Chapter 22 - Digital Special Affects: On Exhilaration and the Stun in CGI Blockbuster Films

Summary

This chapter argues that the use of speed manipulation in digital cinema constitutes special affects of exhilaration and the stun. This emphasis on temporal manipulation supplements the spatial emphasis contained in much work on digital cinema. Digital tools enable a common manipulation of speed and time that potentially innervates the affections of exhilaration and the stun or jolt. In particular, two blockbuster movies – 300 and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies – illustrate the common construction of suspension-images and aftermath-images whose combinations result in the special affects outlined here. The chapter concludes by connecting these images to the consumer culture today, arguing that they express the turn towards an affective consumerism concerned primarily with the production of affective experiences over visual spectacle. In short, cinematic features today, like many consumer commodities, have become something to viscerally feel rather than visually behold, with time manipulation becoming central to this goal.