No Longer State-of-the-Art: Crafting a Future for CGI

Abstract

There is nothing quite like speculating about the future for raising questions about the way we remember the past. The early-to-mid nineteen-nineties can now be identified as a formative, if short-lived, period in the production, circulation, and cultural reception of computer-generated special effects in Hollywood cinema. These were the wonder years--a period in which cgi effects became the focus of intense speculation: not only for cinema audiences, but also for the special effects industry itself. In this, the age of the Hollywood blockbuster, science fiction cinema might have become a forgotten cinema. After all, any claims that its most recent action-attractions might make on our cultural memory are bound to appear tenuous in the face of a mode of exhibition that has made of their public screening an event to be experienced rather than to be remembered. In the early part of this decade, it was nevertheless science fiction cinema, which made the public and social screening of the computer-generated image an occasion for speculation about the future of cinema itself. Much of this speculation focused on the question of how long it would be before digital imaging technologies had totally replaced physical and mechanical effects. Would the production of special effects on-set one day be a thing of [End Page 29] the past? Did the wholesale shift from analogue to digital formats in other areas of film production--most notably, sound and editing--portend the future of special effects production? More than half a decade later, it still remains for cultural critics to wonder what will happen next.

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