Special Effects

Michele Pierson is lecturer in film studies and visual culture at the University of Queensland, Australia.

It is something of a cliche to think of special effects as 'movie magic,' but Pierson helps us to understand the substance behind that cliche, tracing our current fascination with computer-generated imagery back to discourses about magic and popular science in the late nineteenth century. Much as these earlier magicians helped to excite public interest and shape popular perceptions of emerging technologies, Pierson shows how CGI has become one of the most visible aspects of the digital revolution and how effects-laden films have often sought to examine their own precarious position somewhere between simulation and reality. -- Henry Jenkins, Director, Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participator Intriguing... This is not a 'nuts and bolts'history of onscreen magic, but a specific analysis of the 'cultural reception'that visual effects have enjoyed throughout the history of cinema. American Cinematographer [A] ground-breaking book... Pierson's journey through the history of special effects offers us an important new perspective which has previously been left out of cinema-related academia and formal criticism. -- John McGowan-Hartmann Senses of Cinema

• Introduction: Special Effects and the Popular Media 1. Magic, Science, Art: Before Cinema Natural Magic Science Fictions Scientific American Millenial Magic 2. From Cult-classicism to Techno-futurism: Converging on Wired magazine The Limits of Convergence Photon and Stop-motion animation Corporate-futurism/Techno-futurism Home-production 3. The Wonder Years and Beyond: 1989-1995 On Genre Reinventing the Cinema of Attractions Digital Artifacts Retro-future/Retro-vision 4. Crafting a Future for CGI The Case of Editing Disaster Strikes An Aesthetics of Scarcity The Public Life of Numbers Conclusion: The Transnational Matrix of SF Notes Bibliography Index