Special Effects in The Invisible Man

I decided to paraphrase this, but I might want to refer to the original source anyway:

John P. Fulton said in an interview with The American Cinematographer (September 1934),

“The wire technique could not be used, for the clothes would look empty, and would hardly move naturally. So we had to recourse to multiple printing-- with variations. Most of these scenes involved other, normal characters, so we photographed these scenes in the normal manner, but without any trace of the invisible man. All of the action, of course, had to be carefully timed, as in any sort of double-exposure work. This negative was then developed in the normal manner.

Then the special-process work began. We used a completely black set – walled and floored with black velvet, to be as nearly non-reflective as possible. Our actor was garbed from head to foot in black velvet tights, with black gloves, and a black headpiece rather like a driver’s helmet. Over this, he wore whatever clothes might be required. This gave us a picture of the unsupported clothes moving around on a dead black field. From this negative, we made a print, and a duplicate negative which we intensified to serve as mattes for printing. Then, with an ordinary printer, we proceeded to make our composite: First we printed from the positive of the background and the normal action, using the intensified, negative matte to mask off the area where our invisible man's clothing was to move. Then we printed again, using the positive matte to shield the already printed area, and printing in the moving clothes from our "trick" negative." This printing operation made our duplicate, composite negative to be used in printing the final master prints of the picture” (Weaver et al 82).

From Universal Horrors: the studio's classic films, 1931-1946. By Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. McFarland, 2007.

NOTE to self

Do I want to come up with a special theoretical term like THE SCIENTIFIC SUPERNATURAL to signify what I mean by supernatural substantiated by the scientific or the scientific combined with the supernatural?  Is that to pretentious/presumptuous? Do I not get to do that?  Think more on this.

A source to check on later.

For introduction: Look up Walter E. Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind.

A source from 1917 I stumbled upon...

Thanks, Google Books.

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
by Dorothy Scarborough

"No supernaturalism is incredible if it is expressed in technical terminology, and no miracle will be rejected if its setting be in a laboratory.  One peculiar thing about modern scientific thought in its reaction upon fiction is that it is equally effective in realism, such as shown in teh naturalisti novels of Zola, the plays of Brieux and others, and in supernaturalism, as in the work of H.G. Wells, for instance, where the ghostly is grafted on to cold realism" (Scarborough 252). 

She lists a bunch more texts that use the Fourth Dimension, if I need to add to that section of Chapter 2. 

She calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde "chemical supernaturalism" (Scarborough 268).  She refers to what he drinks as "the magic drug." 

""The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells, shows an unusual application of chemistry to ghostly fiction that gives a peculiar effect of reality because its style is that of scientific realism.  By experimentation with drugs a man finds a combination that will render living tissue absolutely invisible...This modern method of transferring to science the idea of invisibilty so prominent in connection with ghosts, showing the invisibility as the result of a chemical compound, not of supernatural intervention, affecting a living man not a spirit, makes the effect of supernaturalism more vivid even than in the case of ghosts" (Scarborough 269).

"This type shows a strange effect of realism in supernaturalism, because of the scientific methods, for supernaturalism imposed on material things produces an effect of verisimilitude not gained int eh realm of pure spirit.  Too intellectually cold for the purposes of poetry, too abstract and elusive for presentation in drama, and too removed by its association with the fantastic aspects of investigation and the curiosities of science to be very appropriate tragedy, which has hitherto been the chief medium of expressing the dramatic supernatural, science finds its fitting expression in prose fiction" (Scarborough 280). 

General update.

I'm nearly finished with a draft of Chapter 2 (the H.G. Wells chapter).  I skipped Chapter 1 for now because I haven't read Two on a Tower yet.  Once the draft is finished (and by finished I mean in complete sentences...completely), I'll post it here.

Onward!

A quote for the introduction

From In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age
Peter Allan Dale
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

"Science....leads to the imaginary": Vaihinger's point (from The Philosophy of "As If," 1911) nicely summarizes some 75 years of intesne speculation on the method and meaning of science.  The point, as Vaihinger argues it, is safely epistemological.  Nineteenth-century scientific philosophers, although they might have begun by setting themselves the task of overthrowing the unreal, the imaginary constructions of metaphysics, repeatedly came back, in one way and another, to the realization that the initial move in the development of any scientific knowledge, whether of the natural or the human world, must be some sort of imaginary projection" (280). 

"Wells and the Novel"

by J. R. Hammond
from H.G. Wells Under Revision.  Edited by Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe.  London: Associated University Presses, 1990.

While discussing Wells' status as a novelist, J.R. Hammond touches briefly on the fact that Wells might make moves in his fiction that engage what he calls "the nineteenth-century realist tradition."  While he does not mention The Time Machine or The Invisible Man in this particular section, he does describe such a move as making the reader "continually aware of a blurring of the distinction between the fiction one is reading and the world beyond the text" (Hammond 76).

He goes on to cite a passage from an early "realistic" novel by Wells called The Wheels of Chance, but the statement can apply to his more fantastic work, such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man as well.  He says, "This reminder that what the reader has before him is a novel destroys the illusion of reality: an illusion that the author is at pains to erode at several points in the story" (Hammond 76).  There are similar reminders throughout The Time Machine, and, contrary to Hammond's claim, such reminders don't actually destroy the illusion of reality; they merely cause the reader to pause and question how reality might be represented in a novel.  How are representations determined to be real or unreal?  How do representations reflect or change the real?

This reference to novel writing or storytelling as fact or fiction within a novel is, course, not a new or innovative narrative technique by Wells.  In fact, it is one that has been in existence and actually, for many scholars, defines the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century.  The hyperbolic insistence on truth that actually emphasizes the fictionality of a novel such as Moll Flanders even more is one that is unique to the novel as a form or genre.