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23 1 Vivid Rivals Seeing Time:Technical Effects and Historical Emplacement Onscreen When things look real at the movies, one can be so enthralled as to lose a sense of reality in the “reality” of the experience. I sat in an audience far below Times Square to watch Star Wars in the summer of 1977, and at the moment—that glorious and epoch-marking moment—when Han Solo and Chewbacca threw the Millennium Falcon into hyperdrive, the twelve hundred or so captivated souls all leaned back and shouted “Wohhhh!!!” in one single, gargantuan breath. It was an embodied experience of“reality,” not reality, we were having together down in that darkness, as no such acceleration existed in the real world any of us knew or had imagined looking like this. Surely at the same moment that we fell for it, we were aware that this was a trick. But the“truc,” or“trick,” was an agency of the marvelous , a harbinger of delight and wonder, not a mechanism for manipulative and immoral deception. To be deceived here was to see the light. While studies of screen technology by such scholars as John Belton, Joel Black, Leo Enticknap, Raymond Fielding, Barry Salt, and most recently Stephen Prince have in various ways addressed how, why, and to what general effect widescreen and digital technologies emphasize the cinematic experience—especially, perhaps, during the 1950s and after 1995 or so—what remains to be understood and appreciated is the way it is possible for a viewer to respond to realisms of the screen. Such an understanding need not limit itself to any particular theoretical approach, 24 The Eyes Have It for example to swimming in the depths of psychoanalysis, since it is with strangers, whose biographical and historical relation to the screen differs from one’s own, that one experiences cinema. Nor do prevailing social and cultural circumstances neatly enough explain what it is that happens to anyone who is provoked by the screen, what viewers are doing in their watching. What that “Wohhh!!!” constituted—and how, as selves facing otherness, as modern folk, as neurotics, as willing believers, viewers make meaning as they scream it—is the pressing question here. Screen “reality” can be utterly confounding. A case in point, that will require a small but patient analysis: Early in 2009, David Denby reviewed Edward Zwick’s World War II adventure Defiance in the New Yorker. The film is an exposition of the brave exploits of three Jewish brothers resisting Nazi tyranny in the Lithuanian forests. Denby was openly amazed by some aspects of the depiction of early 1940s Belarus. He goes so far as to rhapsodize, recapitulating the long-lived wonder experienced by viewers at cinema’s screen magic and also the now increasingly popular lingo of digital effects technology that abounds in the press, on Facebook, and in conversations around the world. “The beautiful light—a little dryer than life,” he writes, “has obviously been digitally altered” (“Survivors” 72; my emphasis). Like many a filmgoer, however—and paid to be more articulate than most—wellintentioned Denby has been artfully misled about this digital “alteration.” Everything one sees in film,“alterations” and straight images, is light. One could even say“beautiful light,” without troubling to invoke prevailing aesthetic sancta or the waffling of personal opinion. What Denby can only mean by pointing to the“obvious alteration” of the“beautiful light” is that the quality of Zwick’s images has led him to suspect or intuit that they are manipulations as images, that they have been tinkered with“backstage.” He is telling us, in short, that he is viewing a special effect. To commit the act of pointing to a cinematic frame being “digitally altered ” is certainly to show a contemporary piety, now early in the twenty- first century. Yet it is hardly necessary to use digital effects to achieve the crisp color we see in this film and that Denby (sensibly) adores: an appropriate choice of film stock, the right fabrics for costumes, an evocative location, and a balance between artificial light and natural (available) light in the forests of Lithuania (where almost every minute of this film was shot) would have done handsomely. But if one possibly can, apparently, one should give the nod to electrons. “Digital alteration.” The same kind of stunning sense of “real” and yet slightly “unreal” light was achieved by [3.15.3.154] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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