The Empire of Effects

Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood--by one company specifically: Industrial Light and Magic. The Empire of Effects digs into the history of ILM, showing how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity towhich viewers were accustomed. ILM's style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit. Today the irony of digital realism is compounded by another: a victim of its ownsuccess, ILM fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many--