BasketFrom Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond
MoreEdited by Geoff King
Hollywood special effects offer spectacular creations or re-creations that make claims to our attention on the grounds of their ‘incredible-seeming reality’.
They can appear both ‘incredible’ and ‘real’, their appeal based on their ability to ‘convince’—to appear real in terms such as detail and texture—and on their status as fabricated spectacle, to be admired as such. At a seemingly very different end of the audio-visual media spectrum, ‘reality’ television offers the spectacle of, supposedly, the ‘real’ itself, a ‘reality’ that ranges from the banality of the quotidian to intense interpersonal engagements (two extremes experienced in Big Brother, for example). The two also overlap, however, nowhere more clearly and jarringly than in the ultimate ‘spectacle of the real’, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, live television coverage of which evoked constant comparison with big-screen fictional images.
Douglas Kellner, chair of Philosophy of Education at UCLA
Lee Rodney, assistant professor at the University of Windsor, Canada
Geoff King, senior lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University
Kathy Smith, senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at London Metropolitan University
Dean Lockwood, lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Lincoln
Amy West, Ph.D. student at the University of Auckland
Misha Kavka, lecturer in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland
Frances Bonner, lecturer in film and televison at the University of Queensland
Leon Hunt, senior lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University
Bernadette Flynn, lecturer in Screen Production and Digital Media at Griffith University, Australia
Michele Pierson, lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland
Lisa Purse, Ph.D. student in Film at the University of Reading
Paul Ward, lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Brunel Univeristy
Julian Petley, professor in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University
Peg Aloi, teacher of creative writing and film studies at Emerson College in Boston, USA
Mike Wayne, senior lecturer in Film and Television at Brunel University
Michele Aaron, lecturer on Film at the Univeristy of Birmingham
Tanya Krzywinska, reader in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University
