The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality

The development of special effects technologies, from Edison’s Kinetograph to digitally composited films of recent Hollywood blockbusters, has transformed modes of filmmaking; it has changed the audience’s aesthetic perception. Film is presenting, or representing, the lives of human beings—a story of the relationships between and/or among people of the world in which we are living. Thus, film is located within the boundaries of reality, and its fundamental role is to seek and trace reality. A film’s reality depends on the degree of realism exhibited by the world depicted in the film: whether or not it keeps pace with the development of technology. The development of technology provides the opportunity to improve the functions of camera, editing techniques, and various environments. The more technology develops, the more reality can be variously represented. With improved technology, reality can be told in new ways, and we can say that society and its culture are more highly developed. The most effective way of examining the relationship between technology and reality, using concrete texts, is comparative research between the early trick films and the recent digitally imaginated films. The early special effects used in trick films, and contemporary special effects, accompanied by the cutting edge of 3-D computer generated imagery (CGI), share many similarities with aspects of the cinema of attractions (Editorial, 1996). However, their realities and their visions of technology seem to stand facing opposite directions. First, the early trick films show the real events physically presented in front of the camera, despite the fact that the tricks are shown as magic; in contrast, 3-D CG draws an artificial reality using computers to increase “perceptive reality. ” Even if both special effects of the early trick films and Hollywood S.F. have the same goal of cultural pleasure that contemporary new media offer to audience, the features of the realities created by the two special effects are opposite in terms of existence o