There once was a time when special effects were, well, special. These days, it's a rare movie that doesn't use computerized effects in some form, often for the more mundane purpose of making a film on budget and on time. (The Tiananmen Square scenes in 1997's Red Corner were actually shot on a parking lot near the Los Angeles Airport.) And with animated movies like Shrek and the upcoming Final Fantasy created entirely within the silicon confines of high-powered workstations, it's easy to forget the days when a handful of filmmakers struggled with the then-rare art of cinematic legerdemain. Thankfully, a recent spate of DVD releases comprises a historical record of movies heavy on special effects from before the digital age.
As far back as the early 1900s, French filmmaker George Méliès developed dozens of camera tricks to delight audiences so unaccustomed to motion pictures that they'd cover their heads when it rained onscreen. Employing double-exposures, dissolves, stop-motion and black backgrounds, Méliès wowed theatergoers with disappearing people, men who metamorphosed into hairy beasts, and space travel complete with malevolent aliens. The DVD, Landmarks of Early Film #2: Magic Méliès (Image Entertainment (DISK)), showcases 15 of Méliès best-known short films, including his most famous, A Trip to the Moon, which was pirated so rampantly when it was released in 1902 that Méliès received little profit from the sci-fi mini-epic.
In the following decades, genre filmmakers employed the techniques developed by Méliès, most notably F.W. Murnau, who used negative images, fast-motion and truly horrifying makeup to create the classic Nosferatu. This 1922 interpretation of Bram Stoker's Dracula is now available on DVD with an excellent audio essay and chilling organ score as Nosferatu: Special Edition (Image Entertainment).
It wasn't until 1928 that special effects became a gateway to convincing fantasy worlds with the arrival of the optical printer, which remained the primary special-effects apparatus until it was replaced by computers in the early 1990s. The brainchild of Brooklyn-born inventor Linwood G. Dunn, this camera-projector allowed images from two reels of film to be incorporated together, meaning characters could be placed into any kind of scene - underwater, in outer space or in the paw of an 80-foot tall Tyrannosaurus rex.
No filmmaker made better use of the optical printer than Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animation wizard widely regarded as the master of old-school special effects. Harryhausen called his method of animating small models and superimposing them into live-action scenes Dynamation, and it was used to great effect in such movies as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958, DVD from Columbia/Tristar (TSAR) Studios) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963, DVD from Columbia/Tristar Studios). The meticulously choreographed skeleton fight in Jason, in which monsters spawned from a hydra's teeth are knocked, flipped, and stabbed out of commission by Jason and his cohorts, rivals the digitally manipulated battle scenes in last year's Gladiator.
Only a director with the same attention to detail as Harryhausen could make a movie about outer space that looks as believable today as it did 33 years ago: Stanley Kubrick. Without computers to help him create the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick used an abandoned corset factory to shoot a stellar explosion, a 30-ton rotating wheel to simulate a space station centrifuge, and a clear glass disc to create the illusion of a pen floating in zero gravity. Unbelievably, until recently, the only version available on DVD was a grainy, scratchy print that made fans want to toss their copies out the pod bay door. But on June 12, Warner Home Video released a fully restored widescreen version, sourced from the original camera negative. Finally, you'll be able to freeze-frame and read those zero-gravity toilet seat instructions.
Mark Frauenfelder is a frequent contributor to The Standard.
