PERFORMING ILLUSIONS

The camera supposedly never lies, yet film's ability to frame, cut and reconstruct all that passes before its lens made cinema the pre-eminent medium of visual illusion and revelation from the early twentieth century onwards. This volume examines film's creative history of special effects and trickery, encompassing everything from George Méliès’ first trick films to the modern CGI era. Evaluating movements towards the use of computer-generated 'synthespians' in films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), this title suggests that cinematic effects should be understood not as attempts to mimic real life perfectly but as constructions of substitute realities, situating them in the cultural lineage of the stage performers and illusionists of the nineteenth century. With analyses of films such as Destination Moon (1950), Spider-Man (2002) and the King Kong films (1933 and 2006), this new volume provides an insight into cinema's capacity to perform illusions.

August 2008
224 pages

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Dan North is Lecturer in Film at the University of Exeter.

We are delighted to announce that Wallflower Press's own Performing Illusions by Daniel North has been shortlisted for the And/Or Awards.

The two shortlists are announced for the 2009 And/or Book Awards, the UK's leading prizes for books published in the fields of photography and the moving image. A winner from each category will share a prize fund of £10,000. They will be announced during an awards ceremony at the BFI Southbank, London, on Thursday 23 April.

The shortlisted titles for the 2009 And/or Photography Book Award are:

• Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 by Corey Keller, Jennifer Tucker, Tom Gunning and Maren Gröning (Yale University Press)
• From Somewhere to Nowhere: China's Internal Migrants
by Andreas Seibert (Lars Müller)
• Susan Meiselas: In History edited by Kristen Lubbin (Steidl)
• The World from my Front Porch by Larry Towell (Chris Boot)

The shortlisted titles for the 2009 And/or Moving Image Book Award are:

• Photography and Cinema by David Campany (Reaktion Books)
• Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and the Early Cinema
by Dan Streible (University of California Press)
• Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor
by Dan North (Wallflower Press)

Over 150 titles were submitted across the two categories for the awards, which have been narrowed down to a final seven books by the two judging panels chaired by Martin Parr (Photography) and Mike Dibb (Moving Image). The judges were looking for works which make a significant contribution to the understanding of photography and/or the moving image and which use photographs as more than a means of illustration.

  

‘This is an outstanding contribution to a new wave of studies of special effects and effects technologies. Its arguments are acute, its scholarship is impeccable and its discussion of the history and importance of magic acts and stage illusions is genuinely ground-breaking.'
– Steve Neale, author of Genre and Hollywood and co-editor of Contemporary Hollywood Cinema