Special Effects: An Oral HistorySpecial Effects: An Oral History by Pinteau; Pascal; Laurel HirschReview by: STEPHEN PRINCEFilm Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Fall 2005), pp. 75-76Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2005.59.1.75.3 .

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TOM COOPER is a professor at Emerson College in the Department ofVisual and Media Arts; he founded, edited and co-published MediaEthics magazine, and is the author of five books and over one hun-dred articles and reviews.

© Tom Cooper, 2005

BOOK NOTES

Contributors to Book Notes: DEBORAH ALLISON is a research assis-tant at City University in London. RICHARD ARMSTRONG is an as-sociate tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. BERNARD F. DICK

teaches in the School of Art and Media Studies at Fairleigh Dickin-son University in Teaneck, N.J. STEPHEN PRINCE teaches at VirginiaTech.

Buscombe, Edward. Unforgiven. London: BFI Publishing,2004. $13.95. Buscombe’s shrewd analysis of Unforgiven chal-lenges an orthodoxy that dominated its critical reception in1992, namely that the film was defined by the various ways inwhich it contravened existing generic norms. This wide-spread perception doubtless played a significant role in itsOscar triumph, as well as helping it to become only the sec-ond Western to cross the $100 million mark since MelBrooks’ brassy satire, Blazing Saddles, in 1974.

As Buscombe compellingly demonstrates, Unforgiven’saccomplishment rests less on a refusal of standard genericmodels than on its astute fusion of characteristics drawn froma range of earlier Western traditions which it adapts to suit“contemporary sensibilities.” His pithy rundown of the genre’slongstanding project of adapting itself to shifting ideologicalframeworks puts this activity in context. If Unforgiven’s mostobvious antecedents are the deglamorised post-VietnamWesterns of the 1970s, his survey shows the extent to which italso draws inspiration from the more heroic narratives of theclassical era. This gives rise to the paradox by which the film“debunks the mythologized West, but ultimately reasserts themystique of the hero” in its volte-face climax.

Whilst Buscombe’s lively and authoritative account ofUnforgiven’s generic heritage provides the book’s principalcritical context, he complements it with an examination ofthe developing themes and approaches within Clint East-wood’s own career. The interrelation of these contextualframeworks provides an excellent basis for the close analysisthat dominates the later sections of the book. His detailedreadings of particular characters and incidents are accompa-nied by views from several of the film’s participants as well asa range of commentators. These various perspectives supplya multifaceted critique of a film that palpably reflects upon itsown patrimony even whilst it skillfully delivers the very pleas-ures so intrinsic to the traditions from which it arose.

DEBORAH ALLISON

Clover, Joshua. The Matrix. London: BFI Publishing, 2004.$13.95. If The Matrix resonated so strongly with audiences in1999, it was due to a number of factors, as Joshua Clover sug-

gests in his dense, sometimes impenetrable, but always bril-liant analysis. As the millennium approached, portents—notalways interpretable but keenly felt nonetheless—presagedthe end of the old order. Concentration had given way to im-mersion, as analog yielded to digital. Games that once re-quired human partners were replaced by video gadgetry that,succubus-like, drew the player into its anti-world, so that—toparaphrase W.B.Yeats—if one cannot tell the dancer from thedance, one cannot tell the gamester from the game. In otherwords, reality had become illusion.

That megaconglomerates such as Time Warner, Viacom,ABC-Disney, and News Corp. had hijacked the media, sub-jecting the news to filtration and controlling programmingthrough their television and film subsidiaries, had become anarticle of faith. This sensation of being enveloped in a worldoutside of time and being unable to enter the real one, as if itwere any different from the world of appearances, is preciselywhat one felt while watching The Matrix. There was an exitfrom the theater, but was there one from the Matrix, a com-puter simulation of reality, the same reality that T.S. Eliotclaimed that humankind cannot bear? In The Matrix, humankind (or rather, the vestiges of the human race) has stub-bornly maintained its integrity in the wake of the encroach-ing machines, taking refuge in Zion—once the promised landabove the earth and now, in keeping with the inversion of thenatural order in which the Matrix delights, below it. Only asavior can redeem the time and the race. Is it Neo, né ThomasAnderson, found behind a door numbered 101? Clearly TheMatrix is the Wachowski brothers’ PHIL 101, whose requiredtext is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation. (Bau-drillard’s prose can get as torturous as Clover’s, but on onepoint he is frighteningly clear: the end of a century, no mat-ter how bloody that century was, induces nostalgia—a yearn-ing for a simpler past, an analog past, and for the Luddites,Smith Coronas instead of Dells.)

Since Clover understands The Matrix so well, BFI mightcommission a Matrix trilogy edition, so that he can explorethe mythic infrastructure of all three films where the charac-ters have emblematic names, and the fractured narrativesteem with motifs that seem to have spiraled out of the collec-tive unconscious (the underground city, the subway platformas bridge between two worlds, and the climactic rainbow withits overtones of the rainbow bridge into Valhalla at the end ofWagner’s Rheingold). The Matrix trilogy is not only a culturalphenomenon; it is an academic goldmine.

BERNARD F. DICK

Pinteau, Pascal. Special Effects: An Oral History. Trans. byLaurel Hirsch. NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. This huge bookprovides a treasure chest of art work and information onmovie special effects from the dawn of cinema to the presentday. Pinteau covers traditional techniques of mattes, minia-tures, and stop-frame animation, make-up effects that trans-form an actor’s appearance, and contemporary digital work.He discusses the history of each approach and explores spe-cific films through interviews with 38 effects artists, includingRay Harryhausen, Douglas Trumbull, Jim Henson, John

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Dykstra, Phil Tippett, Stan Winston, and Pitof. The book ishandsomely visualized with 1,136 photos and illustrations,nearly all in color. Highly recommended for effects devotees.

STEPHEN PRINCE

Temple, Michael, James S. Williams & Michael Witt, eds. ForEver Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004. $45.00. ForEver Godard is derived from the “For Ever Godard” confer-ence at London’s Tate Modern in June 2001. Consisting ofpieces by scholars and professionals ranging from JamesQuandt and Colin MacCabe to Nicole Brenez and AdrianMartin, it is a dense, provocative and extremely inviting book.

Whether in the public arena or in his Swiss bunker, Jean-Luc Godard still towers over moving image studies. One ofthe gifts of conference and book is the attention paid to thediversity of Godard’s work. We know about the features, fromthe interventions of the French New Wave to that bravura re-flection on film and memory Éloge de l’amour (2001). Butthis book invites us to catch (if we can) the “fragments,” the“letters,” “notes,” “video scripts,” the television work withwhich Godard has filled his time over the past two decades.Few Godard studies have been so ambitious.

There is an elusive, in-progress feel to this collection that

recalls its subject’s evolving career. These pieces are torn be-tween the formalist peculiarities of the films, and the philo-sophical issues they raise. After Part One acknowledges thesheer range of Godard’s corpus, Part Two looks for pathwaysthrough it. Vinzenz Hediger considers Godard’s reinventionof the trailer. Vicki Callahan examines connections betweenthe cinematic and the sacred in Je vous salue, Marie (1985)and the 1995 “Self-Portrait” JLG/JLG. In the section “Soundand Music,” Adrian Martin reviews lyrical interludes in earlyGodard. Part Four reflects on the nature and ambition ofGodard’s historiographical project in light of the 1998 essayseries Histoire(s) du cinéma, a work which has haunted mil-lennial Godard writings. Godard’s work here becomes cul-tural resource and archive. Leslie Hill looks at his specialrelationship to montage and his use of literary and philo-sophical citation. Less academic but just as astute are piecesby MacCabe and Quandt on financing Je vous salue, Marie,and the quest for useable prints for Quandt’s Godard retro-spective at the Ontario Cinémathèque.

Few scholarly books work on the coffee table, but this is asumptuous tome to browse, its filmography thorough, itsproduction imaginative, its insights important.

RICHARD ARMSTRONG

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