Special Effects

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In classical film theory, only Béla Balasz (1884–1949) pronounced full enthusiasm for fantasy as a potential route for cinema. Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) was a consummate technician, and a great admirer of Disney, he, like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, was committed to the idea of cinema as a realist vehicle in the purest sense. However, as Christian Metz once observed, "to some extent, all cinema is a special effect," and even classics of the realist canon, such as Citizen Kane (1941), have used the full range of physical and optical effects. More recent critics, following the lead of sociologist Jean Baudrillard, have complained (or rejoiced) that with special effects, cinema departs from the depiction of the world in order to produce a form of hyperreality whose social purpose is to point toward the unreality of the world of everyday experience.

Scholars reflecting on special effects, especially in the period since digital media made their biggest impact on movie production and postproduction, have derived much of their inspiration from phenomenology, following the lead of pioneer analyst Vivian Sobchack. In her work on science fiction film, Sobchack points especially to the construction of space—as a dimension as well as a place beyond the atmosphere—as a critical achievement. Michelle Pierson provides a detailed account of what she considers the crucial transition from the "wonder years" of the 1980s, when films like Terminator 2 (1991) fore-grounded their effects wizardry, to the 1990s, when effects became much more a tool for the production of familiar verisimilitude. Norman Klein and Angela Ndalianis emphasize the parallels between the postmodern culture of special effects and the baroque period of the counterreformation, with its use of spectacle and illusion as a means to win propaganda wars. Taking a more culturally oriented approach, Scott Bukatman stresses the interplay between such themes as superhuman capabilities and cultural trends; like Klein and Ndalianis, Bukatman is interested in the connections between special effects cinema, theme parks, and such phenomena as Las Vegas casino hotels, some forms of sports, immersive technologies like virtual reality, and such related popular cultural forms as graphic novels and computer games. Urbanist and cultural commentator Paul Virilio includes special effects among the optical technologies with which he credits the acceleration of society, to the point of its disappearance. Vilém Flusser's preliminary work on digital photography, meanwhile, suggests that the apparatus of visual technologies exists to exhaust all possibilities, reducing humans to mere functionaries of that process. Between the annihilation of reality and the affirmation of the phenomena of human experience, the study of special effects, though nascent, is already beginning to alter our preconceptions of the nature and purpose of film.