True lies: Perceptual realism, digital images, and film theory

Film Quarterly

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 27-37

  Prince, Stephen ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449259298     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213468     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Telephone interview with the author, October 19, 1994
2. Quoted in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 123-24
3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 5
4. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14
5. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. ix
6. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 16-23
7. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), note 2, p. 268
8. The design and creation of these ads are profiled in detail in Christopher W. Baker, How Did They Do It? Computer Illusion in Film and TV (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 1994)
9. See Ming C. Lin and Dinesh Manocha, "Interference Detection Between Curved Objects for Computer Animation," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation, ed. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), pp. 43-57
10. Ron Magid, "ILM's Digital Dinosaurs Tear Up Effects Jungle," American Cinematographer, vol. 74, no. 12 (December 1993), p. 56
11. Stephen Pizello, "True Lies Tests Cinema's Limits," American Cinematographer, vol. 75, no. 9 (September 1994), p. 44
12. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994
13. Ron Magid, "ILM Breaks New Digital Ground for Gump," American Cinematographer, vol. 75, no. 10 (October 1994), p. 52
14. I do not wish to imply that photography was ever a mere mechanical recording of the visual world. During shooting, printing, and developing, photographers found ways of creating their own special effects. Despite this, theorists have insisted upon the medium's fundamental indexicality
15. Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)
16. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 287
17. Colin McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, p. 182
18. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 25
19. Noël Carroll has urged film theory in this direction by recommending smaller scale, piece-meal theorizing about selected aspects of cinema rather than cinema in toto and on a grand scale. See Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, p. 255
20. and Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 230-34
21. For a fuller discussion of this literature, see my essays "The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies," Film Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 16-28
22. and "Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator," in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
23. See Uta Frith and Jocelyn E. Robson, "Perceiving the Language of Films," Perception, vol. 4 (1975), pp. 97-103
24. Renee Hobbs, Richard Frost, Arthur Davis, and John Stauffer, "How First-Time Viewers Comprehend Editing Conventions," Journal of Communication, no. 38 (1988), pp. 50-60
25. Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, "Picture Perception as an Unlearned Ability: A Study of One Child's Performance," American Journal of Psychology, vol. 74, no. 4 (December 1962), pp. 624-28
26. Robert N. Kraft, "Rules and Strategies of Visual Narratives," Perceptual and Motor Skills no. 64 (1987), pp. 3-14
27. Robert N. Kraft, Phillip Cantor, and Charles Gottdiener, "The Coherence of Visual Narratives," Communication Research, vol. 18, no. 5 (October 1991), pp. 601-16
28. Robin Smith, Daniel R. Anderson, and Catherine Fischer, "Young Children's Comprehension of Montage," Child Development no. 56 (1985), pp. 962-71
29. See Austin S. Babrow, Barbara J. O'Keefe, David L. Swanson, Renee A. Myers, and Mary A. Murphy, "Person Perception and Children's Impression of Television and Real Peers," Communication Research, vol. 15, no. 6 (December 1988), pp. 680-98
30. Thomas J. Berndt and Emily G. Berndt, "Children's Use of Motives and Intentionality in Person Perception and Moral Judgement," Child Development no. 46 (1975), pp. 904-12
31. Aimee Dorr, "How Children Make Sense of Television," in Reader in Public Opinion and Mass Communication, ed. Morris Janowitz and Paul M. Hirsch (New York: Free Press, 1981), pp. 363-85
32. Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor, "Developmental Differences in Response to a Television Character's Appearance and Behavior," Developmental Psychology, vol. 21, no. 6 (1985), pp. 1065-74
33. Paul Messaris and Larry Gross, "Interpretations of a Photographic Narrative by Viewers in Four Age Groups," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication no. 4 (1977), pp. 99-111
34. Elizabeth M. Perse and Rebecca B. Rubin, "Attribution in Social and Parasocial Relationships," Communication Research, vol. 16, no. 1 (February 1989), pp. 59-77
35. I am indebted to Carl Plantinga for clarification of some of these distinctions
36. Telephone interviews with the author, October 25, 1994
37. Stuart Feldman, "Rendering Techniques for Computer-Aided Design," SMPTE Journal, vol. 103, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 7-12
38. With respect to digital-imaging practices, rendering is distinct from the phases of model-building and animation and refers to the provision of texture, light, and color cues within a simulated environment
39. Texture-mapping is a process whereby a flat surface is detailed with texture, such as skin wrinkles, and can then be wrapped around a three-dimensional model visualized in computer space. Some surfaces texture-map more easily than others. Pat Byrne, at Post Effects, points out that spherical objects are problematic because the top and bottom tend to look pinched. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994
40. Telephone interview with the author
41. Author's interview with Kevin Mack. See also Tsuneya Kurihara, Ken-ichi Anjyo, and Daniel Thalmann, "Hair Animation with Collision Detection," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation, pp. 128-38
42. See Stephania Loizidou and Gordon J. Clapworthy, "Legged Locomotion Using HIDDS," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation, pp. 257-69
43. Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 5
44. Christopher Williams, "After the Classic, the Classical and Ideology: the Differences of Realism," Screen, vol. 35, no. 3 (Autumn 1994), p. 282