Turnock, Julie A. (Author)
This dissertation provides a previously neglected academic history of the technology and aesthetics of special effects. By this, it identifies the central role special effects played in the vital shift in 1970 cinematic aesthetics, through changes in representation and spatial construction. Drawing from rare archival material and interviews with practitioners, my dissertation uncovers often overlooked intersections among disparate image-making practices, including Hollywood films, experimental film, animation, plastic arts and graphic design. Through close attention to these artistic, historical and industrial networks, we can better understand the digital, nearly fully manipulatable contemporary blockbuster. As a result of rethinking cinema's aesthetic structures, I demonstrate that film's ontology is not stable, but rather, that cinema has a constantly changing ontological history, constantly in flux as it encounters new imaging practices and media. More specifically, I argue that in such films as Star Wars and Close Encounters, filmmakers deployed special effects techniques to inaugurate a technologized mode of filmmaking I call optical animation that allowed them to design a fully synthetic, composite mise en scene. Greater control of the composition and animation of the frame meant new possibilities for creating equally credible and fantastic cinematic worlds on screen. Through this practice-centered approach, I denaturalize, historicize and explicate the photoreat special effects aesthetic so prevalent in filmmaking from the 1970s to today, as a style with particular contours as well as unexpected components. I explore the cross-fertilization of experimental, industrial and commercial influences that filmmakers sought to merge in mainstream filmmaking in order to realize their goal of what I call the expanded blockbuster, a popularly successful film that is equally sensually and intellectually engaging. Finally, I examine the efforts though the late 1970s and 1980s by filmmakers to streamline the bricolage of their initial successes in order to realize their ambition of a fully designable and seamless cinematic diegesis, a goal that many feel they may have realized too well. By understanding the implications and consequences aesthetic choices have on cinematic representation, 1 therefore suggest a renewed importance for aesthetics as an organizing theoretical question to cinema studies and visual culture more broadly.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/04 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3309114.
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