A New Developments in Screen and Film Theory: The Magic and the Real - Essay Example

Aliens in the characters of Autobots (Optimus Prime et al.) and Decepticons were conveyed to be so real with the cinematography and so realistic that we are tempted to believe. The audience knew that Autobots, Decepticons and their planet Cybertron do not exist but the technological spectacle of putting them on screen was so incredible real that we couldn’t help think it was all true. The visual rendering was so effective and intense that it could even be taken as overkill in the use of technological visuals; the appeal of the film rests mainly on visuals in recognition of the audience’s increasing “attention deficit disorder”.

According to Crary the 19th century Western mass entertainment is obsessed due to the perceived breakdown in attention of the audience such as the use of trance, reverie, monomania and hypnosis (1999), which in this case is technological spectacle. The argument of Jean-Louis Baudry could be valid especially in the trailer of the film Transformer that is being critiqued. The plot is really simple to the point of being predictable that inferring to street parlance, it is a “no brainer” because the story of two warring groups be it Autobots and Decepticons or other entities and the idea of the world being invaded by aliens is already a cliche yet we are engrossed with the film.

The use of “technological spectacle” was so effective that the audience in general did not mind the simplicity of the story for as long as they are enthralled with the sophistication of the film that it blurred the line between what is real and fiction/magic. In general, the film can be taken as a mere eye candy whose appeal is anchored on its visual that if you cannot engage the audience with your plot, you can instead awe them, a principle consistent with Baudry’s argument in his work “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus".

In the work, Baudry posits that the cinematography of the film itself, such as that of the movie Transformers is a process of transformation that is transcendental that the eyes itself is given a temporary sense of freedom and movement (1970) by forgetting the technological and even physical implausibility of benevolent aliens (Autobots) being with us and evil aliens (Decepticons) invading us. What used exist in our dreams about the existence of aliens was given reality in the film, presented in a technological magic that is so convincing we would like to believe it is real.

Galison articulated how this technological development in film made possible. Film making is no longer an exclusive province of arts of retelling or narrating stories but also became a stage to showcase technology and its sociology. The intertwining of the streams of film and hard science provided depth and explanation in the rendition (1997) of a particular genre such as the film Transformers: Dark Moon where the audience became curious how would the film maker Michael Bay would make the animation Tranformers (its original version was animation) look real in the big screen interacting with humans.

And the rendition and cinematography was so realistic that the film extended into three installments suggesting the successful integration between visualization and computational use of data that were so intense in the film that it became its central appeal. This phenomenon of integrating science in films (even if its logic is implausible) is not unique to Transformers but is also present in other