Preview

About the book

Mr. Scanlon welcomes critics to a screening with confident claims about an experience that will displace the familiar and offer a superior vision of reality. His remarks center on Stella, an actress whose performance supposedly strips away theatrical falseness. At first the film appears to be an exceptionally convincing Western, combining landscape, sound, and star presence into a polished spectacle. But the audience's practiced categories begin to fail as what appears on the screen refuses to remain within the expected production. Long uses the rhetoric of artistic innovation as the opening to a very short fantastic disturbance. The 1956 magazine story depends on a rapid change in scale, making the promise of heightened perception more ominous than the assembled critics could anticipate.

• Perception and illusion
• Spectacle and intrusion
• Confidence and uncertainty

Why read it

The compressed form lets the language of a routine publicity event acquire a sharply unsettling second meaning.

English story from Fantastic Universe, January 1956