This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Bode, L. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

From Shadow Citizens to Teflon Stars: Reception of the Transfiguring Effects of New Moving Image Technologies

School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Australia, l.bode{at}uq.edu.au

This article examines and compares a couple of moments of fleeting strangeness punctuating the history of the cultural reception of moving image technologies. Maxim Gorky read the early cinematographic image in terms of ‘cursed grey shadows’ (1896), while recent reviewers of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) have rendered the film’s computer-generated cast as cadavers, dummies, dolls and silicon-skinned mannequins. This article argues that it is not merely the image’s unfamiliar and new aesthetics that evoke the uncanny. Rather the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be ‘human’ at that historical moment.

Key Words: animation • cinema • cultural reception • digital actor • Final Fantasy • human • live-action • modernity • synthespian • uncanny

Animation, Vol. 1, No. 2, 173-189 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1746847706068901


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?