic beauty" (to use a phrase of Mandelbrot's), since we never for a moment doubt their artificiality'. See his 'Troy story'. World Art, no. 12 (1997), pp. 29-33
2. See Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)production (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 66
3. See Albert J. La Valley, 'Traditions of trickery: the role of special effects in the science fiction film', in George S. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 141-57
4. See Christian Metz, 'Trucage and the film'. Critical Inquiry (Summer 1977), pp. 657-75
5. La Valley, 'Traditions of trickery', p. 144
6. Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence, p. 86. On this issue, Landon also writes: 'In this respect, SF film intensifies the fantastic bent of cinema in general, since its entire aesthetic can be seen as a writing large of the experience of the special effect: in one sense, the science fiction film can be seen as a genre focused precisely upon advocating and valorizing its effects' (p. 89)
7. The importance of maintaining this legacy also appears in a richly illustrated, folio-sized tribute to Industrial Light and Magic. In this book, a profile of 'The Effects Supervisor' reads: 'Most of ILM's supervisors (and many effects artists in general) got their first taste of the magic of effects watching films featuring the work of such stop-motion wizards as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen'. See Mark Cotta Vaz and Patricia Rose Duignan, Industrial Light & Magic: Into the Digital Realm (New York: Del Rey Books, 1997), p. 122
8. See Don Shay, 'Dennis Muren - playing it unsafe', Cinefex, no. 65 (March 1996), pp. 100-111
9. See in particular, Tom Gunning, 'The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde', in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 56-62
10. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991)
11. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1991)
12. and the essays on early cinema in Christopher Williams (ed.), Cinema: the Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996)
13. See Musser, Before Nickelodeon, p. 8
14. Gunning, 'The cinema of attractions', p. 64
15. Vivian Sobchack, 'Postfuturism', in Screening Space: the American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987)
16. For an examination of some of the formal characteristics that are shared by film and video games, see Mark J.P. Wolf, 'Inventing space: toward a taxonomy of on- and off-screen space in video games', Film Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (1997), pp. 11-23
17. See Scott Bukatman, 'The artificial infinite: on special effects and the sublime', in Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (eds), Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995)
18. Bukatman, 'The artificial infinite', p. 270
19. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen use the term 'techno-futurism' to describe the rationale behind the production and marketing of new media and communications technologies. See their introduction in Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, (London: British Film Institute, 1993), pp. 1-9
20. See Susan Buck-Morss's, '"panoramic" tour of the ur-forms of the phantasmagoria of progress which Benjamin unearthed in his research' for the Passagen-Werk, in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), p. 82
21. In a discussion about the early cinema of attractions, Miriam Hansen argues that 'the display of diversity also means that the viewer is solicited in a more direct manner - as a member of an anticipated social audience and a public, rather than an invisible, private consumer'. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 34. Scholarship on early cinema has prompted an ongoing re-evaluation of the ways in which all cinema - and not just the cinema of attractions - solicits a spectator who is both a private consumer and a member of one or more social audiences
22. See Sylvia Harvey, 'What is cinema: the sensuous, the abstract and the political', in Christopher Williams (ed.), Cinema: the Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996), p. 241. The contours of my own work on Hollywood science-fiction cinema have been very much directed by attempts to find ways of discussing the 'private, social' experience of cinema
23. See, for instance, Steven R. Holtzman, Digital Mantras: the Language of Abstract and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994)
24. See Dennis K. Fischer, 'The last starfighter', Cinefantastique, vol. 15. no. 1 (1985), pp. 24-37
25. See the 'Roundtable discussion about why today's science fiction movies are so damned lame', in Sci-Fi Universe, no. 24 (May 1997), p. 24
26. See Andrew Ross, 'Getting out of the Gemsback continuum', in Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)
27. Cultural critics like Mark Dery and Claudia Springer have pointed out that these futures have invariably reproduced phallocentric fantasies about technology and gender. See Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 264-5
28. and Springer, 'Virtual sex', in Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996). While these readings are entirely apposite - and even necessary - it is my contention here that they do not quite register the impact that these shimmering computer-generated objects have had on the contemporary techno-cultural mediascape
29. See Fredric Jameson, 'Progress versus utopia; or, can we imagine the future?', Science Fiction Studies, vol. 9 (1982), p. 151
30. In their work on special effects, both Landon and Bukatman have argued that encounters with technology in contemporary science-fiction cinema reveal considerable ambivalence about technology. Bukatman suggests that in fact, '[t]he presence of the sublime in science fiction - a deeply American genre - implies that our fantasies of superiority emerge from our ambivalence regarding technological power'. 'The artificial infinite', p. 279
31. See Jameson's critique of special-effects imagery in the conclusion to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 297-418