Image as Collective: A History of Optical Effects in Hollywood's Studio System

This dissertation provides a historical account of a until now neglected field of moving image production. It identifies and focuses on optical effects as a practice of montage within moving images as opposed to the montage of like images in time. Drawing on a wide range of new archival material, my dissertation presents previously unknown reasons for the developments of different techniques of image compositing such as traveling mattes, color-based processes, rear projection, and optical printing. This field has currently gained relevance as a forerunner to contemporary digital effects and image processing, a fact that in part also explains the marginal presence optical effects in earlier scholarship. My work collects original publications by participants and critically relates them to each other and akin areas of film production. As a result I will show that there were no single privileged sources of agency but rather chains of translation that involve humans as much as non-humans...