Book review: Plastic Reality: Special Effects,Technology,and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics

It is not controversial to suggest that George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are major touchstones in the history of cinematic special effects. If Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) inaugurated the era of the Hollywood blockbuster (and by extension led to the demise of so-called New Hollywood and its focus on political realism), then these two 1977 productions concretized the links between blockbuster filmmaking and dynamic, visually kinaesthetic special effects. However, the precise manner in which these films shaped a particular kind of animated visual effects aesthetic, and what kind of an aesthetic this is, has been a subject long neglected by film studies scholarship. As Julie Turnock puts it in Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, despite frequent assertions of the significance of these texts to popular filmmaking, ‘their enduring popularity (especially Star Wars) means that they have effectively been hiding in plain sight’ academically (p. 107). Turnock seeks to correct this omission, and her detailed, rewarding account of the techniques and aesthetics of visual effects animation across the late 20th century certainly succeeds in this ambitious goal.

Special effects (as opposed to on-set effects captured during principal photography) rely upon animation techniques in their management of the image frame-by-frame, whether that involves manipulating the existing image or inserting new content. In recent decades, digital production pipelines have allowed the film image to be more easily and practically worked over, and this kind of digital animation is currently pervasive in contemporary blockbuster film production. As Turnock comments in relation to Avatar (2009), the difference between ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ is increasingly artificial (p. 327, n25). The last few years have accordingly witnessed renewed academic interest in digital special effects. Monographs and edited collections by Stephen Prince (2012), Lisa Purse (2013), Kristen Whissel (2014) and Dan North et al. (2015) have all rethought the importance of digital effects, and explored how their aesthetics must be approached in textual analysis. Despite exploring optical printing for the most part rather than digital animation, Turnock’s study is certainly in line with this scholarship. With its focus on a specific historical period of effects production and its intermingling of industrial history and textual analysis, it also has much in common with Michele Pierson’s earlier discussion of the beginnings of CGI in Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (2002). Like Pierson’s account of the ‘wonder years’ of CGI between 1989 and 1995 (when the computer-generated effect was a costly, significant, and often bracketed textual incursion), Turnock alights upon a moment at which technological change behind the scenes shifted the nature and meaning of animated effects sequences on the screen. She too maps this change in a non-deterministic fashion, discussing not only technologies and techniques, but also the practitioners behind them and the economic and social circumstances that shaped effects work of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Indebted to, but moving beyond, Scott Bukatman’s (1998) influential account of Star Wars’ expansion of the diegetic world of the blockbuster and the resulting ‘end of offscreen space’, Turnock describes Star Wars and Close Encounters as ‘expanded blockbusters’ that sought to use effects to open up, through shared cinematic experience, alternate worlds that were somewhat utopian in their functioning. She adapts the term from the ‘expanded cinema’ of the 1960s and 70s, and Gene Youngblood’s (1970) book on this topic, arguing that Lucas and Spielberg ‘saw themselves as participating in an accessible version of countercultural cinema, which they reimagined all the more powerfully as a vision of popular, not experimental, cinema’ (p. 194). Key to this, Turnock explains, was the creation of an effects aesthetic that was simultaneously photorealistic and spectacular, both embedded within realist techniques of 1970s filmmaking and privileged as conspicuous, labour-intensive and astonishing. Not just ‘perceptually realistic’ in the manner that Stephen Prince (1996) has defined 1990s digital effects, this 1970s aesthetic was inspired by both realist film-makers and avant-garde animators, as much informed by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its studiously believable effects mise-en-scène, as it was by the experimental animations of artists like John Whitney and Jordan Belson, and by the concept of ‘graphic dynamics’ described by film-maker Slavko Vorkapich (p. 49).

This aesthetic relied upon animation techniques achieved in postproduction. Turnock describes how the return of the optical printer to the mainstream of effects production in the 1970s (it had previously been much used on Citizen Kane, 1941), marked a new emphasis on creating effects shots in post, rather than on set at the time of shooting (as was the case with back projection in the 1950s and 1960s). She outlines the process of optical effects printing in detail, and convincingly links it to the fundamentals of animation, since in either case the shot is considered to be a series of frames that are individually manipulable and which often consist of a series of separate elements composited together (pp. 43–48). As such, the ‘densely packed and composed composite’ created by effects sequences in Star Wars demonstrates a kind of pre-digital corroboration of Lev Manovich’s (2000) oft-cited claim that cinema is ‘all animation’ (p. 43), and marks the beginning of an industrial shift ‘to a nearly fully “animatable,” all special effects cinema’ (p. 26). This is not to say that Turnock is seeking to outline a pre-history of the digital. Her account is not so teleological, and her assertion that the technicalities of effects animation shift over time and generate new (but not technologically determinist) film aesthetics is extremely valuable in a contemporary era when ‘CGI’ is used as a catch-all term for a wide variety of techniques and processes. Moreover, her work helps unsettle ideas of realism in effects production, usefully highlighting how effects do not simply ‘improve’ over time, but rather that ideas of realism shift historically thanks to technical and other considerations (p. 5).

The book is structured in three parts. The first covers relevant histories of animation and optical compositing prior to 1977; the second and longest part analyses the technologies and aesthetics of Star Wars and Close Encounters; and the third discusses effects of the 1980s and the domination of what is defined as the ILM style. This overarching approach provides a usefully broad picture of how effects practice changed in the 1970s, and how these changes continue to be felt in the computer-generated animation of today’s digital blockbusters. However, this does unfortunately mean a long wait before concerted textual analysis, and the book’s structure also results in some repetition of key historical details and biographies as the chapters plug these returning contexts into new thematic terrain. Nonetheless, Turnock’s central arguments are not only convincing but cogent and detailed, and her compelling thesis makes one go back to her central examples and see them in an exciting new light. Watching the climactic assault on the Death Star in Star Wars and then any one of the space battles from the film’s prequels (1999, 2002, 2005) becomes a study in contrasts. In both cases, X-Wings and TIE fighters plunge and dive across the frame; but the earlier film’s emphasis on strikingly composed movements, intensely dynamic cutting, and Eisensteinian visual momentum is starkly revealed by Turnock’s study. Yes, the ILM aesthetic of fantastical realism is in place in either case, but what the later films have gained in visual density they have lost in what Turnock calls an ‘optimistic futurism’ (p. 194), a futurism created through ‘technological spectacle’ and a reliance on ‘surprisingly abstracted’ visual kinetics (p. 198). In this way, Turnock fills in not only a major blind spot in studies of effects histories, but expands our understandings of effects cinema and its reliance on animation in ways that can inform but go far beyond the digital era.