And I really enjoy this kind of book that is not uniform in its scope, nor in its willingness to express connectivity of media and ideas from different fields of thought. It is a bold subject to try and cram so much into a few hundred pages, but it is to the book’s credit that Williams is able to pull together far-ranging subjects not only through the connective substance of glass, but in how optics and the way in which we receive images drastically alters our perspective in, and on, real life. But what it did achieve was the inference of the image crossing the parallax, the dividing line of the screen relative to the action approaching the lens of the camera He gives the example of the Lumiere brothers’ film of a train racing towards the screen as an example of the technology making its presence known through the medium, pointing out that at the original screening no-one actually ran away in fear, as the legend often goes. Where computer-generated effects have sometimes taken the place of storytelling and shall we even say, emotional depth, as opposed to infinite perspective, Williams is also trying to explore how glass as a medium, and in particular screens on our handheld devices have changed the way we view and experience the world. As both edgy metaphor and reflective distruptor, glass diffusing into the shard and its dismemberments figure large in popular imagination, as well as cutting a swathe through history.Įvan Calder Williams has written a far-reaching book that jumps between scenes from popular films where glass-type effects including water droplets, dust motes and the ever grander scale of metal crashing into metal has become a modern language as relevant to the modern blockbuster as acting used to be. Since the invention of optics, glass has transformed sound and vision through the lens via the looking glass and perhaps most importantly, the transformative spectacle of the moving image. ![]() The affordability and sustainability of film produced in this mode begs the question of where cinema is going when budget – at both ends of the spectrum – becomes the key driver of success, seeming to replace the quintessential human elements of screen-writing, acting, and hands-on film-making. This in turn becomes a self-justifying process of meeting revenue targets and trying to break even in order to meet these costs. The ‘shard’ of the title works as metaphor for a divisive and increasingly diffuse element the increasing tendency for film-makers to produce very linear Good vs Evil films that lend most of their commercial weight and production time on digital special effects and computer-generated images. This more-ness is driven largely by scale but also the power of shock and awe to overwhelm the audience into non-thinking submission, with colours and shapes taking the place of plotting and intelligent camera work, at the cost of physical cinematography work which is a large part of what helped to establish moving film as both artform and the medium. ![]() The author, Evan Calder Williams argues that while the vista of the cinema screen brought new worlds of sight and sound to the viewer, it also has increasingly been co-opted to present audiences with more spectacle and less substance. Shard Cinema charts the brief history of glass as the ultimate liminal material and how the spectacle of the screen has increasingly become the lens through which we view the world. ![]() Evan Calder Williams, Shard Cinema (Repeater Books, 2017), 336pp.
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