Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts

(Paperback)

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Description

As blockbusters employ ever greater numbers of dazzling visual effects and digital illusions, this book explores the material roots and stylistic practices of special effects and their makers.

Gathering leading voices in cinema and new media studies, this comprehensive anthology moves beyond questions of spectacle
to examine special effects from the earliest years of cinema, via experimental film and the Golden Age of Hollywood, to our
contemporary transmedia landscape.

Wide-ranging and accessible, this book illuminates and interrogates the vast array of techniques film has used throughout its history to conjure spectacular images, mediate bodies, map worlds and make meanings.

Foreword by Scott Bukatman, with an Afterword by Lev Manovich.

Author Bio

Dan North is an independent scholar. He is the author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (2008), and editor of Sights Unseen: Unfi nished British Films (2008).

Bob Rehak is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, USA. His work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, and The Cybercultures Reader (2007).

Michael S. Duffy is Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Towson University, USA. His essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Volumes I and II of Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood (2011, 2015).