avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-12-26 12:36 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-12-26 12:36 pm
Special effects
Somewhere in the last years of the twentieth century, a genie escaped from a bottle...
Once there were just plays. Actors speaking lines on a stage, in costumes, waving fake swords and pretending to die. If they wanted thunder, then maybe they had a chap in the wings with a sheet of metal waggling it around. How they did lightning before the electric light bulb I do not know. But there was a kind of unspoken agreement between the company and the audience (well, unspoken till Shakespeare laid out the terms in the opening speech of Henry V) that you understood what they were trying to achieve and gave them the credit. Think when we talk of horses that you see them and so forth. If anyone had interrupted King Lear's famous storm scene to say "you know it's just a man with a metal sheet, don't you?" they would have been roundly shushed, because what was the point? It would just have been spoiling it for everyone else.
Then there were films, and Georges Melies, and filmmakers started to realise that you could do convincing effects--thunder that really sounded like thunder, model ships that actually sank beneath the rolling waves of the studio tank, explosions that really went bang, rockets that looked as if they were actually going to the moon. And somewhere along the way, some people started saying "it's only a model." I don't know why. No filmmaker had, as far as I know, tried to claim that Charlton Heston was actually talking to God in the Ten Commandments, or that they had actually brought in a genuine radioactive dinosaur to attack Tokyo or reanimated a real dead man in a genuine laboratory, but the game changed; it was no longer about enjoying the story, it was about catching them out. Maybe it carried over from stage magic; maybe the irritating fellow in the audience who kept saying "it's up his sleeve" and "they do it with mirrors, you know" decided to start frequenting the picture palaces instead. I don't know. But like a disease, it spread, and there was no way filmmakers or workers in the new industry of television could fight it, because, well, yes, they were fake explosions, and it wasn't real blood, and it wasn'ta real metal corridor in a genuine space station, and why should it be? Why weren't they watching the story?
So now we have people moaning about how obvious the CGI is in nuWho or LOTR, and doing their level best to spoil it for those of us who still like to immerse themselves in the story and give the storytellers the credit, because they (the moaners) are far more interested in showing off how clever they are to have spotted the trick. As if there was ever going to be a real Gollum to cast, or a real Time Lord who can turn into a skeleton. And you can not listen, but that kind of vitiates one of the main points of these things, which is that it's a shared experience.
The genie is out of the bottle. The contract between storyteller and audience is broken, and not by the storytellers, but by people who don't want to tell stories themselves, just to make it more difficult for those who do. There are ways around it--the film of the Call Of Cthulhu, that I've raved about before, gets you so thoroughly immersed in the artificial idiom of the silent film that by the time Cthulhu actually appears you are perfectly comfortable with it being a silent-film-type effect, and happily ignore all the subtle technological wizardry that recreates 1920s America in the background--but that's a very specialised solution, and wouldn't work with your general run of films and telly shows.
If there's any good to come out of this, then maybe it's this; no-one can pick holes in the special effects you get in books or on radio, so the pictures there will always be better. But it's a meagre kind of consolation for the loss of trust.
Once there were just plays. Actors speaking lines on a stage, in costumes, waving fake swords and pretending to die. If they wanted thunder, then maybe they had a chap in the wings with a sheet of metal waggling it around. How they did lightning before the electric light bulb I do not know. But there was a kind of unspoken agreement between the company and the audience (well, unspoken till Shakespeare laid out the terms in the opening speech of Henry V) that you understood what they were trying to achieve and gave them the credit. Think when we talk of horses that you see them and so forth. If anyone had interrupted King Lear's famous storm scene to say "you know it's just a man with a metal sheet, don't you?" they would have been roundly shushed, because what was the point? It would just have been spoiling it for everyone else.
Then there were films, and Georges Melies, and filmmakers started to realise that you could do convincing effects--thunder that really sounded like thunder, model ships that actually sank beneath the rolling waves of the studio tank, explosions that really went bang, rockets that looked as if they were actually going to the moon. And somewhere along the way, some people started saying "it's only a model." I don't know why. No filmmaker had, as far as I know, tried to claim that Charlton Heston was actually talking to God in the Ten Commandments, or that they had actually brought in a genuine radioactive dinosaur to attack Tokyo or reanimated a real dead man in a genuine laboratory, but the game changed; it was no longer about enjoying the story, it was about catching them out. Maybe it carried over from stage magic; maybe the irritating fellow in the audience who kept saying "it's up his sleeve" and "they do it with mirrors, you know" decided to start frequenting the picture palaces instead. I don't know. But like a disease, it spread, and there was no way filmmakers or workers in the new industry of television could fight it, because, well, yes, they were fake explosions, and it wasn't real blood, and it wasn'ta real metal corridor in a genuine space station, and why should it be? Why weren't they watching the story?
So now we have people moaning about how obvious the CGI is in nuWho or LOTR, and doing their level best to spoil it for those of us who still like to immerse themselves in the story and give the storytellers the credit, because they (the moaners) are far more interested in showing off how clever they are to have spotted the trick. As if there was ever going to be a real Gollum to cast, or a real Time Lord who can turn into a skeleton. And you can not listen, but that kind of vitiates one of the main points of these things, which is that it's a shared experience.
The genie is out of the bottle. The contract between storyteller and audience is broken, and not by the storytellers, but by people who don't want to tell stories themselves, just to make it more difficult for those who do. There are ways around it--the film of the Call Of Cthulhu, that I've raved about before, gets you so thoroughly immersed in the artificial idiom of the silent film that by the time Cthulhu actually appears you are perfectly comfortable with it being a silent-film-type effect, and happily ignore all the subtle technological wizardry that recreates 1920s America in the background--but that's a very specialised solution, and wouldn't work with your general run of films and telly shows.
If there's any good to come out of this, then maybe it's this; no-one can pick holes in the special effects you get in books or on radio, so the pictures there will always be better. But it's a meagre kind of consolation for the loss of trust.
no subject
"reviews and fan posts which speak of a good story let down by bad FX; no question of forgiveness there"
Yup. Their problem, not mine. I still enjoy Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (the original), cheesy effects and dialogue included. I enjoy Capt. W.E. Johns' space series of books, even though I knew when I first read them as a teenager that the 'science' was rubbish. I don't care that most other SF fans consider my tastes to be rubbish, all that concerns me is if the rubbishers push it out of print so I can't watch or read it.
Yes, I'm aware of disparities. But I treat films (and to an extent books) like I do the theatre -- it isn't real, that "all [that] world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players", but I pretend and for the performance it is 'reality' for me.