"It's a Fake!": Early and Late Incredulous Viewers, Trick Effects, and CGI

This paper offers a historical inquiry into industry worries about incredulous viewers, prompted by the persistence of claims by prominent contemporary film industry figures that computer-generated imagery (CGI) is intrinsically detrimental to cinematic realism and is eroding viewer immersion in screen fiction. Examining a range of fan and trade magazines from the 1910s and 1920s, I find evidence of an earlier anxiety in the film industry about incredulous viewers. This anxiety, however, was blamed not on the intrinsic unreality of cinematic tricks but a broader film culture, including fake actuality films and journalistic revelations of filmmaking secrets. I show that the industry made a concerted effort to manage such viewership by cultivating uncertainty about the reality or artifice of what appeared on the screen. Finally, moving back to the present, I argue that CGI is not inherently less real. Rather, a broader viewing culture of incredulity has reemerged due to a combination of production publicity, cult viewing of bad cinema, online forums, editorial photoshopping, and image hoaxes.