Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

1. Through the Looking Glass

11 The digital era in cinema challenges our understanding of the medium and not simply because of the shift to electronics from celluloid. It challenges us to think anew about the nature of realism in cinema and about the conjunction between art and science, as these domains collaborate in the design and use of technologies that make possible the creation of a new class of images, ones that have a transformative effect on existing media and offer viewers opportunities to enter new optical domains. As Barbara Maria Stafford points out, visual technologies are “tools for transformation and revelation [and] expand human consciousness.”1 Digital tools are merely the latest instance in a long history of imaging technologies that have been designed to take viewers through a looking glass into domains of novel perceptual experience . As Scott Bukatman notes, “The special effects of contemporary cinema are . . . a more recent manifestation of optical, spectacular technologies that created immersive, overwhelming, and apparently immediate sensory experiences .”2 For centuries, optical technologies have offered art and science a productive meeting place, and digital applications exemplify this relationship. Digital visual effects come to us by way of the phenakistiscope. Nothing ever happens for the first time in film history, and we can learn about contemporary imaging modes by keeping in mind the bridge between art and science that gave birth to the movies. This will enable us to chart a different investigative direction into digital cinema than more familiar ones that equate visual effects with the provision of spectacle and that regard effects as being mostly incompatible with realism. Before taking up these topics, I offer in this chapter some necessary historical and theoretical background. I begin by examining the arrival of cinema’s digital era by tracing the development of computer graphics and their application to cinema, paying particular attention to the achievements C H A P T E R 1  Through the Looking Glass 12 digital visual effects in cinema in Jurassic Park (1993), the film that unequivocally demonstrated for Hollywood the benefits of computer-based imaging in narrative filmmaking. I then explore the union of art and science in cinema’s prehistory and its relevance for understanding digital visual effects as more than spectacle. I conclude by examining the complexity of viewer response to pictorial illusion in ways that inflect the construction of visual effects. The Development of Computer Graphics If the 1990s were the takeoff years for digital effects in cinema (the “wonder years,” in Michelle Pierson’s terminology),3 the foundations for the new generation of images appearing in Terminator 2 (1991), Death Becomes Her (1992), Jurassic Park, and Forrest Gump (1994) were established in the 1960s and 1970s at a series of industry and academic research labs, including MIT, Harvard, Ohio State University, the University of Utah, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Bell Labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). The period saw a burgeoning interest among academics and industry professionals in engineering, electronics, and computer science to extend the computer’s capabilities , using them to draw, paint, model solid objects, and even make films. Visual effects often are equated with eye-popping spectacle, but digital tools have enlarged domains in which effects operate and have enabled filmmakers to achieve greater levels of realism in representing a world on screen. The Mask (1994, New Line Cinema). Frame enlargement. through the looking glass 13 The research generated numerous academic papers and dissertations, and in 1974 the area’s professional interest group, SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics, as it was then called), held its first conference. As many of the algorithms and procedures basic to computer imaging were developed, the available computer memory and its prohibitive cost meant that implementing these breakthroughs in a high-resolution medium like cinema remained years away. Computational power, however, was not the only constraint. The behavior of natural phenomena needed research and study from the standpoint of computer modeling. As a 1983 SIGGRAPH roundtable on the simulation of natural phenomena noted, “Most items in nature, trees, clouds, fire and comets being some examples, have not been displayed realistically in computer graphics. . . . Previous attempts at realism have dealt with the appearance of the surfaces being modeled, in terms of their illumination or relief. . . . However, it appears that natural phenomena will require more research into the fundamental way things occur in nature, and in terms of...