Special Effects

Still in Search of Wonder

Michele Pierson

• Editore: Columbia University Press
• Anno: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231500807
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Designed to trick the eye and stimulate the imagination, special effects have changed the way we look at films and the worlds created in them. Computer-generated imagery (CGI), as seen in Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men in Black, and The Matrix, is just the latest advance in the evolution of special effects. Even as special effects have been marveled at by millions, this is the first investigation of their broader cultural reception. Moving from an exploration of nineteenth-century popular science and magic to the Hollywood science fiction cinema of our time, Special Effects examines the history, advancements, and connoisseurship of special effects, asking what makes certain types of cinematic effects special, why this matters, and for whom. Michele Pierson shows how popular science magazines, genre filmzines, and computer lifestyle magazines have articulated an aesthetic criticism of this emerging art form and have helped shape how these hugely popular on-screen technological wonders have been viewed by moviegoers.

1

MAGIC, SCIENCE, ART

BEFORE CINEMA

Special effects have always been a magical form. Belonging to no single media, they flicker most brightly in the moment at which all media appears most modern. Before the emergence of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, many different forms of public amusement enchanted audiences with their wonder-working special effects. Throughout the early part of the century, lavish displays of industrial light and magic were mounted in the form of phantasmagoria and magic shows, pantomime, exhibitions of new technologies, and science lectures and demonstrations. Visitors to these popular amusements were drawn by the expectation of having all manner of curious, mercurial, and startling images materialized before their eyes. Both the wonder-workers responsible for the creation and exhibition of this imagery and the popular media that circulated advertising and reviews of it invited audiences to view it as magic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, computer-generated visual effects are not only a major attraction of Hollywood blockbuster cinema but one that, despite being produced within an industrial context that is more highly rationalized than ever before, continues to be presented to contemporary audiences as magic. The artists, designers, and engineers working in this area of special effects production are revered as wizards and illusionists in the many different forms of media that now report on the current state of the art. Major exhibitions at metropolitan science and technology museums and Hollywood studio tours alike invite patrons to step behind the scenes of moviemaking and learn the secrets of special effects. Within the swirling eddy of hype and infotainment that is popular culture in an age of global media conglomerates, popular discourse on special effects still circulates in and through the language and iconography of magic. None of this has been lost on contemporary commentators, who have tended to assume that whatever magic special effects might have for contemporary audiences is only a dull form of commercial hocus-pocus. Where once magic might have appealed to audiences’ curiosity about the invisible forces guiding the hands of ingenious industry, the attraction of Hollywood special effects is assumed to lie elsewhere: in childish enchantment, in base stupefaction, in adolescent technophilia.

I have already suggested that speculation about the popular reception of special effects in Hollywood cinema—and especially science fiction cinema—might be better approached by looking at some of the contexts that have been important for the cultivation of contemporary forms of effects connoisseurship. In this chapter I want to suggest that the discursive networks that support these modes of reception actually took on their contemporary contours in the late nineteenth century. Central to this argument is the claim that in the United States popular science periodicals played a key role in the cultural reproduction of special effects connoisseurship after 1870, when the staging ground for special effects production moved from the science lecture and the magic stage to more drama- or narrative-oriented forms of spectacle. While programs of popular scientific entertainment declined in popularity over the next decade, other forms of spectacular entertainment did not. One consequence of this was that it was left to popular science periodicals to provide a context for speculation about these other, less overtly scientific sites of effects production. Of all the periodicals in circulation during this period Scientific American stands out as a particularly important site of such instruction. It paved the way not only for the slew of other popular science magazines that have come and gone since it began publication in 1845 but also, and in a much more formative sense, for the science fiction fan magazines that began offering detailed analyses of cinematic special effects in the 1970s and the computer lifestyle magazines that sprang up to cover digital effects production in the early 1990s.

In keeping with its broadly cartographic concerns with mapping, tracing, and delimiting the historical and discursive coordinates of contemporary forms of special effects connoisseurship, this chapter begins by speculating about the traditions of popular scientific demonstration that shaped audiences’ emotional and intellectual engagement with the optical illusions and special effects featured in two popular series of lectures in the 1860s: the first delivered by John Henry Pepper at London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1862/63 and the second delivered by Henry Morton at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in 1867/68.¹ The stage directions and descriptions of apparatus left behind by Pepper and Morton reveal that while all special effects were presented to audiences as startling feats of science and technology, the class of effects most often credited with exciting the imagination and stimulating the intellect were those that took the form of novel, if not always “never-before-seen,” imagery. Neither Pepper nor Morton was a scientific demonstrator in the same way that someone like Michael Faraday—lecturing at London’s Royal Institution in the 1830s and 1840s—had been. In his wide-ranging study of the “place,” “performance,” and “process” of Victorian scientific experiment, Iwan Rhys Morus has argued that two distinct and to some extent antagonistic trends of scientific experimentation began to emerge in England in the 1830s. On the one hand, “elite, largely middle-class gentlemen centered at institutions such as the Royal Society or the Royal Institution fostered an image of science as the province of highly trained, vocationally minded specialists,” and, on the other, “another set of experimenters—popular lecturers, instrument-makers, or mechanics—fostered a different image and a different practice.”² Rather than being oriented toward the pursuit of basic research, the practices of this second lot of experimenters centered on the display of spectacular phenomena and the instruments used to produce it.

In the early 1860s Pepper’s closest contemporaries were not eminent associates of the Royal Institution but other educators, entertainers, and writers like himself. While he would on occasion claim that innovations in the art and craft of stage illusion tended to trickle down from the scientific to the conjuring professions, he was at other times happy to allow that the techniques of optical illusion and visual display made popular by magicians and popular science lecturers alike tended in fact to trickle across and between these overlapping spheres of entertainment.³ So frequently did they borrow from each other that the origins of a particular illusion or effect often became obscured by subsequent adaptations in remarkably short time. In Lives of the Conjurors (1876), Thomas Frost attributed the design of Pepper’s famous ghost illusion to the magician Alfred Sylvester, who was, according to Pepper, only responsible for one of several improvements made to his and Henry Dircks’s patented design.⁴ Lives of the Conjurors nevertheless provides an important point of reference for this chapter, for in plotting the history of magic in terms of the contributions that both magicians and popular science demonstrators made to the popularization and democratization of the idea of “rational entertainment,” the genealogy for popular science that emerges from this book locates the nineteenth-century popular science lecture within a tradition of public performance stretching back to turn-of-the-century phantasmagoria shows and, going back still further, to the courtly practice of natural magic. More recently, Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman have argued that natural magic has never really disappeared but has instead been “subsumed under new categories such as entertainment, technology, and natural science”—to which the category of science fiction might be added.⁵ Many of the key architectural features and instruments used in Pepper’s and Morton’s lectures—a darkened theater, a mirror, a spirit lamp with a salted wick, a magic lantern—were used in the practice of natural magic. Nineteenth-century popular science not only inherited its instruments from natural magic but also a tradition of public performance that subordinated the visual articulation of instruction and amusement to the intensification of aesthetic effect. Therein lay the secret to turning science into entertainment.

Just as nineteenth-century science was split in England between a scientific elite pursuing an increasingly abstract form of basic research and popular educators like John Henry Pepper, the American scientific establishment firmly distinguished between different types of scientific activity. Historians concerned with examining the professionalization and institutionalization of American science between 1830 and 1870 have laid particular emphasis on the role that the professoriat played in this process. Revising an earlier tendency to place this group of science professionals in the same category as scientists engaged in more or less full-time research, Nathan Reingold has argued that the professoriat was largely and necessarily “concerned with teaching, administration, applied developments, and other essential, grubby tasks.” Compared with the full-time researchers “who were their friends and teachers,” these educators and administrators made far fewer contributions to basic research.⁶ Reingold’s claim that the expansion of this class of science professionals was brought about by increased opportunities for social participation in the sciences—as much as by increasing specialization—draws attention to the professoriat’s interest in maintaining demand for scientific education. Significantly, representations of science in newspapers, magazines, and courses of public lectures did not make distinctions between researchers and educators, and publicly at least the professoriat enjoyed all the authority and prestige that on a professional level tended to be more generously bestowed on the research scientist. Up until the early 1870s many of the country’s most prestigious educators combined their regular teaching duties with some form of public lecturing. Some also contributed to the popularization of science by writing for leading periodicals. Henry Morton, for instance, occasionally contributed articles to Scientific American, while Louis Agassiz was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly.⁷ But the popular “lecture system,” as it was called, was not as institutionally localized in the United States as it was in Britain. While at places such as the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Cooper Institute in New York courses of public lectures had long been seen as an important means of raising revenue and attracting prospective students, popular science lectures were not only, or even mostly, associated with these established institutes of education. As J. G. Holland pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly, they were also organized on a much more ad hoc basis by library and lyceum associations equally interested in the idea of replenishing their treasuries through public education.⁸

Holland’s 1865 essay “The Popular Lecture” was the inspiration for another essay on the American lecture system a few years later. In this essay the writer, minister and social activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, begins by imagining a railway construction train moving westward across the American prairies and into the wilderness: “These iron rails once laid, all else follows—all the signs and appliances of American social order: the farm, the workshop, the village, the church, the school-house, the New York Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, and—the popular Lecture-system.”⁹ If the gesture of harnessing the future of the nation to the railway was to be repeated in a variety of forms of representation well into the twentieth century, the idea that the progress of the nation might be tied to something called the popular lecture system proved to be rather more fleeting.¹⁰ Both Holland and Higginson suggest that American enthusiasm for the form could be calculated in direct proportion to its ability to tap into the vernacular culture. And in this they agreed that lecturers were aided by the sheer diversity of styles of presentation and address that could conceivably pass muster in the public arena. As Holland warmly puts it, in America “the word ‘lecture’ covers generally and generically all the orations, declarations, dissertations, exhortations, recitations, humorous extravaganzas, narratives of travel, harangues, sermons, semi-sermons, demi-semi-sermons, and lectures proper, which can be crowded into what is called a ‘course.’” ¹¹ Nevertheless, both authors also single out history and science as the subjects that struggled hardest to find widespread public favor in this form. Holland speculates that the education system’s success in making science part of the elementary curriculum may already have made it an unsuitable subject for a forum that relied so heavily on novelty to attract an audience. But the United States did produce some exceedingly popular lecturers in the field of science. Henry Morton’s and R. Ogden Doremus’s lectures set the stage for some of the period’s most lavish visual effects extravaganzas, adopting a form that, as Holland himself conceded, never failed to meet with audiences’ approval.¹²

While this chapter includes an examination of the way Morton adapted the traditions of scientific demonstration and performance associated, on the one hand, with natural magic, and, on the other, with the turn-of-the-century phantasmagoria, it is worth remembering that there were still other popular science lecturers who were not science professionals but skilled orators and showmen. Among the most vocal critics of this group of popularizers was E. L. Youmans, one of the founding editors of the Popular Science Monthly.¹³ Setting himself the task of staving off the degeneration of science into mere amusement and recreation, Youmans signaled his scholarly and pedagogical aspirations for his new journal with a monthly format that included essays commissioned from professional scientists and lengthy literature reviews. Holland had begun his 1865 essay on the American lecture system by pointing out that its “downfall” had “been confidently predicted” for “the last fifteen years.”¹⁴ When his turn to survey the state of the popular science lecture came in 1873, Youmans sensed that its future was unlikely to be decided by the professoriat, even though he was a long way from being reconciled to the direction in which it appeared to be heading. In “Scientific Lectures” he wrote:

That lectures will always continue to be, as they always have been, a valuable mode of public instruction, there can be little doubt; but that what is called the lecture system is going to prove an agency of rational regeneration, may be seriously questioned. In so far as it is in any sense a system it has degenerated to a mere catering to public amusements. The platform is crowded with readers, singers, declaimers, dramatists and buffoons, and the “course of lectures” is transformed into a “series of entertainments.”¹⁵

In fact, the small but popular lecture circuit that had been maintained by distinguished professionals like Morton had already seen its heyday some years before John Tyndall made his thirty-five-lecture tour of the United States in 1872/73. While the Popular Science Monthly continued to keep the world of commercial entertainment at bay, it was to Scientific American—the country’s most widely circulated popular science periodical—that interested spectators could still turn for informal instruction in the reception of new entertainment technologies and their artifacts.

NATURAL MAGIC

The Magician and the Cinema (1981)—Erik Barnouw’s well-known monograph on the traditions of trickery that played such a vital role in the early days of cinema—was one of the first books to demonstrate how much the development of early film culture owed to the performative traditions of stage magic and, later, magic theater.¹⁶ In this slim book, the social and technological intersections between these traditions and those associated with nineteenth-century popular science and spiritualism—the latter circulating less as popular science’s dark nemesis than as its shabby next of kin—have been threaded together to suggest a genealogy for cinema that continues to inspire new scholarship on the precinema history of moving picture technologies. Embedded within this narrative is the genesis of another story: this one about the precinema history of special effects. For Barnouw’s story begins in fact with the observation that cinemagicians such as Georges Méliès and Robert R. Booth “played a pioneer role in animation”; their trick films laying “the foundations for the field of ‘special effects’ in the modern cinema” (6). By the book’s conclusion, this story has given way to an elegiac rumination on what has happened to magic now that tradition and craft have at last been outrun by industrialization. Reflecting on the attractions of contemporary media images, Barnouw finds himself wondering if the central element in their power might not be “the astonishing fact” that they “are no longer seen by the public as optical illusions offered by magicians, but as something real.” The “new industrialized magic may,” he concludes,...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Special Effects and the Popular Media
• 1. Magic, Science, Art: Before Cinema
• 2. From Cult-Classicism to Technofuturism: Converging on Wired Magazine
• 3. The Wonder Years and Beyond: 1989–1995
• 4. Crafting a Future for CGI
• Conclusion: The Transnational Matrix of SF
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index