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SCMS 2021 - VFX Scholar Thoughts

 

 

The 2021 annual Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference took place on Zoom this year over several days in late March, with several of our members presenting and attending. Lisa Purse was brilliant and sent out a short questionnaire. Although the time-zones were ghastly for those of us in the Southern hemisphere so we missed much of the conference, a few members in the North sent back their responses.

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What was your highlight of the conference and why? (paper or panel)
 

Lisa Purse: There were a number of fantastic panels on special and visual effects, histories of visual technologies, animation, computer histories, and machine learning and AI this year, so it felt like a really rich SCMS for our area. Two highlights for me: H19, the Digital Bodies and Visual Effects panel, in which Tanine Allison, Hye Jean Chung, Malinda Dietrich considered the connotations of and contexts for the production of digital bodies on screen. These were nuanced accounts in which the entanglement of the politics and aesthetics of representation with questions of technology and genre were insightfully illuminated. Politics, aesthetics and technology returned as entangled critical issues in Q3, To Hell and Back: Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), in the thoughtful and thought-provoking dialogue between four different analyses of Jackson’s film by Robert Burgoyne, John Trafton, Jonna Eagle and the late, great and much missed Eileen Rositzka.

 

Nick Jones: Panel H19: Digital Bodies and Visual Effects was the highlight of the conference for me. Tanine Allison's paper on the digital cloning of Will Smith in Gemini Man called attention to the racial dimensions of this and other synthespians; Hye Jean Chung's paper on the kaiju of the MonsterVerse extended her brilliant work in Media Heterotopias (2018) by thinking about the composite nature of digital creatures like Godzilla; and Malinda Dietrich asked intriguing questions around mocap, aesthetics, and humanity. All this work spoke to contemporary developments and urgent issues around visual effects in mainstream cinema.
 

Kartik Nair: A methodological highlight of the conference was the panel "African American Culture, Spectatorship and Hollywood, 1920 - 1940". It really opened out ways for me to think with archival gaps, the status of trade documents, and even scanning the backgrounds of images, which is useful in my own work on Bombay horror films of the 1980s.

 

Julie Turnock: I echo what Kartik wrote. I didn't get to attend as many panels as I would have liked, but the ones he talks about were certainly standouts. I would add the Disney panel that Misha Mihailova was on as a particularly generative one as well (especially in the chat, somehow, a surprisingly useful aspect of the online conference experience), and in the last session, the historical effects panel Katarina Loew chaired was also great. I didn't see the Romero panel at SCMS, but I had seen a webinar outside of SCMS and it is indeed an exciting new archive.

 

Ernest MathijsI will add to the already excellent observations one more: the panel on 'flops'. Panel T4 (I remember this because in Canada T4 is a tax slip :-)) Eliot Bessette gave a presentation on The Wolf Man that focused on special effects, which I really liked because it made the argument that The Wolf Man (2010?) struggled with shifts from tactile horror FX to digital FX. Hence its failure, the paper claimed (it made other claims too, but this one seems relevant to us).

 

What were the key trends in visual effects scholarship that SCMS threw a spotlight on for you this year?

 

Lisa Purse: I think we are seeing visual effects scholars really engage with how creative decision-making is situated culturally, institutionally, economically but also crucially in terms of the politics of representation. It feels like an important and necessary emphasis for our work. 
 

Kartik Nair: A welcome trend I noted was the continued effort to deepen and texture our historicization of visual effects genres, practices, and aesthetics. In this regard, a particular highlight of the conference was the roundtable "Building a Horror Studies Archive: Opening the George A. Romero Collection", which I know some other folks on here also attended. It felt unprecedented that such an archive was being opened, and will house archival papers and documents from Romero's collection, including (hopefully) on production and prosthetic special effects ---I  also felt the same way regarding the panel Global Special Effects 1925-1935 

 

Nick Jones: While the conference took place during teaching, and therefore I was unable to attend as much as I would have liked, I did see an array of panels about VFX and associated issues. These discussed subjects as diverse of the place of digital effects in the mind-game film, action cinema, VR, 3D, cinema history, and others. However, overall I did not myself note any major trends, with visual effects scholarship and theory instead being a reference point for a wealth of other issues.

 


What upcoming publications from speakers are you looking out for?
 

Lisa Purse: Tanine Allison’s Capturing Motion: Digital Performance in Contemporary Film, Television, Animation, and Video Games (forthcoming) looks really exciting.

 

Nick Jones: I'm looking forward to the publication of the edited collection Action Cinema Since 2000, edited by Lisa Purse, Chris Holmlund and Yvonne Tasker, and due for release in 2022. Collecting together papers from the Action Cinema Now conference in Reading in 2019, the focus here may not be VFX, but issues of digital animation are sure to feature prominently given their significance to the contemporary action film.

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What are you currently working on?

 

Lisa PurseI’m finishing a chapter on the use of digital technologies in the depiction of the female action hero for a forthcoming anthology co-edited by myself, Chris Holmlund and Yvonne Tasker called Action Cinema Since 2000 (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), and researching a project on volume stages and mixed reality studios.  

 

Kartik Nair: I am currently working on the manuscript of my first book, and feel lucky to say I go on a sabbatical this year to do so! As a 'break' however, I am spending time in May putting together an article on VFX and presence in new the version of The Invisible Man.

 

Nick JonesI'm currently working on a project exploring the connections between the graphic user interface and other media. A video essay related to this work, and which explores VFX breakdowns and labour, is available on youtube.

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