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Columns::March 3, 2003
Weekly Reader
Book explores films’ impact on reality
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$90 (cloth)
$424.95 (paper)
Routledge |
It used to be only movies were on film, but now reality television and security cameras are recording the most intimate and most banal moments of people’s daily lives for public consumption.
In The Reality Effect, Joel Black argues that people’s steadily increasing desire to make visible every aspect of their lives is an impulse derived from cinema--one that has made life both more graphic and less “real.” A UGA associate professor of comparative literature, Black approaches film not as art or entertainment, but as a documentary medium that has obscured--if not obliterated--the line between reality and fiction.
Selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic titles of 2002, The Reality Effect traces the interplay between movies and real-life events through a series of provocative and unsettling comparative analyses--from Antonioni’s Blow-Up and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination to Lolita and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey to Wag the Dog and the Clinton scandal to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Princess Diana’s violent death, from Casablanca and pornography to Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Freud’s “Wolf-Man.”
An ambitious work of both film theory and cultural criticism, The Reality Effect will reframe readers’ view on cinematic culture, in which nothing is left to chance, nothing must appear to be unreal and nothing can be left unseen.
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