The reality effect : film culture and the graphic imperative / Joel Black.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Black, Joel, 1950-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Realism in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

286 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2002.

Summary:

It used to be only movies were on film; now the whole world is. The most intimate and most banal moments of our lives are constantly recorded for public consumption. In "The Reality Effect," Joel Black argues that the desire to make visible every aspect of our lives is an impulse derived from cinema- one that has made life both more graphic and less "real." He approaches film as a documentary medium that has obscured-if not obliterated- the line between reality and fiction. To illustrate this effect, Black traces the uncanny interplay between movies and real-life events through a series of comparative analyses-from "Lolita" and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey to "Wag the Dog" and the Clinton scandal to "Crash" and Princess Diana's violent death.

Contents:

Introduction: The Filmed Century 1

Before (and Beyond) Art and Entertainment 1

The Reality Effect 7

Reality Bites Back: Kernel Truths 11

From Cinema Verite to Reality TV 15

Mediating Reality: Wag the Dog to War Games 20

The Graphic Imperative 24

Part 1 Film culture

1 Pornographic Science 35

Missing Scenes: Coover's Casablanca 35

Intrusive Scenes: Scorsese's Marriage Manual 48

Freezing the Scene: Pynchon's Prehistory of Film 52

Your Car's Mind 56

2 Primal Scenes 61

Questioning the Woman 61

Films without Film 64

Infantilizing the Viewer 66

Hard-core Freud 69

The Reality of Fantasy 78

De Palma's Wolf Man 81

3 Body Parts 85

Multiple Images and Displaced Desire 85

Split Persons and Body Doubles 87

Shower Show: Dressed to Kill to Body Double 89

The Erotics of Substitution: Vertigo to Body Double 93

Vamps and Vampires 98

Conjugal Adultery and Movie Children 103

Part 2 Filmic events

4 Documenting Violence 111

Serial Violence/Surveillance 111

The Year of Filming Dangerously 118

Hidden Figures: The Assassination Scene from Antonioni to Zapruder 121

Surprise Executions 130

Films that Kill 135

5 Telling Stories 145

"I Want You to See with My Eyes" 145

Screening the Holocaust 151

Screening Hollywood 154

The Death of the Mind 158

6 Showing the Obscene 163

Time and the Unthinkable 163

Releasing the Unreleasable 169

Stealing Childhood: Lolita and JonBenet 169

Death Imitates Art: Crash and Princess Diana 174

Wagging the Dog: Sex, Lies, and the Clinton Videotapes 187

Part 3 Film dreams

7 From Dream Work to Dream Works 197

Unreal Estate: Fake Towns, Real People 197

Ants Wars 201

Back to the Future: Movies, the Ride 203

From the Moon to Mars: 2001 Then and Now 206

The Color of Dreams 213

Back to the Drawing Board: Movies, the Game 215

Dream Worlds 218.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [229]-270) and indexes.

ISBN:

0415937205

0415937213

OCLC:

46634165