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Julie A Turnock
About
Julie Turnock is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, in the College of Media, and was awarded an NEH fellowship in 2024. She is the author of Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, from Columbia University Press, and The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism from University of Texas Press. She has published on special effects, spectacle, and technology of the silent and studio era, the 1970s, and recent digital cinema in Cinema Journal, Film History, Film Criticism, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as several edited collections.
Areas of Focus
I write about the history of effects from the silent era to the present, and have a particular focus on the technological aesthetics of realism in effects work.
Relevant Publications
Reading the Effects Program: The Mission: Impossible Series and Special/Visual Effects Discourse’ (Expected 2025)
The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism (2022)
The Auteurist Special Effects Film: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the ‘Single-Generation Look' (2018)
Gravity and the ‘Lighting Designer’ Controversy: Cinematographers, Special Visual Effects Artists and the Rhetoric of Digital Convergence (2017)
Special Effects: Auteur Renaissance, 1968-1980 (2016)
Special Effects: Post-War Hollywood, 1947-1967 (2016)
Designed for Everyone Who Looks Forward to Tomorrow!: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind and The 1970s Expanded Blockbuster (2015)
Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and The Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (2015)
Patient Research on the Slapstick Lots: From Trick Men to Special Effects Artists in Silent
Hollywood (2015)
The True Stars of Star Wars?’: Experimental Filmmakers the in 1970s and 1980s Special
Effects Industry (2014)
Not Just a Day Job: Experimental Filmmakers and the Special Effects Industry in the 1970s and
1980s (2015)
Removing the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3D High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of
Cinematic Realism (2013)
The ILM Version: Recent Digital Effects and the Aesthetics of 1970s Cinematography (2012)
The Screen on the Set: The Problem of Classical Studio Rear Projection (2012)
From Star Wars to Avatar: Contemporary Special Effects, Industrial Light and Magic, and the Legacy of the 1970s (2010)
Before Industrial Light and Magic: The Independent Hollywood Special Effects Business, 1968-1975 (2009)
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