The Empire of Effects

Immaculately researched, passionately argued, and hugely informative, The Empire of Effects is in its way as game-changing as the much-ballyhooed technological innovations it historicizes, contextualizes, and critiques. Julie Turnock adds powerfully and memorably to a growing body of scholarship on the aesthetics and industry of visual effects while establishing a trailhead for future academic work in these areas. Valuably, she dismantles an easy binary between visual effects and perceptual realism—the argument that effects work best when they mimic the world as we see it—to show instead how the ILM style enshrines a particular '70s cinematic aesthetic that audiences have been trained to receive as more believable and 'real.'

~Bob Rehak

Julie Turnock’s The Empire of Effects makes a crucial contribution to the literature on special effects, both historical and contemporary. Among Turnock’s interventions is her challenge to ILM’s official history of how 'special visual effects' developed from an optical-photochemical field to a digital one, in an argument that expertly maps stylistic history onto the terrain of studio economics. She has pored through thousands of pages of trade journals and four decades’ worth of FX magazines in addition to the voluminous scholarly work on New Hollywood’s infrastructure, form, and style, and from this broader perspective has also formed a compelling take on the peculiar ideology of auteurism that surrounds effects artists and their work.

~Paul Young

Turnock finds new ground to cover in The Empire of Effects...a captivating look at digital realism and the success of ILM.

~The Film Stage

Turnock’s expansive study of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and by turns of the wider special effects industry provides insight, nuance, and practical reactions to an industry that often dominates the filmmaking process and erodes the elements of story, direction, or performance...Highly recommended.

~CHOICE