The Empire of Effects
The Empire of Effects
Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism
Finalist, 2024 Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award, Media Ecology Association
How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism.
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 & Magic.
The Empire of Effects shows 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 A. 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 to which 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, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.
Turnock finds new ground to cover in The Empire of Effects...a captivating look at digital realism and the success of ILM.
Turnock’s expansive study of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and by turns of the wider special effects industry provides insight, nuance, and practical reactions to an industry that often dominates the filmmaking process and erodes the elements of story, direction, or performance...Highly recommended.
As a close study of [Industrial Light & Magic], the book is enlightening. But it’s also about far more: Turnock chronicles the rise of the contemporary effects industry in the 1970s and ’80s, the emergence of an oligopoly of studios based in California, and the way that mega-budget franchises like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter came to shape the effects industry of today...By tracing the history of special effects since the 1970s, Turnock shows readers how the tools that shaped the counterculture’s alternative visions lent themselves to a new set of labor relations in which a stronger, more concentrated corporate bloc took more and allowed less.
Any historian of merit would commend and envy her usage of these primary source materials.
Both scholars and 'lay' readers will certainly benefit from this...instructive and original volume that will change the way we look at films.
Immaculately researched, passionately argued, and hugely informative, The Empire of Effects is in its way as game-changing as the much-ballyhooed technological innovations it historicizes, contextualizes, and critiques. Julie Turnock adds powerfully and memorably to a growing body of scholarship on the aesthetics and industry of visual effects while establishing a trailhead for future academic work in these areas. Valuably, she dismantles an easy binary between visual effects and perceptual realism—the argument that effects work best when they mimic the world as we see it—to show instead how the ILM style enshrines a particular '70s cinematic aesthetic that audiences have been trained to receive as more believable and 'real.'
Julie Turnock’s The Empire of Effects makes a crucial contribution to the literature on special effects, both historical and contemporary. Among Turnock’s interventions is her challenge to ILM’s official history of how 'special visual effects' developed from an optical-photochemical field to a digital one, in an argument that expertly maps stylistic history onto the terrain of studio economics. She has pored through thousands of pages of trade journals and four decades’ worth of FX magazines in addition to the voluminous scholarly work on New Hollywood’s infrastructure, form, and style, and from this broader perspective has also formed a compelling take on the peculiar ideology of auteurism that surrounds effects artists and their work.
Julie A. Turnock is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics.
Introduction: The ILM Version
1. ILM Versus Everybody Else: Effects Houses in the Digital Age
2. Perfect Imperfection: ILM’s Effects Aesthetics
3. Retconning CGI Innovation: ILM’s Rhetorical Dominance of Effects History
4. Monsters are Real: ILM’s International Standard of Effects Realism in the Global Marketplace
5. That Analog Feeling: Disney, Marvel Studios, and the ILM Aesthetic
Conclusion: Unreal Engine: ILM in a Disney World
Appendix: List of Films Mentioned in the Text
Notes
Bibliography
Index
