Vatican to Vegas

THE WORLD THROUGH GLASS

In an age of optical scanning, the look of optical printing is considered a bit artificial today by f/x people in the industry. At the same time, in outdoor malls, the staging begins to look more like movie mattes, or trompe l'oeil. Like a movie set before the cameras roll, it becomes a Baroque sculptural collage. Even model drawings for mattes resemble handbooks from Baroque eras.  The space appears as trompe l’oeil; then the shutter clicks. This clash of fake with real is filtered smooth once it passes through a lens. That causes a diffusion effect, like the world through glass before you open the car window. The glass collapses the middle ground into the background. That diffusion turns all film into a hidden effect - the erasure of difference; the invention of a flattened solidity. The movie set is Baroque (Artifice invading nature). Once that Artifice filters through the lens, the movie becomes panoramic (the machine replacing nature). We walk through the Baroque, while it vanishes on film. Silent filmmakers occasionally toyed with this parallax. Buster Keaton made that part of his signature. A building collapses on Buster. The gap in the door frame saves him. But he looks strangely unconcerned, even though the facade weighs over a thousand pounds. It’s sculptural solidity turns into trompe l’oeil against the flat screen. The air itself can be trompe l’oeil as well. And Los Angeles’s climate has it’s own diffusion effect - a very, very faint fog over a semi-arid sky. It was called haze in 1890, then smog in 1943. Clouds almost never seem to float overhead in L.A., unless it’s humid. They sit like matte paintings over the mountains, in deep focus, on the horizon.

Klein, N M. (2004). The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. New York: New Press.


Overall, I didn't enjoy reading the Vatican to Vegas, as a book it is very long winded in the way it is written. It's not the easiest to read. I also felt like that although there is some merit in the way that classical art has inspired theater and theater has inspired film and special effects, as sculptures have inspired model making, I don't think the book is very concise. It tends to go off on a tangent regularly which is a bit annoying when reading, I think it wouldn't be if it was interesting. One of the first chapters spends over half of it talking about a war that last thirty years around 600AD and I just think we've moved on since then. And it goes on about Iraq a lot and I understand that these things need to be put into context as to what's going on in the world but I don't think this much detail is needed. 

But what did work in my favour is the fact that because the author had been so long winded about all the wars and the content when it came to actually describing the process of Matte Painting he was actually a lot more concise than Richard Rickett and the other authors, so this was a positive. The only other point in the book that I thought was really applicable was the above quote comparing the art form of matte paintings as Trompe L'Oeil. When you think about it, it is actually a pretty obvious comparison to make, the similarities are undeniable, I think if anything the matte painting is an extension of the Trompe L'Oeil art form. My reasoning in saying this, is that when you film the matte painting, some of the quality is changed, so they look more realistic than the Trompe L'Oeil. Also because they are painted on glass and they are painted really flat they look more professional than the Trompe L'oeil.