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This chapter argues that reflection in painting can be linked to philosophical reflection by focusing on Hegel’s enthusiasm for seventeenth-century Dutch art, that, it is argued, resulted in his concept of “shine”. The chapter demonstrates that some of Hegel’s most complicated concepts, among them aufheben and self-consciousness, have been informed and shaped by pictorial reflection and shine in the work of Willem Kalf and others. On the basis of photorealism, in particular the work of Richard Estes, it is shown how painting, first in the wake of the invention of photography and then in the wake of modernism, has become increasingly self-conscious through the use of reflection.

This chapter, written by Leon Gurevitch, considers intersections between the cinematic and game aesthetics. Rather than interrogate the implications of the predominance of photorealism in game aesthetics, Gurevitch asks why notions of the cinematic have often been, and continue to be, so important to commentators, games makers and players alike. His chapter not only problematizes the simplifications upon which the comparison between cinema and games has often rested, but asserts that notions of the ‘cinematic’ are now being redrawn by production techniques and consumption practices of the games industry, rather than the other way around. With special effects studios increasingly deploying game engines as pre-visualization tools, and motion capture, animation, and compositing teams entering the cinema industry from games studios, the material practices and visual cultures that constitute the cinematic are being reconfigured. The issue, then, is not one of just how cinematic games have become, but how the cinematicity of gaming is expanding notions of the cinematic.

Beginning with conceptual works in polymer-based 3-D printing that play between optics and objecthood, sound and shaped “volume,” this chapter then aligns the blind spot of reflected camerawork in photorealist painting (and its exceptions in certain works by Richard Estes and Chuck Close) both with earlier aspects of the trompe l’oeil tradition in painting (with its frequent inclusion of photographs) and with the more immediate auto-mimesis of the spectator in various conceptual mirror works, their implications traced back to the inset mirror of Velasquez’s Las Meninas.

This chapter discusses the design and conception of the aesthetic of Star Wars. George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) designed its 1970s photorealistic special effects to match the 1970s live-action aesthetic of cinematic realism, and Star Wars has been considered as an achievement in effective photorealism. Lucas's overall visual concept of Star Wars included “graphics of fantasy combined with the feel of a documentary.” The combination of bright and dynamic graphics and carefully selected techniques and imagery of cinema verité helped comprise this “documentary fantasy.” Through this aesthetic, Star Wars combined commercial, experimental, and feature filmmaking. As the auteurist filmmaker behind Star Wars, Lucas had a personal interest in experimental filmmaking, which taught mainstream filmmakers how to build virtual environments out of movement, animation, and graphic dynamism.

This concluding chapter discusses the legacy of the 1970s special effects. Special effects technology enabled filmmakers to provide alternate world possibilities, prompting moviegoers to think about the world's transformation or alteration. Recent critics' dislike for excessive use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in “over-animated” action films suggests the extent to which the original context, in which optical animation was conceived, has been largely forgotten. Many filmmakers quickly used technology to convey the negative potential for over-technologization to express pessimism and dystopia. However, films such as Zodiac and There Will Be Blood followed the style of 1970s filmmaking. Critic Mark Harris suggests that many still prefer 1970s photorealism, and that the novelty of physics-defying CGI has begun to wear out. Recent films like Avatar and Gravity show that 1970s filmmakers' goal to have complete aesthetic control over all aspects of the composite mise-en-scène have been realized.

In this chapter, I acknowledge that a study of the digital image would not be complete without a discussion of realism. The widespread concern about whether to trust digital images is tied up, for many art and media theorists, with particular accounts of realism (e.g., Rodowick 2007). The notion of realism is a complex one, and this chapter provides some important theoretical background on one central kind; namely, the kind had by traditional photographs. This prepares the way for a discussion of digital “photorealism” as it is derived from traditional “photographic realism.” Through an analysis of “live-action animated” films, I develop an account of photorealism and its effect on the viewer’s experience of the composite—i.e., part recorded, part computer-generated—shot.

Acknowledging its comic genealogy and resonances of SF, this chapter explores the Surrealist roman-photo as a meditation on the ‘tribulations’ depicted in the six extant photographs that comprise the book ‘Les Tribulations de Monsieur Wzz…,’ which adopts its serial-panel form toward an exploration of ‘approximate life,’ a notion that pertains at once to the financial conditions of a group of young leftist writers who turned to screenwriting and translating as ways to make a living, as well as to broader questions about the technological and material conditions for modern life in general. The anthropomorphic Monsieur Wzz, a figure composed of twisted wire with no observable organs or mechanisms, accompanies human actors on a series of adventures that suggest the extent to which the technophilic machine-bodies of Dada had become assimilated into the photorealism of contemporary Paris. As in earlier avant-garde explorations of mechanical approximations of human life – whether the robots of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. or the mechanomorphs of Dada – it is the implied actions of Monsieur Wzz’ that become significant within the Surrealist comic book. At the same time, with no inner workings, Monsieur Wzz invokes the mystification its technophilic name suggests: life may be a ‘whizz,’ yet no less subject to tribulation. Thus the roman-photo comments no less directly on the explicit demands on life posed by the Surrealist movement’s discussions about communism, which become the focus of Tristan Tzara’s contemporaneous meditation on modern-day humanism in his poem ‘L’Homme Approximatif,’ an excerpt from which was published in 1929 in the main Surrealist journal of that decade La Révolution Surréaliste, around the time of the appearance of Monsieur Wzz.