Cultures of special effects: the cultural reception of CGI effects in Hollywood SF cinema

© 2000 Dr. Michele PiersonThis thesis offers an historical and theoretical investigation into the role that cultures of connoisseurship, appreciation, and fandom have played the cultural reception of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in Hollywood science fiction cinema. It begins by looking at some of the contexts that have been important for the cultivation of these cultures: arguing that the discursive networks that support them actually took on their contemporary contours in the late nineteenth century. Central to this analysis is an examination of the reasons why science fictions have been so important for the exhibition of new kinds of visual effects imagery. In moving from an analysis of popular scientific demonstration in the late nineteenth century, to Hollywood science fiction cinema in the late twentieth century, this investigation weaves together two methodological and chronological lines of inquiry: the first historical and contextual, and the second, critical and futurological. The historical and contextual axis of this investigation is concerned with examining the role that a wide range of popular publications – popular science magazines, genre fimzines, computer lifestyle magazines – have played in the social formation of cultures of effects appreciation and connoisseurship. The critical and futurological axis of this investigation looks at how film and cultural studies scholarship on special effects has dealt with the task of theorising their reception. Rather than simply offering a critical engagement with this work, this analysis is concerned with testing new lines of theoretical inquiry by suggesting other readings, other ways of understanding, special effects and the popular science fictions that feature them