Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Techniques of the Moving Image) by Lisa Bode

Author:Lisa Bode [Bode, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: COM071000 Computers / Digital Media / Video & Animation, PER004030 Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism, TEC043000 Technology & Engineering / Television & Video
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2017-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

The Importance of Sustaining Belief and Wonder

I have sketched here a historical narrative of how over a century the value of bodily authenticity in performance has periodically emerged and reemerged, and how it has been reshaped in contexts of doubt about technological illusionism. In dance performance on the screen, the image used to be able to authenticate itself by relying on the minimization of cuts and on a play of proximity and distance with the camera. Such strategies are used in Moira Shearer’s extended dizzying ballet sequence in The Red Shoes (1948), in John Travolta slicing up the disco floor in Saturday Night Fever (1977), or in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers floating like dandelion clocks and gliding like warm butter through any of their films: the authenticity of the performing body’s skill is signaled with extended takes. These are shot from enough of a distance as to capture the full body so that we can appreciate the virtuosity of the dancer’s movements, and yet close enough to recognize the star’s face. This is all Moira/John/Fred+Ginger, all the time, such shots proclaim. Such camerawork, as André Bazin argued, serves to “send us back to reality,” inviting admiration of what performers can do with their bodies.69 Before the era of digital filmmaking, the authenticating power of the extended take depended entirely on our firm belief in what John Belton called the “integrity” of the film image—the belief that it could not be broken down into smaller units.70

Digital effects dissolve the integrity of the image, and it is important to note that Black Swan’s opening also contains cues that could serve as a warning that we should not believe our eyes. As Nina/Portman is joined by a male dancer and they whirl and spin, the shot is held as their costumes magically transform. With a flourish of his arms and the sound of heavy wings unfurling, the male dancer in conventional stage makeup and a black unitard becomes a dark-feathered demon with golden glowing eyes in a black face. When Portman wheels out from his grasp, we see that suddenly the simple white flowers in her hair have become the white-feathered crown of the swan queen. These instant, impossible transformations reveal the presence of digital elements and underlying manipulation: microsurgeries in the tissue of the film’s reality. They indicate that the image should not be understood as a raw recording of a profilmic event, but a composition of layered elements, some that may have happened before the camera and some that definitely did not, unless we are to believe in magic.

In the late 1920s, the awareness that sound and image were separate, and the revelations of dubbing for star voices, worked to cast doubt over the authenticity claims of all screen star vocal performances. So, too, the revelation of face replacement here to mask the use of a double might undermine the authenticity of all apparent physical achievements onscreen. If we must doubt everything, can we appreciate the wonder of anything? Will

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