Special Effects on the Screen: Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture (Cinema and Technology)

Special Effects on the Screen: Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture (Cinema and Technology)

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films. Martin Lefebvre is Professor and Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University (Montréal, Canada). He is Editor-in-Chief of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry and has published widely on semiotics and film. He is the author of Truffaut et ses doubles (Vrin, 2013) and has edited several volumes including Techniques et technologies du cinéma (with A. Gaudreault; PUR, 2015); Landscape and Film (Routledge, 2007); and Eisenstein: l’ancien et le nouveau (with D. Chateau & F. Jost; Sorbonne, 2001). Marc Furstenau is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. He published articles on a range of topics and is the editor of The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments (Routledge, 2010), co-editor of Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (Palgrave, 2008), and co-editor of Special Effects on the Screen: Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is past editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies . John Belton is Professor Emeritus of English and Film at Rutgers University, Chair of the Board of Editors of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and editor of the Film and Culture series at Columbia University Press. He is the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema and American Cinema/American Culture François Jost is Professor Emeritus at Université Paris 3 ― Sorbonne-Nouvelle where he created the Centre d’Études sur l’Image et le Son Médiatique (CEISME). He has written and edited more than 30 volumes on cinema and television and has published some 270 articles and book chapters. He is also the author of a novel, Les Thermes de Stabies, and has written scripts and directed several works of fiction and documents, including La mort du révolutionnaire, hallucinée, which won the Critics’ Prize at the Festival du jeune cinéma of Hyères in 1979. Frank Kessler is a professor of Media History at Utrecht University and currently directs the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). His main research interests lie in the field of early cinema and the history of film theory. He is a co-founder and co-editor of the KINtop yearbook and the KINtop. Studies in Early Cinema series. Sabine Lenk is an archivist and film historian. She was a researcher at the University of Antwerp in the research project “A Million Pictures” before co-writing the EOS research project “B-Magic,” in which she works as postdoc at Antwerp University (research group Visual Poetics) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (CiASp). François Albera is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Lausanne (Swit_x0002_zerland). He is Editor-in-Chief of 1895 revue d’histoire du cinéma. His most recent books include Cinema Beyond Film (co-edited, 2010), Cine-dispositives. Essays in Epistemology across Media (co-edited, 2015); Le cinéma au défi des arts (2019); and Fernand Léger et le cinéma (2021). Donald Crafton has received the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Jean Mitry prize presented at Pordenone, Italy. He has been recognized by the Jean Vigo Institute (France), the International Animation Festival in Zagreb, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Crafton held the first endowed professorship in film studies at the University of Notre Dame. Benoît Turquety is Associate Professor of cinema history and aesthetics at the Université de Lausanne. He is Director of the SNF research project on Bolex and amateur cinema and of the EPIMETE/Digital Media Epistemology research axis. He is a founding member of the Material Archival Studies Network and a member of the Dispositives research group, of the Network for Experimental Media Archaeology, as well as the Technology and the Humanities project. His recen