Disappearance
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Recognized as the greatest director of special effects in cinema since his participation in “2001, a Space Odyssey” and “Star Trek”, the American died Tuesday at the age of 79.
He had the future in his sights, perpetually. The imaginary one of science fiction, the deployment of which he influenced in the cinema like no other, through his colossal work on 2001 and blade runner ; but also that, technical and very real, of the image and what it can do for art, immersion, stories, imagination. Douglas Trumbull, director, researcher, fake artist, essential craftsman of American cinema who has just passed away at the age of 79, had only made two feature films, and no masterpieces. Yet he was an artist in the full sense of the term, his pictorial genius, his essential engineering and his deep faith in the power of the image only relegated to the background by our culture’s belief in the gesture of the director, ultimate author and all powerful.
Consider a sequence from one of the dozen or so films that benefit from its exceptional special effects: the discovery of the Enterprise in the film star trek,directed by veteran Robert Wise in 1979, in which Captain Kirk, though outdated by a decade of untimely TV reruns, returned by shuttle to his spaceship to celebrate his arrival on cinema screens. Devoid of words, purely contemplative, the walk is a pretext for a superb spatial tracking shot, at a snail’s pace, lit by the bluish glow of the earth below; aesthetically magnificent, the sequence is also a call…