Jasper Sharp : Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

20
May

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinema doesn’t get a lot of column inches in the popular press nowadays, at least outside of the Arts section, so I was intrigued to stumble across an article in a copy of last week’s Evening Standard (Thurs, 13 May 2010) left lying on the Underground entitled “3D or not 3D: Avatar and Godfather directors go to war over technology” written by the paper’s Technology Editor, Mark Prigg. The article stated that James Cameron had declared last week at the Seoul Digital Forum that 3D will become the standard format for movies and television in “a couple of years” and that “there will be a “3D renaissance” comparable to the advent of sound and colour in motion pictures”, while Francis Ford Coppola is quoted as saying that the marketing of 3D movies by Hollywood studios was just a way “to make you pay more money for a ticket”. The new technology’s most prominent decrier, Mark Kermode, is also quoted as saying “3D has never been the future of cinema. It is, was, and always will be the past.” Kermode has been grinding his axe over the new 3D revolution for several years now – you can get a sense of his passion in these videos here, here and here.

James Cameron and Sam Worthington on the set of Avatar

So, sorry, as I wend my weary way back to Avatar again, but I’ll confess, I have more than a passing interest in the subject of 3D, as I’m currently in the midst of a PhD about the adoption of widescreen technologies in Japan during the 1950s, and there appear to be many clear parallels with Hollywood’s attempt to force a new mode of exhibition on a generation of cinema-goers who were then being lost to the new medium of television and discourses surrounding the 3D revival happening today. Having spent the past few months picking through John Belton’s monumental study Widescreen Cinema (1992), it seems that the historical case for the success or failure of 3D is not quite as cut and dry as the rather simplistic one-line quotes presented in this article suggest.

Raoul Walsh’s Grandeur film, The Big Trail (1930)

A Polyvision sequence from Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927)

For a start, all of the technologies underpinning the new immersive cinema experiences introduced in the 1950s, be they Cinerama (multi-screen), CinemaScope (anamorphic widescreen), Todd-AO (wide-gauge, faster frame rate of 30fps) or emulations, variations or amalgamations of all of the aforementioned (Vitascope, Technirama, Super Technirama 70) had already been experimented with in the 1920s and 1930s: Abel Gance’s three-camera Polyvision system for Napoleon (1927) ; Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s Chang (1927) , with its Magnascope elephant stampede sequence; the Fox Film Corporation’s early 70mm Grandeur productions like The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930) and Warner’s 65mm Vitascope production of films such as The Bat Whispers (Roland West, 1930) . The reason they failed to take hold then was due to the plethora of non-compatible formats that meant that exhibitors weren’t sure which equipment to hedge their bets on (especially as the coming of sound had already presented a significant expense for exhibitors at a time of economic uncertainty as the Great Depression dawned). Also, with no viable alternative arenas in which to view films, audiences didn’t need bigger screens to lure them to the cinema. We could also add that no small number of these simply weren’t very good films. The landscape was considerably different in the 1950s, an era in which television was taking root and Americans had a greater amount of money and leisure time to spend on other recreational pursuits.

See the joins? This was Cinerama!

All of these widescreen formats developed by rival studios went head to head with one another in the 1950s, but the key point is that they were promoted at the time as being “3D experiences”. They weren’t 3D in the sense we now understand the term (i.e. stereoscopic), but they introduced a new, more active way of looking at the film being projected, with picture detail and movement also taking place in the peripheral vision, setting them above the Academy ratio that had been the industry standard since 1932. The film now considered to be the first colour 3D feature, Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler), which premiered on 26 November 1952, was filmed in a process called Natural Vision, although of course there’s not much that’s natural about peering at the screen through red and green pieces of perspex. It arrived less than two months after the premiere of the Cinerama featurette, This is Cinerama, at the time itself touted as the future of cinema (although its three-projector technology used significantly more film stock and required multiple projectionists at specialist exhibition venues, and the joins between the screens were also visible, so the format never really went anywhere). With the major players struggling to come up with their own single-camera widescreen solution, Natural Vision was initially rejected by the major studios and Bwana Devil was produced independently, although the first studio-produced films using the stereoscopic process, House of Wax (André De Toth) and Man in the Dark (Lew Landers) were both released by Warners and Columbia respectively in April 1953.

Not so Natural Vision

Nevertheless, their timing was not particularly propitious, because within six months, on 16 September 1953, 20^th Century Fox unveiled its first feature using its proprietary widescreen CinemaScope process, The Robe (Henry Koster). As CinemaScope projection equipment and screens were rolled out across America and the rest of the world (most importantly from my point of view, Japan – the “full package” included a specially curved screen and a stereophonic sound system, but most venues opted out of the last option, and I’m not sure yet if Japanese exhibitors went for the curved screen either), Natural Vision’s days were numbered from the very outset. Of course, CinemaScope was a superior format in any case, but it was helped by the fact that the epic religious subject matter of The Robe gelled more closely with the critics’ and the general public’s notions of what constituted a “quality picture” than the schlocky genre pieces that were initially produced in Natural Vision (the oft-quoted exception is Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder , released in 1954, although the film has rarely been shown subsequently in its 3D mode).

It was the rapid adoption of the CinemaScope format and its variations that put the kaibosh on the first wave of 3D releases, but as mentioned, it was itself initially promoted as a 3D format: Belton argues that both Natural Vision and “flat” widescreen cinema shared the common goal of encouraging a more participatory viewing experience by breaking down the viewer’s sense of the frame (see also William Paul’s “The Aesthetics of Emergence”, Film History, Vol. 5, No. 3, Film Technology and the Public (Sep., 1993), pp. 321-355).

A wider view, in the first CinemaScope feature, The Robe (1953)

CinemaScope’s main rival came in 1955 with the release of the first feature using the Todd-AO format, Oklahoma! (Fred Zinnemann). Todd-AO used 70mm film stock and upped the frame rate from 24fps to 30fps: the picture was bigger, sharper and relatively flicker-free, but films could only be projected in venues with the necessary specialist equipment. There were only a handful of such theatres at the time (four in 1955), and though this number grew slowly, such venues remained limited to larger urban centres. Oklahoma!, its rights acquired at great cost from Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, creators of the phenomenally successful 1943 Broadway musical from which it was adapted, was a hugely expensive project, with the Todd-AO process requiring considerably more raw film stock: the cost of a Todd-AO production was between 2.5-2.75 times that of the average for a 35mm film from Hollywood. Not much more than a dozen such films were made using the format, prestige spectacle films such as Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956) and Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). Such films were often also released in separate CinemaScope versions to ensure their more widespread distribution, but it was always made clear that you wouldn’t be getting quite the same movie experience unless you shelled out that little bit more to see it in one of the small network of high-class theatres especially equipped for the purpose.

A scene from the Todd-AO version of Oklahoma!

For Mike Todd Jr., the maverick who bankrolled the development of the system that bore his name, the issues of spectacle and elevation of each performance to an event were paramount: “I’m not interested in making movies,” he famously claimed. “Movies are something you can see in your neighbourhood theatre and eat popcorn while you’re watching them.” Ticket prices might have been accordingly much higher, but as he explained, “the carriage trade will swim a river of crocodiles to see it. To show they got class and appreciate the arts, they’d be insulted if you didn’t charge premium prices and make it a little hard to see. Besides, if you get the reviews and have a hot ticket, the gum chewers will figure out how to get in as well.”

The same scene again from the CinemaScope version for the oi-polloi.

A number of widescreen technologies, or new names for rejigged versions of the old ones, have emerged since the arrival of 70mm Todd-AO and anamorphic 35mm CinemaScope. Once seen as novelties, widescreen formats have long been the norm, but though widescreen temporarily forestalled the constant drift of audiences towards television, the heyday of Hollywood blockbusters such as The Robe and Oklahoma! was short-lived. As habitual movie-going continued declining, individual titles became marketed as one-off events. By the 1960s, 3000-5000 seater movie palaces were swiftly becoming the stuff of history. The emergence of the multiplex saw theatres sub-divided into smaller screens, and such lavish large-screen spectacles came primarily to be experienced on television (and later video) in panned-and-scanned, squashed or cropped versions that went against their very essence.

Nowadays, HDTV widescreen TVs, DVD and Blu-Ray mean that we at least get to experience films in the aspect ratio they were intended to be shown in (and with the original soundtrack: for simplicity I’ve avoided mentioning the various sound technologies that also played a major role in the CinemaScope and Todd-AO experience, and the different proprietary screens the films were projected upon). But watching the various titles I’ve mentioned on DVD, it is difficult to get any real sense of how it must have felt to experience these films in situ at the time of their release. Watching a Todd-AO film on my 32” LCD flat screen television in my living room is hardly the same as seeing it on a 52×26 foot curved screen with an audience of 3000.

A cast of thousands in the Sovscope 70 spectacular, War and Peace (1967)

This is the environment into which Avatar has been released, and I think the parallels between James Cameron and Mike Todd Jr. are quite illuminating. Both Avatar and Okalahoma! were independent productions. Okalahoma! was the most expensive film of its era, and Avatar now ranks as the most expensive production of all time. (That said, much of Avatar’s budget went to vital R&D that can be considered an investment for future productions, and its promotional budget alone was $150 million. If we allow for inflation and exchange rates, the Soviet production of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (Voyna i mir, 1967) is often cited as the most expensive film in cinema history, itself filmed using a version of the 70mm Todd-AO format known as Sovscope 70; that said, this 484-minute epic was actually released in four standalone parts over the years, so I’m not sure if it really counts. I ploughed my way through the DVD release of this over the Christmas break, around the same time I saw Avatar, and I have to say, I found it far, far, more impressive and engrossing than Cameron’s film). Both films were developed to showcase a new type of technology, and both, in order to appreciate the full experience, were intended to be viewed in a specific type of venue capable of projecting them in a specific way. In no small part because of this, Okalahoma! was not the commercial success it was hoped for, but Avatar is now apparently the highest-grossing film of all time. Yes, Avatar has been shown in many places in a ‘flat’ 2D version, and has just been released on home-viewing formats that also serve to reduce its sense of spectacle, but if you wanted to see it in optimum conditions, you’d need to catch it at a cinema with 3D IMAX projection.

And this is one of the most important points about Avatar. In 1999, the British Film Institute opened its 477-seat IMAX cinema in Waterloo, boasting a curved screen 20 metres high and 26 metres wide. A further nine such screens were rolled out across the country, but most failed to attract much customer interest. Tickets were bloody expensive, and with no narrative features specifically made for them, the best they had to offer their potential audiences were documentaries about that traded on the spectacle of 3D projection on a large screen – not to dissimilar from Cinerama in the 1950s, then. In a nutshell, no one went. In the space of a couple of months, Avatar pretty much turned the remaining venues’ fortunes around. Tickets at the BFI IMAX in London were booked up for months in advance. It is somewhat ironic that as far as I know, at least two of these venues constructed at vast expense in the UK not even ten years ago are no more – the Bournemouth one is set to be demolished, while the one in Bristol closed a few years ago, although it seems to have reopened in some form. If only Avatar had arrived a little earlier to save them.

BFI Imax, London

Avatar’s success does prove, however, that people were quite willing to pay that little bit extra if the film promises to deliver. Whether IMAX will find new films that justify the higher ticket prices in the future is uncertain, but Avatar is going to remain a historical landmark for this reason alone. It barely matters if one considers it a good film or not. Like both The Robe and Oklahoma!, it was the new format that set tongues wagging and put bums on seats. Venues across the world are now busily equipping themselves with 3D projection equipment and there are plenty of new titles in the pipeline aimed at exploiting it, as both the production and exhibition of subsequent 3D films becomes relatively more cost effective.

I am not sure whether I agree with Cameron’s prediction’s that 3D will become the norm. Like Natural Vision, the glasses are still a real problem. Even if the new system doesn’t tinge everything red and green, they still reduce the amount of light getting into your eyes by 30%, and aside from the number of people who have reported headaches or are just unable to perceive the image stereoscopically, many regular spec-wearers seem to be having trouble keeping both pairs on at once, not something I’ve had a problem with myself, but maybe my nose is bigger. I also don’t agree with Kermode’s curmudgeonly carping that 3D is just a gimmick. Filmmakers are really only now just beginning to explore once more how to exploit the aesthetic potential of the added dimension. Avatar didn’t do it for me, it’s true (there again, neither did The Robe ), but I amm intrigued by Werner Herzog’s plans for a new 3D documentary on 2D primitive cave art.

3D may not be THE future of cinema, but it is A future. I’ve got a lot more to say on this subject, but for now I just want to end with a head’s up on the UK’s first ever stereoscopic short film festival, Short & Sweet 3D , taking place at the Barbican on Friday, 16 July; you can book tickets here and also follow them on Twitter for more regular updates. Don’t just take the word of the evangelists and naysayers for it, go and see for yourself and make your own mind up!

Links to the rest of these articles:
Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

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