Jason and the Argonauts (1963): ‘a sense of the marvellous’
When lockdown restrictions were relaxed last month, an exhibition devoted to the work of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen reopened at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It might seem strange that an art museum should host a show dedicated to a man who spent much of his career making models for monster movies, said Martin Hannan in The National – but its subject “was no ordinary modelmaker”. Harryhausen (1920-2013) can truly be said to have “changed cinema” forever.
Working decades before computer-generated imagery became available, Harryhausen created astonishing and believable worlds on screen, conjuring up fantastical ephemera – from armies of reanimated skeletons to fleets of marauding UFOs. Using plasticine and other materials, he became a master of stop-motion animation, manipulating his models at the painstaking rate of 24 frames per second. He rarely wrote or directed his movies, but it was his creations that truly enlivened those he was involved with from the 1940s to the 1980s: many, including