Synopses & Reviews
A guided tour through special-effects environments from 1550 to the present, Norman Klein's The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects demonstrates how Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered interactive, cinematic, and even digital environments. As in our era, sixteenth and seventeenth-century illusion serviced a global culture and even relied on "software" of a kind: solid geometry for architecture, optics, sculpture, painting and theater. As if from a cryonic thaw, these forms have reemerged very clearly in recent decades. And to manage all this friendly disaster, modern special effects have evolved a unique grammar as precise as the rules of film, theater, and music. Klein reviews this syntax and demonstrates how special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity and economic relations, but an instructive parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.
Review
"Norman Klein is full of ideas, brilliantly and beautifully expressed." Journal of American History
About the Author
Norman Klein is a cultural critic, media and urban historian, the author of The History of Forgetting; Seven Minutes and the cinematic database novel Bleeding Through. He is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.