Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema by Lisa Bode (review)

In film histories, screen performance and special effects are usually treated as separate strands, even as they have become increasingly entangled in the digital age. This book brings these two strands together, exploring how the practices and discourses around screen acting have changed or remained stable through the evolving technological and cultural contexts of cinematic illusionism. Making Believe combines screen analysis with archival research in the forms of North American film reviews and editorials, actor and crew interviews, trade and fan magazine commentary, actor training manuals, and film production publicity materials to trace how screen performance, stardom, and casting practices and philosophies have shifted through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras. While providing new insights into the specificities of acting beneath prosthetic makeup, for motion capture, on green screen, for photographic tricks, and with doubles, it also provides a unique perspective on broader historical patterns in illusionism, stardom, artifice, and realism in Hollywood international cinema. Its conclusions point both to the cultural specificity of its findings, as well as to the need for further research into how acting and special effects may intersect differently in non-Anglophone cinemas such as Bollywood and Chinese cinemas.

Lupita Nyong'o on the set of Star Wars VII in performance capture suit and face markers to play Maz Kanata.