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.

‘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