of love for an actor’s face (one of the prime purposes
of the close-up); but on the other hand, the length of
the shot gives Kidman the time to convey the depth
of Anna’s thoughts without the use of dialogue or
overt action.
Special Effects
Cinema itself is a special effect, an illusion that
fools the human eye and brain into perceiving
motion. Special effects(abbreviated SPFXor FX)
is a term reserved for technology that creates
images that would be too dangerous, too expensive,
or in some cases, simply impossible to achieve with
the traditional cinematographic materials that we
have already discussed. As spectacular as SPFX
technologies and their effects can be, however, the
goal of special-effects cinematography is generally
to create verisimilitude—an illusion of reality or a
believable alternative reality—within the imagina-
tive world of even the most fanciful movie. Special-
effects expert Mat Beck says, “The art of visual
effects is the art of what you can get away with,
which means you really have to study a lot about
how we perceive the world in order to find out how
we can trick our perceptions to make something
look real when it isn’t.”^10
In-Camera, Mechanical, and Laboratory Effects
The ability of movies to create illusion has always
been one of their major attractions for audiences.
Indeed, the first special effect appeared in Alfred
Clark’s The Execution of Mary Stuartin 1895 (cine-
matographer: William Heise), the year the movies
were born. To depict the queen’s execution, Clark
photographed the actor in position, stopped filming
and replaced the actor with a dummy, then started
the camera and beheaded the dummy. (Inciden-
tally, this film involved another kind of illusion: a
man, Robert Thomae, played Queen Mary.)
From that point forward, special effects
appeared regularly in the films of Georges Méliès,
the great illusionist, who used multiple exposures
and stop-motion animation. Edwin S. Porter’s The
Great Train Robbery(1903) featured matte and com-
posite shots, and J. Searle Dawley’s Rescued from
an Eagle’s Nest (1908; cinematographer: Porter)
included a mechanical eagle, created by Richard
Murphy, that was the forerunner of “animatronic”
creatures in contemporary films. By the mid-1920s,
extraordinary effects were featured in such films
as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis(1927; cinematographers:
Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann),
for which designer Otto Hunte created the city of
the future in miniature on a tabletop; Cecil B.
DeMille’s first version of The Ten Commandments
(1923; cinematographers: Bert Glennon, J. Peverell
Marley, Archie Stout, and Fred Westerberg), in
which technicians could part the Red Sea because
it was made of two miniature slabs of Jell-O;^11 and
the first of four versions of The Lost World(1925;
cinematographer: Arthur Edeson), directed by
Harry O. Hoyt. The special effects in The Lost World
were the work of Willis H. O’Brien, who went on
to create the special effects in Merian C. Cooper
and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933;
cinematographers: Edward Linden, J. O. Taylor,
Vernon L. Walker, and Kenneth Peach), in which
the giant ape terrorizing New York City from the top
of the Empire State Building was, in fact, a puppet.
Until the advent of computer-generated imagery,
in the 1960s, such illusions were accomplished in
essentially three ways: through in-camera effects
created in the production camera (the regular cam-
era used for shooting the rest of the film) on the
original negative, through mechanical effectsthat
create objects or events mechanically on the set and
in front of the camera, and through laboratory
effectscreated on a fresh piece of film stock.
Although computer-generated graphics and ani-
mation have virtually eclipsed the way special(^10) Mat Beck, qtd. in “Special Effects: Titanic and Beyond,”
Nova, produced for PBS by the Science Unit at WGBH
Boston, November 3, 1998.
SPECIAL EFFECTS 279
(^11) DeMille’s 1956 version of the parting of the Red Sea (cine-
matographically engineered by Loyal Griggs) cost $2 mil-
lion—the most expensive special effect up to that time—and
involved matte shots, miniatures, 600 extras, and a 32-foot-
high dam channeling tens of thousands of gallons of water.