Best Dressed #5; Madonna in a costume Givenchyon the Red Carpet at The Met Gala 2013
WE SAY GOODBYE TO THE GREATEST VISUAL EFFECTS ARTIST THE MOVIES HAVE EVER KNOWN
Is it unreasonable to suggest that, for better or worse, special effects just don’t seem quite as special now as they were when Ray Harryhausen made them? It’s not even so much that he was a master of the form—though he was certainly that—as the fact that his mastery was the product of a purely physical labor. Harryhausen’s special effects were real, hard work, accomplished as much through technical ingenuity as by sheer dedication to a craft; when you see his work brought to painstaking life on screen, even now, the immense effort is visible in every frame.
Cherishing Harryhausen’s now antiquated stop-motion animation techniques isn’t a matter of mere nostalgia for some outdated facet of movie history—the quality of the work speaks louder than that. It’s true that many of the fantastic creations for which Harryhausen was responsible have aged and look dated, maybe even quaint, but they don’t look dated in the same way that, say, the early computer effects plastered throughout “Tron” do. Digital effects have a tendency to fall into what seems like instant obsolescence, where even the most-cutting edge images are outpaced the moment they arrive, making year-old blockbusters seem clunky and decade-old ones to look practically archaic; the advances are so sudden, the achievements so fleeting, that what’s once-revelatory rapidly becomes an antique. But Harryhausen’s effects never had that problem: their style was so singular, their presence on screen so wonderful and strange, that even today they don’t appear old-fashioned so much as otherworldly.
Unidentified photographer View of New Brighton Beach, Liverpool, England, shows a camera obscura on wheels Late 19th century (via Luminous-Lint - Image)
Thierry Mugler F/W 1992 ‘Eté Cow-Boy’, Karen Mulder in Iron Lace on the runway by Patrick Stable x The Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope
