Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Dissertations Department of Communication 5-3-2007 Reality & Effect: A Cultural History of Visual Effects Jae Hyung Ryu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/communication_diss Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Ryu, Jae Hyung, "Reality & Effect: A Cultural History of Visual Effects." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007. doi: https://doi.57709/1059335 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gsu.
REALITY & EFFECT: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VISUAL EFFECTS by JAE HYUNG RYU Under the Direction of Ted Friedman ABSTRACT The purpose of this dissertation is to chart how the development of visual effects has changed popular cinema’s vision of the real, producing the powerful reality effect. My investigation of the history of visual effects studies not only the industrial and economic context of visual effects, but also the aesthetic characteristics of the reality effect. In terms of methodology, this study employs a theoretical discourse which compares the parallels between visual effects and the discourse of modernity/postmodernity, utilizing close textual analysis to understand the symptomatic meanings of key texts. The transition in the techniques and meanings of creating visual effects reflects the cultural transformation from modernism to postmodernism.
Visual effects have developed by adapting to the structural transformation of production systems and with the advance of technology. The studio system strongly controlled the classical Hollywood cinema by means of the modern economic production system of Fordism. Breakdown of Hollywood classicism as a production system gave rise to the creation of digital effects with the rise of the concept of the blockbuster and with the development of computer technologies. I argue that the characteristic feature of time-space compression, occurring in the process of the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, clearly reflects that of compression of multi-layered time and space, generated in the development process from analog visual effects, such as trick, rear and front projection, to the digital effects, such as rotoscoping and CGI animation.
While the aesthetics of analog visual effects, without computing, can be compared to a Fordist production system, digital effects, which hugely rely on CGI manipulation, are examples of flexible accumulation. As a case study of the local resistance or alternative of Hollywood today, I examine the effects-oriented Korean nationalist blockbuster. The Korean nationalist blockbuster films have sought large-scale filmmaking and presentation of spectacular scenes, including heavy dependence on the use of special effects, which is frequently considered a Hollywood style. This paradoxical combination of peculiar Korean subjects and Hollywood style can be viewed as a form of cultural jujitsu, taking advantage of the force of the dominant culture in order to resist and subvert it.
INDEX WORDS: Special Effects, Visual Effects, Digital Effects, CGI, Tricks, Modernism, Fordism, Postmodernism, Reality Effect, Time-space Compression, Trickality, Korean Blockbuster, Cultural Jujitsu, Korean Wave, Hallyu, Shiri, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, Welcome to Dongmakgol, 2009 Lost Memories REALITY & EFFECT: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VISUAL EFFECTS by JAE HYUNG RYU A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2007 Copyright by Jae Hyung Ryu 2007 REALITY & EFFECT: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VISUAL EFFECTS by JAE HYUNG RYU Major Professor: Ted Friedman Committee: Kathy Fuller-Seeley Angelo Restivo Alisa Perren Jung-Bong Choi Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2007 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank, foremost, my advisor, Dr. Ted Friedman, for his unconditional support, guidance, and generosity. He is a dedicated teacher, but at times, I look to him as an older brother, and a good friend. If my advisor was not him, I could not stand here now.
I love his passion for fostering scholarship, his consideration of students, and I admire his belief in his advisees. Friedman will be a model for my way of scholarship. I also wish to thank my everlasting mentor, Dr. Yong-soo Kim, who is Professor of School of Communication at Sogang University, Korea.
He is a father in my academic life. He opened my eyes to film studies and led me to the way of learning. His continuous consideration and encouragement have provided the vital energy for my struggle in overseas. Kim has been and will be the cornerstone of my way of learning.
I am grateful to my committee members, Dr. Kathy Fuller-Seeley for her kind mentoring and warm encouragement, Dr. Angelo Restivo for his precise reading and acute comments on the earlier draft of the Korean film chapter, Dr. Jung-Bong Choi for the critical suggestions derived from his wide range of knowledge, and Dr.
Alisa Perren for her helpful comments and suggestions on the earlier drafts. Finally, infinite thanks go to my family: my parents, RYU Jong Yeol and PARK Kyung Sook; parents-in-law, CHOI Dong Kwon and RA Ssang Ju; my wife, CHOI Won-Jeong; my daughter, Jennifer Yujin RYU; and my soon-to-be son, Jason, who will arrive this June; my brother and brother-in-law, RYU Jae Yong and CHOI Hyuk Seung. Words cannot express how much I am loved by them and I love them. I wish to live as repaying their love.
I dedicate my humble dissertation to my wonderful family. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………… iv LIST OF TABLES…………………………………………………………………………. VISUAL EFFECTS OF EARLY HOLLYWOOD……….1 Train Arriving at a Station (Louis and Auguste Lumières, 1895)……… 52 2.2 A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)…………………………….3 The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)……. MODERNIST VISUAL EFFECTS…….1 Forbidden Planet (Fred M.
POSTMODERNIST VISUAL EFFECTS………………………….2 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)…………………. DIGITAL EFFECTS as CULTURAL JUJITSU: FUNCTIONS of DIGITAL EFFECTS in KOREAN NATIONALIST BLOCKBUSTER FILMS ………….1 New Relationship between Hollywood and the Korean Film Industry in the Digital Empire………………………………………………….2 Korean Nationalist Blockbuster Films, Cultural Jujitsu…….3 Cultural Jujitsu: Healing Trauma through Korean Nationalism with Hollywood Style……………………………………………………… 199 6. 227 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Attendances and Market Share of Korean and Foreign Films…………………….
The Productions and Screenings of Korean and Foreign Films…………………… 176 Table 3. The Average Production Cost of Korean Films……………………………………. The State of the Export of Korean Films’s Remake Copyright to Hollywood……. Top Local Movies………………………………………………………………….
Selected Awards from Major International Film Festivals………………………….1 Overview Special effects in cinema have presented the cutting edge technologies of their eras. They have even functioned as harbingers of future reality. Through examination of the direction of visual effects history, from the past to the present, we can imagine what the visual effects of the future may entail. The representation of the future by means of visual effects provides us with a vision of future reality.
Thus, visual effects function as a measure of the times, of contemporaneous visions of reality and technology. The purpose of this dissertation is to chart how the development of visual effects has changed popular cinema’s vision of the real, producing an ever more powerful “reality effect.” I will examine the implications of visual effects in film, in particular in science fiction films (SF), and inquire about the function of their reality effect in contemporary culture. Key Terms In this project, I follow the industrial definition of the terms “visual effects” and “physical effects.” “Visual effects” are “any visual manipulation of motion picture frames, whether accomplished in cameras, projectors, optical printers, aerial image printers, front and rear screen systems” (Smith, 1986, p. 270), and in digital composition with computers including computer graphic imagery (CGI).
“Physical effects,” on the other hand, are “mechanical effects or practical effects that take place on the set during filming, such as explosions, wire tricks, bullet hits, etc. I employ the term “reality effect” to describe the cinematic illusion of reality created by visual effects. Visual effects make impossible events seem realizable. This process produces a 2 perceptual effect: the audience perceives the artificial representation of impossible events as reality.
The origin of the term reality effect derives from Roland Barthes. In examining the realist novels of writers such as Flaubert, Barthes (1982) argued that through the accumulation of so many “concrete details,” the signifier becomes alienated from the referent; the more the referent is concretely described, the more the signifier is distanced from the referent; the signified, the concept of the signifier, is “expelled from the sign”; as a result, the referent survives alone within the narrative. This is the “referential illusion” of realist literature (p. At the moment that the signified is eliminated from the sign and that “the referent stands as or for itself in the midst of narrative line,” “language disappears” (Cole, 2005, p.
What remains is the illusion of reality. This is the reality effect. Although realist novels are fictional constructions, their writing conventions hide their artificiality and create the illusion of reality. Barthes writes “It suffices to recall that for the ideology of our time, obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’ is always brandished as a weapon against meaning…” (p.
It means that the concrete detail does not show reality itself but represent only “vraisemblable/verisimilitude” as the meaningless illusion of reality. It is Barthes’ criticism on the reality effect to attack the authoritative Authors and Literatures as the cultural agents and implication that reality is our ideological screen. In filmmaking, visual effects produce excessive cinematic details to make impossible scenes possible. As a result, the relationship between signifiers and their referents is blurred.
In the middle of this blurring, cinematic illusion is created. Thus, the term reality effect can refer to the perceptually illusionist effect of reality in both literature and film. I want to limit the use of the term reality effect to the aesthetic aspects of the cinematic 3 illusion. Barthes’ original intention of the term was to criticize the function of verisimilitude that hides ideological construction.
However, the reality effect of visual effects in SF genre films, which is the major object of my dissertation, provides, in most cases, the clear cultural window of the present view on technology—in particular computer technology—that our anxiety and expectation coexist, rather than represents and reinforces the present ideology by means of meaningless visual illusion. In this sense, I believe that the directors and digital effects engineers in the contemporary effects-oriented films are not the objects of political criticism from the aspect of extension of 1968 French movement’s critique of traditional authority. Thus, my use of the term reality effect does not imply Barthes’ ideological criticism on the Author but merely indicate the effect of cinematic illusion that visual effects create. The reason why I focus on visual effects, not physical effects, has much to do with the term reality effect.
Although scenes with physical effects that present exploding cars or rampaging monsters provide the audience with a plausible mise-en-scene, they do not inspire perceptual illusion of the effects among viewers because the audience is watching a scene that really did happen in one contiguous physical space. However, scenes with visual effects that portray Superman flying, T-1000’s finger-morphing to the sharp gimlet, and Trinity transferring through the phone line all produce the reality effect. In comparison to the wire action in the 1950s and 1960s, 1978’s Superman produces a different kind of visual illusion, because the scene is impossible in the real world. It was created by the combination of live-action footage and pre-filmed scenery, through the visual effect of rear projection.
I cannot say that all kinds of physical effects never produce a reality effect. However, in majority of cases, visual effects are much more related to the reality effect than physical effects. Visual effects include rear/front projection, rotoscoping, and, more recently, digital effects such as CGI digital composition. 4 Naturalism indicates the effects-added shot or scene’s perceptual indistinguishableness from live-action footages.
Visual effects have developed with seeking naturalism of the reality effect in the effects-added scene. Naturalism depends on the plausibility of the effects-added scene.
