We Have Star Wars at Home

This is cool: Evan Puschak looks at the rush of cheapo knockoff space operas that came out in the wake of Star Wars, a once-in-a-generation film that refashioned the entire movie business. Even the names are kooky: Starcrash, War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars, The Humanoid, Message From Space, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Man Who Saved the World, Star Odyssey, and The Beast in Space — although tbh, Star Wars is a goofy name as well. Some of the movies even had lightsabers and anxious robots.

Puschak highlights Star Wars’ unique combination of realistic depictions of space with special effects (a la 2001) and an adventure story with colorful characters. He quotes Julie Turnock’s book, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, in making the case that Lucas and other filmmakers of his generation were using special effects to up the sensorial ante for moviegoers — I dug the full passage out of the book’s introduction:

Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects-heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have (often rightly) condemned the aggressive, pummeling blockbuster style that has arisen in the wake of the two successes of 1977, it is incumbent upon scholars to recover the creative process that made them so stimulating and exhilarating to the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert, and other prominent critics of the era, as well as so popular with audiences. A renewed interest in special effects technology by influential auteurist filmmakers certainly made this historical development possible. However, even more strongly, auteurist filmmakers went to the considerable and painstaking effort to promote and develop complex special effects technology, precisely in order to realize aesthetic filmmaking goals they designed to rouse and provoke the sensorium. They called this approach variously “visual storytelling,’ “visceral engagement,’ or “graphic dynamics.”

Moreover, so-called New Hollywood filmmakers in the 1970s reinterpreted the role of cinematic aesthetics to suggest a purposeful relation between sensual and intellectual impact. In other words, filmmakers sought to stimulate the senses. This was not to numb the viewer but to activate him or her — not unlike the notion of drug-induced mind expansion. Intensified color schemes, beams of light, fast-moving objects, and quick editing first penetrate the body and then engage the mind with the films’ ideas about technology, kineticism, power structures, liberty, etc.

I am firmly in the camp of those who enjoy filmmakers that engage the senses like this — among contemporary filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve come to mind as continuing the legacy of Lucas et al. in this way.

• Evan Puschak
• film school
• Julie Turnock
• movies
• Star Wars
• video