Another year grinds torpidly to its bathetic conclusion, and the internet is already bulging at the seams with the traditional seasonal self-indulgence as various critics and aficionados such as myself flag up their top film picks of 2010. Forgive me if you were expecting even more of the same here, but my selection for Sight and Sound’s annual canvas of its contributors, 2010: The year in review, can already be already found online, while the Midnight Eye round-ups should be up for your perusal, fashionably later than most of our fellow movie websites, sometime in January. Meanwhile I’m faced with my usual dilemma of whether to try and tailor my selections according to the specific readership of each, or just cut and paste directly. One thing is sure – there’s no real need to come up with another variation on my selections here.

Before I continue, I’d also like to point out that this is not intended as any sort of end-of-year post. Things have been relatively quiet on this site while I’ve waited for the dust to settle down after Zipangu Fest, but I haven’t forgotten that I’ve plenty more to say on Jake West’s wonderful Video Nasties documentary and the other DVDs of Japanese experimental animation released by CALF.

Step Up 3D - maybe not the "quality" pic of 2010, but hey, it was fun!

Anyway, the primary purpose of this piece was basically to point you towards the Sight and Sound list, but I’d also like to use this opportunity to explain one of the more seemingly eccentric among my own choices, Step Up 3D. I’ll happily concede that this was not a “good” film in the way that Citizen Kane or, to cite a more current example, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (so I’m told), are “good” films. My criteria for mentioning it were twofold. Firstly, while I think 2010 was generally a pretty unexciting year for cinema, the most significant aspect of it was the sheer volume of 3D releases and cumulative their box office share, a phenomenon that, prompted in no small measure by the enormous pop-cultural clout of Avatar, I attempted to track in some detail in a number of posts earlier this year. Look, for example, at the bewilderingly high returns of Resident Evil:Afterlife, or the budget-for-box-office profitability of StreetDance 3D and it is clear this is not something that’s going to go away in 2011. Of the numerous such titles I made it my business to go out and see, I deemed this title the most successful in its innovative use of the format.

I think the Chicago Tribune’s critic Michael Phillips best sums up my feelings when he describes it in his review as “a bit like watching a CinemaScope musical from the early 1950s but front to back rather than side to side, i.e., turned at a 90-degree angle.” Yes, the story had its loopholes, I won’t deny it, as did StreetDance 3D, Piranha 3D and lets face it, Avatar itself. And the characters were unbelievable and wafer thin. But putting all cynicism aside, for me the pure brio of scenes such as the impromptu Fred Astaire homage that came about midway through, whose rendering via a lengthy fluid one-take tracking shot provided a perfect showcase for this newly possible exploitation of screen depth, were as rousing and magical as, say, the opening reel of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sadly, you’ll have to take my word for this if you want to catch up on the film “flat” at home, but for me it nevertheless provided a perfect antidote not only to the migraine-inducing edits of Cameron’s film, but also the soporific “contemplative” static long-shots so beloved of practitioners of a certain strain of international arthouse cinema that became referred to as “slow cinema” following Nick James’ provocative “Passive Aggressive” editorial in the April edition of Sight and Sound that appeared to call time on this tradition, some of which is excepted here. I don’t agree with everything James says, and it’s clear he doesn’t either, but at the same time, one has to admit he has a point…

The rekindled vogue for 3D has managed to avoid much in the way of serious analysis by magazines such as Sight and Sound, no doubt due to its exploitation primarily by certain forms of quite brazenly entertainment-oriented productions thus far, allowing the misapprehension to set in that it is only suitable for such films. Twaddle, I say! Imagine how a Mizoguchi film might look if he’d been able to go down this route. Lets see how our more inventive auteurs like Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders (Go! Go! Gaspar Noe!) make use of the added dimensions before we pronounce the technology’s latest incarnations dead in its infancy.

StreetDance 3D - a pretty good use of screen space.

My candid acknowledgement of the pleasures inherent in the cheesier end of the cinematic spectrum was at least shared by one other contributor to the S&S poll, Hannah Patterson, who cited “sloping off alone to watch StreetDance 3D in a morning screening (dance movies, a guilty pleasure) and finding three others in the audience – all teenage boys – who proceeded to dance in the aisle throughout” as one of the movie-going highlights of her year. This somewhat echoes my experiences too, watching both StreetDance 3D and Step Up 3D during afternoon screenings at the Peckham Multiplex, sitting among exactly the same type of teenage audiences the films were aimed at, all responded viscerally to the physicality expressed onscreen. For someone whose movie-watching is largely confined to sitting in austere press screening rooms among other jaded note-scribbling critics or wading through copious screeners hunting out increasingly more elusive gems for to show at festivals, it was a refreshing experience, and rekindled those sparks of adolescent passion that had led me down my particular route of cinephilia in the first place.

The fact is cinema may well be viewed as an art form, or it may equally be viewed in terms of escapist fantasy, but whichever way you look at it, it is first and foremost an industry. What has began to trouble me over the past few years is the relative dearth of a younger generation of viewers inhabiting the same venues or festivals as I do, ready to take up the pen or the camera and keep this whole thing going into the future. I remember the first thing I did when I moved to London in 1989 at the age of 18 was to make a beeline straight to the Scala in Kings Cross, where I began educating myself with double bills of directors as diverse as Pasolini and Russ Meyer, or heading out in big groups when I was a student to the local arthouse cinema in Brighton to watch films as impenetrably erudite as Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Without getting too nostalgic about this, I’m wondering if this kind of audience is still there. Many of the venues for this kind of cinema aren’t any more. There might not have been any younger versions of myself at the screening of Step Up 3D either, but there were still people there at least, all having fun to boot.

They don't make them like this anymore... Prospero's Books

I guess I’m somewhat hampered by my London-centric viewpoint in all this. Cinema tickets in our capital are prohibitively expensive, and prices are only going to get a lot worse in the coming year with the Tory VAT rises. I can’t afford to go to the West End cinemas myself, which is why you’re more likely to find me in the Peckham Multiplex, where normal people can afford to treat cinema as a more habitual form of entertainment rather than need to save up for weeks to turn a trip to the Odeon Leicester Square into some sort of big night out. The number of films mentioned in the Sight and Sound poll provide ample proof that there’s a huge amount of titles worthy of further investigation, and I’d love to go and see them all, on a big screen, with a full audience, but I don’t know if most of them will play anywhere near me at a price I can afford. So for now I’m happy enough that films such as Step Up 3D and StreetDance 3D are out there getting people into cinemas and putting smiles on faces, fighting their respective corners amongst the numerous other avenues of entertainment that have arisen during the first decade of the twenty-first century that conspire to make film appreciation an atomised solitary experience rather than a communal one.

Talking of which, my opinions have also been solicited for another poll by Sight and Sound that will be appearing in the New Year – the top online videos of 2010. It’s an interesting indication perhaps of the role critics and curators are likely to play in the future. Rather than direct people to go and watch films that probably won’t be playing anywhere near them by the time they’ve heard about them, it is more like being the online visual equivalent of a DJ, or like curating ones own personal mini-film programme for people to enjoy in the privacy of their own homes; films that take as much of their meaning from the context in which they’re presented, the other titles they play alongside and the explanatory text that accompanies them.

Thanks to Adam Curtis for inviting me to The Office Party via his brilliantly pithy blog

So on that note I’d like to sign off with a link to Adam Curtis: The Medium and the Message on the BBC website (apologies to those readers outside of the UK who can’t access the films here). Documentary-maker Curtis’ various postings provide a masterclass in the savvy disinterment and dissection of long-forgotten news and documentary footage from the dim-yet-not-so-distant past in order to contextualise the present. Here’s one that particularly tickled my fanc as our new government strive to make this Christmas a particularly miserable one for students, public servants and much of the population at large alike - The Office Party from 1969. Not only a wonderful piece of social history, but just a damn amusing way to pass 30 minutes. Ho ho ho!

Posted at 12:26 on 14 December 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• 3D
• Adam Curtis
• Avatar
• Best Of Lists
• Sight and Sound
• Step Up
• StreetDance
• The Office Party

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As you’ll have no doubt have gathered from this series of articles, unlike Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode, I am fascinated by the new wave of 3D releases, both in terms of aesthetics and industry trends, and so last weekend I indulged this fascination by going to see StreetDance 3D at the Peckham Multiplex and Toy Story 3D at the Empire Leicester Square, two very different films, both of which throw up very different issues. Judging by the parade of trailers before the screenings, it seems that Kermode is mistaken on the count that “3D has never been the future of cinema. It is, was, and always will be the past.” All of the animations previewed for release later this year are to be released in both 2D and 3D versions, so clearly there’s been enough invested in promoting this new format for exhibitors to pull out at this late stage in the game. In fact, Toy Story 3D’s Summer rival, Shrek Forever After, was premiering in the cinema next door at exactly the same time. Unlike the earlier boom in the 1950s or the 1980s revival, which in reality only ever amounted to a handful of titles like Jaws 3-D (1983) and Amityville 3-D (1983), there’s already a sizeable canon of films to analyse and, from the evidence of the two under discussion here, one can already detect signs of stylistic innovation.

I’m a little more sympathetic to Ebert’s claim that it is just a way for the industry to charge more for admissions. The Peckham Multiplex not only put a £1.50 surcharge on the ticket, they also forced me to buy the glasses, which cost another quid, although this at least means I can keep them for future presentations at this venue (Space Chimps 3D? Well, maybe one has to draw the line somewhere…) As an aside, the glasses provided to view the system used to project StreetDance 3D, RealD, appear to be incompatible with Toy Story’s Disney Digital 3-D system, so already we seem to be in a war of formats, although I assume that the projectors being rolled out across the world can handle both systems, and any differences between these formats are at the production level. There’s some info about this on Wikipedia, with RealD described as “the world’s most widely used technology for watching 3D movies in theatres and the cheapest to install and maintain,” while Disney Digital 3-D is actually a brand, “not a presentation nor a production format or technology. Films advertised as Disney Digital 3-D come from a number of sources, film, digital camera as well as animation software, and can be presented using any digital 3D technology.” I wonder what the projection technology actually was for Toy Story was then, seeing as my RealD glasses didn’t work for it?

Pixar's latest animated masterpiece, Toy Story 3D

The trouble most critics are likely to have with explaining the appeal of 3D is that it is often difficult to describe the aesthetic aspects of cinema in basic words. It is something one feels at a deeper level than words can often do justice to. It is also difficult to illustrate the formal aspects of 3D on a 2-dimensional screen, such as the one you’re looking at this article on now, and besides, publicity stills don’t always accurately represent the scenes as they appear in the actual film, nor can they convey movement. My ideas are therefore based largely on my impressions while watching the film.

There’s a further trade-off to these new productions that the widescreen formats never had to deal with – while CinemaScope titles eventually found themselves on television within the first decade of this new anamorphic projection system, reframed and re-cut to fit 4:3 screens, they were made to be shown in cinemas. As soon as widescreen became a standard but it was acknowledged that a great deal of viewers would watch the film on television, directors came up with strategies to limit this damage, by centrally positioning the characters in the frame, for example, so that it didn’t matter if the edges fell outside of the TV screen – many even oversaw the TV edits of their films. Now that widescreen TVs are the norm, reframing for domestic viewing is no longer an issue.

Comparing the switchover from standard to widescreen ratios with the adoption of full colour is also interesting. Colour was, perhaps to a lesser extent than 3D, also associated with added spectacle, arguably a needless luxury as far as most viewers were concerned, judging by the several decades it took to become a production standard, and not something that necessarily contributed to any sense of “realism”. Look back to the early Technicolor productions and you’ll see it was originally associated with non-realistic, fantasy genres such as animation, or musicals, while serious dramas such as On the Waterfront (1954) remained in monochrome. I think the contrast between the colour and monochrome sequences in The Wizard of Oz (1939) perfectly illustrates this point (made, not by me, but by Ed Buscombe in the essay “Sound and Colour.” in Movies and Methods vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, 1985).

A scene from Wizard of Oz demonstrating that colour most certainly was not equated to realism in its early applications.

It was several decades before colour became the norm for filmmakers, due to the cost of the film stock. If you remember that the BBC only began colour broadcasting in 1967, any films shown on UK TV would have been viewed in black and white anyway. It was after this point that the number of films actually produced in monochrome started to decline, with black and white films coming to be seen as old fashioned. Interestingly, the UK’s first colour TV broadcasts were matches in the Wimbledon tennis tournament (see more here), while the UK’s first 3D broadcast, on February 6 of this year, was also sport, the England Vs Wales rugby match, although it was mainly seen this way by viewers attending participating cinemas (see here). Still, with 3D ready flat-screen TVs now a reality, who knows how long it will be before such broadcasts become the norm? And what will this mean for cinema?

Twickenham Stadium, as seen by viewers at 40 Odeon and Cineworld cinemas on February 6, 2010

Still, at the moment, it is assumed that the majority of viewers for the latest wave of 3D titles such as those by Disney/Pixar will be watching the film at home, not projected in 3D. Here’s the compromise: films must be made that use the format in a way that persuades viewers it is worth paying that bit extra, and yet take care that their impact is not diminished on the flat screen.

This compromise is much in evidence in StreetDance 3D. Thinking about it a little more, this film is the first actual live-action film produced in 3D that I’ve caught in the cinema, distinguishing it from the other titles I’ve written about, which are either animations such as Coraline or Up, films which make heavy use of CG such as Avatar, or films which were rendered as 3D in post-production such as Clash of the Titans or Alice in Wonderland. For those who’ve not heard anything about it yet, it’s a pretty fascinating title, a British film realised on a relatively modest budget of £4.5m that took more at the UK box office than Ridley Scott’s new Robin Hood film (budget $200m+) and Prince of Persia ($150m) in the first week of its release on 21 May. It’ll no doubt do pretty good business internationally too, for a film of this scale. It’s already been sold to almost 30 countries. You can read more about this surprise box office success on the websites of The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times, or indeed the film’s own website.

Britain's Got Talent's Diversity, one of the many charms of StreetDance 3D

You won’t hear serious film critics talking much about the film though. It’s thoroughly lowbrow entertainment aimed at a teenage demographic, one of its hooks being the performances of Diversity, the East London street dance group that famously beat Susan Boyle to win last year’s season of the ITV competition Britain’s Got Talent. The plot isn’t much to write home about either: a young South London girl working at a sandwich bar leads her dance posse to success after drafting the failing students of a snooty ballet school, under the encouragement of their teacher, Charlotte Rampling (the only real name actor in the film). It’s an exuberant wish-fulfillment fantasy in the vein of the TV series Glee or Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, a title from 1983 that wasn’t made in 3D. Lets face it, it’s really not aimed at people like me, but you may be surprised to hear it, I enjoyed its naive razzle-dazzle far more than I did Avatar.

Here  is a film that uses 3D in a totally different way from what we have been led to expect by previous releases. There are precious few moments of objects coming out of the screen at you, although a hat is flung out into our faces at the end of one early dance number, and there’s a riotous food fight in the ballet school’s cafeteria which I thought looked pretty good. What really impresses is the use of depth, the sense of a lived in space beyond the plane of the screen; the framing of shots along the ballet school corridor that stretches into the distance, the vistas of London bathed in a cosy sunset glow that evoke a city far different from the one of my daily experience. And then there are the dance scenes themselves, whether they take place in shopping malls, nightclubs or the ballet academy’s class room. These look best in static wide angle shots, which create a depth of field in which all of the dancers remain in focus. There’s no need to break down these scenes of action into bewildering flurries of MTV-style edits, although this has been the norm for these types of sequences since the 1980s, an aesthetic cultivated by the rise of the pop promo, and an aesthetic which the film struggles to resist. Can we imagine this sort of style applied to old-school martial arts films such as the finest work of Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, where the real-life gymnastic depicted on the screen are what causes viewers to sit up and gasp, rather than the fake CG-enhanced Matrix-styled sequences we’ve all become so inured to?

An impressive use of the screen depth in StreetDance 3D - the image remains in focus at all depths of field

This is where the compromise come in, though, because as successful as it has been upon its theatrical release, a larger part of the film’s revenues are sure to come from DVD sales for people viewing it flat. The sensation of dancing bodies arranged and moving through a palpable volumetric space is not only sure to be lost on TV, it will also look decidedly unspectacular in comparison to films such as Flashdance, that ‘cheat’ by cutting up and reassembling the breathtaking real-life action of the performance in an attempt to create something more spectacular. Projected on 3D in the cinema, these straight filmed performances are impressive enough, they don’t need editing to make them look any more dynamic (and again, one is reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s statement about cinema, that “Every edit is a lie”). We also have the luxury of allowing our eyes to roam around the various moving figures on the screen, be they in the background or the foreground. We don’t get this on the small screen.

Shots like this have a real sense of indepth dynamism to them, but how will they look on TV?

Filmmakers working in 3D need to be mindful about such intrinsic aesthetic considerations though. For one thing, dazzling montages of short cuts can really give you a headache. Stereoscopic images might trick the brain into believing we’re looking through a window into the distance, but our eyes are still focussed on a flat screen a fixed distance away from our noses. Static shots allow us to take in the details across the whole scene. Moving shots give our eyes time to adjust to the illusion that we’re part of the scene. Rapid edits between shots of different focal lengths jar and confuse, which is why so many people claimed that Avatar hurt their eyes. They’re probably not lying.

This seems to present another interesting aspect of 3D. If you look closely at some of these screen shots, you’ll notice that they are composed in accordance with 2D film aesthetics. If the camera is focused closely on a foreground object or character, then the background is thrown out of focus. The use of narrow angle lenses strive for this very effect. Take a look at this shot of Carly in the foreground. It is clearly composed to draw the eye to the details of Carly’s face, and yet if this were reality, the viewer would also be able to change their focus onto the dancers behind her, which here remain a blur. Our sense of reality is shattered, as we are made aware of the constraints of the camera lens. Here, the use of focus serves the same effect as an edit. We are forced to concentrate on one specific detail, rather than look around the scene looking for other salient features that may, or may not, be a part of the narrative.

Nichola Burley as Carly, very much the centre of attention in this shot.

Compare this with the shot below. The ballet dancers are arranged in a straight line perpendicular to the camera, with each figure afforded equal prominence by the focal length of the lens. They are clearly the subject of our gaze. However, rather than depict an out-of-focus background space behind them, the painted backdrop prevents our eyes from looking past them. Some viewers might wonder what lies beyond the screen obstructing their view. Most, in reality, probably won’t, but at least they have the freedom to do so, rather than being made aware of the role of the camera in framing what they can or can’t see. They won’t feel like their missing something taking place in a background blur.

The dancers remain the foreground interest without the distraction of an out-of-focus backround

In my previous posting, I talked a little about staging in depth (profondeur du champ), which David Bordwell goes into inconsiderable detail in his book On the History of Film Style (1998). 3D is clearly ideally suited to this type of scenic composition. It encourages our brains to compose our own narratives from the details we can see on the screen, in the foreground and the background, and across the multitudes of depth planes in between. A long static shot of characters moving along the Z-axis, into or out of the screen, for example, down a corridor (inventively lit so that certain details are hidden by real-life phenomena such as shadows, we might imagine), along a road, or as in this case within the space of a stage, also seems a good use of 3D, as relative size is also a depth cue that works in tandem with stereoscopic vision, to heighten the sense of realism.

As well as causing huge headaches for 3D film viewers, rapid editing shifts the balance of power to the director and editor. Controlled focuses within narrow depths of field might not cause headaches, but they similarly highlight the viewer’s passive role in the film. From this I draw my conclusions that using long depths of field is the best use of the 3D screen. (There was another thing I noticed though: when the film cuts from mid shots or close-ups to the extremely wide shots of the dance group onscreen, it gave the odd effect of the figures appearing to shrink in size to Lilliputian dimensions.)

Camera lenses have certain physical constraints, particularly in different lighting conditions, so that if focusing on something particularly close in the foreground, the background will be out of focus. I don’t know as much as I’d like to on the issue of to what extent modern 3D camera equipment is limited by these real-world practicalities, but the field of CG animation most certainly isn’t. It should permit every depth plane of the image to be in as sharp a focus as the next. Toy Story 3D uses the 3D format in a way that is effective and yet doesn’t draw attention to itself. And yet if we look at this scene here, we can see Andy in sharp focus, holding Woody and Buzz Lightyear (slightly out of focus) and the background of his bedroom (out of focus). The virtual camera is emulating the focal depth of a real-life camera.

An example of CG animation emulating the effect of the camera. Note intentional emulation of a narrow depth of field that throws the background out of focus

One of the things I’ve often mentioned as strange about CG animation is that in its attempts to be realistic, it emulates camera-lens realism, introducing such details as lens flares and camera judders in action sequences. But the thing is, it doesn’t have to replicate the same sense of depth of field. This is an stylistic choice. This scene (perhaps not the best example, but the best I could find on the web, and again, I make the point that publicity stills might not accurately reflect how the scene looks in the film) could have been rendered so that everything would be in perfect focus. I don’t intend this as a criticism of the film (which, like all of Pixar’s releases, raises the bar for CG animation even further). For all I know, it might look really strange if everything was in totally sharp focus, perhaps because viewers are habituated to a lens-based reality in cinema.

Pixar's inventive 3D short animation Day&Night

This is just a point to ponder, and it applies to live-action too. If the backgrounds of StreetDance 3D were in completely sharp focus in the close-up scenes of the characters, would this look really bizarre too? I’ve no answer to this, but aside from my observations that I found the wide-angle shots the most impressive, the point I am making is that 3D makes possible a radically different onscreen reality than that which we have become accustomed to in cinema. That animators are already beginning to explore its potentials is evidenced by the short animation Day & Night that accompanies Toy Story 3D, which I found fascinating. I can’t sum up its experimental approach of juxtaposing 2D and 3D any more succinctly than its Wikipedia entry, which describes its approach thus: “The insides of the characters are computer animated, the use of a masking technique allows the 2D characters to be windows into a 3D CGI day or night world inside them.”

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 4: 3D or not 3D?

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

Posted at 18:42 on 22 June 2010 Filed under news.

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• cinematism
• David Bordwell
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• Diversity
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Bwana Devil promised “a lion in your lap”. Friday the 13^th 3D and the sundry other horror films that followed its model thrust various sharp implements towards your eyeballs. Perfect Eduction 6: Maid For You, as I reported here, presses a tit in your face. All of these films are essentially exploitation films that use 3D as a gimmick, something extra to distract from their otherwise basic formulas.

Comin at ya! Friday 13th 3D (1982)

On Monday I went to see Up again as part of the Barbican’s Animate the World Festival, with specs and on a big screen, as it was intended, and it really struck me what a different kettle of fish this film is from the bulk of 3D offerings that the format’s detractors wheel out to predict that the party’s over before it’s even begun. I seem to recall at the time of its original release a number of critics saying that the story could just have easily have been presented “flat”. This seems an odd thing to say, rather like suggesting that The Robe would have been fine in Academy Ratio, Star Wars would have worked just as well in monochrome or Shrek could have been made as live action. For a start, these films were made primarily with a theatrical audience in mind, even if most people are more likely to experience them on the small screen, which now provides the largest share of the film industry’s revenues. Narrative content and presentational style are two separate aspects of a film, so to point to the limitations of one to criticise the other is a red herring.

But in any case, Up presents a rare case where these two facets work in tandem. Like Toy Story, it boasts a perfectly-crafted script (I’m talking in terms of structure rather than content), that draws attention to the tricks it is playing with the new medium it is showcasing (CG in the case of Toy Story). To say it would work just as well in 2D baffles me. Take for example the scenes set inside the otherwise claustrophobic confines of Mr Fredricksen’s house, in which the landscape through which it is floating can be spied through the windows and doors, giving a dynamism and richness of detail that wouldn’t be present in its flat presentation, or the use of fog and cloud effects as objects and characters emerge from the distance. I won’t argue the case for this particular film much further, but let’s just say it worked for me.

Pixar's masterful Up.

Lets look at the other good example from last year, Coraline. David Bordwell makes some fascinating observations about this film’s style in this posting from his website, in particular the skewing of perspectives and manipulation of depth cues in several of the scenes in the alternate worlds that its main character explores. This toying with the volumetric dimensions represented on the screen is not something that a critic might find easy to put into words, but it does have a tangible effect on mood and atmosphere.

A subtly skewed scene from Coraline

With the huge glut of films coming out in 3D this year, it’s been difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff. To the list of titles I mentioned in my opening paragraph that adopt 3D as a gimmick, we might add the following that make use of the revived format (albeit using new technology): Scar (2007), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2008) and The Final Destination (2009), all genre films whose appeal is mainly visceral. Then there are concert films such as Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert (2008) that attempt to replicate the excitement of being there, but let’s face it, if you’re not into the music, you probably wouldn’t want to be there anyway. The two main titles exploiting 3D that have aired so far this year in the UK, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, were not filmed using the process, they were converted in post-production: in other words, they were not conceived with this technology in mind, so did not use it to its best advantage. Yes, it’s easy to dismiss 3D if you’re only looking at titles such as these, none of which were particularly groundbreaking on a narrative level and most of which just weren’t satisfactory entertainment full stop. (As an interesting aide, I just heard that the recently released StreetDance 3D is currently out-performing Robin Hood and Prince of Persia at the UK box office.)

It is also important to remember the obvious, that the most successful 3D films of last year were CG animations: Up, Monsters vs. Aliens and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . These are presumably easier to produce in 3D, as they are created using 3D models on the computer, so the flat versions are only rendered as 2D projections of the same created objects. And lest we forget it, Avatar itself was essentially a CG animation with integrated live-action footage.

The first cinematic "rollercoaster", courtesy of Cinerama

With regards to the aesthetics of 3D, I want to return to my previous discussion of the widescreen formats that emerged in the 1950s. The showcase “documentaries” with which Cinerama and Todd-AO were released, This is Cinerama (1952) and The Thrill of Todd-AO (1955), both featured lengthy sequences filmed with the camera positioned on a rollercoaster, promising you the thrill of being there in the front seat; this came at a time when theme parks were popping up across America, with the film industry getting directly involved when the Walt Disney Company opened Disneyland in 1955. In such films, audiences could experience all the thrills of Coney Island without having to go there. Cinema’s decline as a quotidian form of entertainment throughout the decades saw releases of a smaller number of higher-budgeted films, instead marketed under the rubric of “events”, “blockbusters” or, tellingly, “rollercoaster movies”. The showcasing of new exhibition technologies in this fashion didn’t end in the 1950s. I vividly remember my first trip to an IMAX cinema in Paris in 1993, where I swayed giddily in my seat during a screening of Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets (the film was actually made in 1984), thrust into the spectatorial position of a passenger in an ultralight aircraft soaring over vast crevices. It felt like I was witnessing cinema for the very first time.

An IMAX presentation of Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets (1984)

Doesn’t this all sound remarkably familiar? Didn’t Avatar aim for exactly this effect in its climactic battle scenes? Doesn’t Up itself, and countless other titles, boasts its share of sequences that exploit this form of cinematic dynamism, the sensation of plunging ever forward into the unknown or providing the viewer with a front-of-the-seat that perspective that would be impossible to replicate in reality?

Cinerama, Todd-AO and IMAX are as much characterised by the size of their screens as their dimensions, so that the images projected upon them occupy the whole visual field, with the edge of the frame, the proscenium and all other features external to the film itself falling outside this range. In his book Widescreen Cinema, John Belton argues that this changed the very nature of the viewing experience: “In positioning the spectator at the center of a semicircular arc that filled the field of vision, widescreen processes both centered and decentered the spectator. The spectator was physically centered in the theater, but his or her attention was dispersed across a wider area; the horizontal field of view of Cinemarama (at 146 degrees) was so extensive that the spectator did not know where to concentrate attention… These extreme widescreen processes encouraged the spectator constantly to redirect his or her interest across a panoramic field of view.” In other words, cinema changed in the 1950s to a more active, rather than passive, form of entertainment.

The curved screen of Cinerama covering the entire visual field

In Avatar, we can see this in the opening scenes on Pandora, as our eyes dart around the screen in what are known as saccadic movements to take in every detail of this rich alien environment. This form of presentation largely informed the style of CinemaScope films such as The Robe, in which our eyes scan the scene, fixing on individual details and piecing them together in our minds. Taking this theoretical route to its extremes, we could argue that each individual viewer might have experienced a different film by fixing on the myriad of different details within the frame, and that the film would not have been the same exact experience upon repeated viewings.

This form of active perceptual participation came earlier than widescreen, as David Bordwell points out in his On the History of Film Style (1998), with the introduction of deep focus techniques such as those pioneered by the cinematographer Gregg Toland most famously in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1942), allowing staging within a standard ratio using the full depth of the scene, what French critics such as André Bazin labelled profondeur du champ. If we look at the evolution of films style, whereas the silent films championed as art in the 1920s used montage to construct a scene through individual shots, and the classical early sound cinema of Hollywood in the 1930s used découpage to break down a scene and reassemble it (like your typical television drama), profondeur du champ kept editing to a minimum. All of the relevant details of a scene could be combined in a single frame, in the foreground, middle-ground and background, there for the viewer to seek out rather than have his or her eye guided by the edit (Incidentally, Bordwell expands upon this in this other piece on his website.) 3D heightens this effect, and there are numerous moments in Up and Coraline in which action and incidental details are juxtaposed in the foreground and background for comic or dramatic effect.

Action and detail in three different planes, in a scene from Citizen Kane

This active form of viewing approximates live theatre, where the audience’s concentration is not channelled into one area by a limited frame, and it is worth pointing out that the worthy nature of a lot of CinemaScope titles, often historical or religious epics, optimised this sense of spectacle to bring cinema closer to “legitimate theatre”. The wide, lateral strip of the CinemaScope format was also perfectly suited for the depiction of spectacular panoramic landscapes, a salient feature of the American Westerns produced in this era. Fixed scenes are a characteristic of CinemaScope, whereas Motion in Depth, as opposed to profondeur du champ’s staging in depth, is something of a rarity, unlike Cinerama or IMAX productions.
It is where Motion in Depth is introduced that we experience another, more primal, mode of viewing, closer to the “rollercoaster” than “legitimate theatre”, arguably more passive than active, as we place our experience wholly in the hands of the director in the same way as we did when the editor reigned when montage and découpage were considered the height of cinematic art (cf. Jean-Luc Godard: “Every edit is a lie”). This is essentially the issue I had with Avatar, as I discussed in my first musings on the subject of 3D back in December. In its latter stages, we are not encouraged to participate in exploring the onscreen world as we are in Coraline or Up. We are forced to sit back and marvel at the technological wizardry of James Cameron – and following on from Godard’s maxim, I couldn’t but help notice that Avatar’s action scenes, like those of Michael Bay or Roland Emerich, featured one hell of a lot of edits!

Anyway, these were just random thoughts I had at the time, encouraged by some of the ideas in Thomas Lamarre’s recently published Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation and put forth perhaps a little vaguely, mainly as a discussion point, as something to think about a little more: the idea that such hyper-kinetic Motion in Depth scenes equate with realism, whereas in reality it is a form of realism I refer to as cinerealism, one which is only possible in cinema as opposed to an everyday reality. I argued that technological advances don’t make films more realistic, they make them more cinerealistic.

Publicity image from the Avatar video game – note the blurring at the periphery

Rather than pursue the political or theoretical ramifications of this here, I want to end with another fruitful path of looking at the possible appeal of such dynamic action sequences as those contained at the end of Avatar. First of all, I acknowledge that the categorising of viewing modes into “active” and “passive” as problematic. What I am referring to here is the viewing experience, the visual processes involved in processing static scenes and dynamic motion-in-depth sequences, regardless of narrative content. If I define active viewing as scanning the details of a static tableau as if looking at a painting or theatre stage, and passive as fixing the central origin that the camera is moving towards on the retina, with the rest of the image whizzing past in the peripheral vision as if the viewer were hurtling forward on the front of a rollercoaster, it is not to apply a value-judgement that one is intellectually superior to the other, just that the visual processes are very different. Finding fault with the narrative of Avatar is something that comes about through higher-level thought processes than those that take place in the visual cortex, the same processes that we engage to piece together the meanings of arthouse films by directors such as Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr and Hou Hsiao Hsien. In fact, there’s been a bit of a hub-hub following Nick James’ piece in Sight and Sound earlier this year, which claimed that such examples of “slow cinema” were easier for film critics to champion as “challenging” or “artistic” because they necessitated a different manner of viewing and their content was slight – see here. There has to be a more fundamental reason why general audiences prefer the thrill of Avatar or Michael Bay while they are bored by the static tableau of “slow cinema”.

Shinji Aoyama's Eureka (2000) – Japanese-style widescreen "Slow Cinema"

Psychology tells us that motion, depth, form, and colour are all handled separately within different areas of the visual cortex and integrated at a higher level to give the experience of seeing. I’m simplifying things a little here, but if you don’t believe, take a look here, here and here. We know this from studying different animals, that most mammals do not have the capacity for colour vision, and that a frog’s visual system is primarily geared towards detecting motion – surround it with dead, immobile flies and it will starve to death. So on the basic level of pure aesthetics, a different part of the brain is stimulated by form (the details the eye scans across in active modes of viewing) than by movement or colour (a subject I want to address in a future posting, but it is often viewed as a “biological luxury” and is not essential for humans to function in the world, just liven it up a bit).

The oft-reported tunnel hallucination

Motion in depth stimulates different parts of the brain. The information that is fed into pour visual cortexes comes from the optic flow of our peripheral visual, more than our foveal vision (the fovea being the area of the retina where visual acuity and colour perception is highest). The fovea, used during the scanning of an image to discern its form, is densely packed with photoreceptors known as cones. In the peripheral image, there a different form of photoreceptor predominates, rods, which as you can see by this article here [the rods are better motion sensor] are “responsible for our dark-adapted, or scotopic, vision…the rods are better motion sensor”. At low levels of light, it is difficult to detect colours such as red and discern visual details, but you’ll notice something whizzing past your head pretty sharpish!

So it is this part of the brain that thrills to Avatar’s virtuoso dragon battles and This is Cinerama’s rollercoaster rides, and clearly we love it, as sensations of movement are a widely reported part of any psychedelic experience. A good number of writers, including Paul Devereux in The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia , have hypothesised that the notion of witches riding on broomsticks derived from their use of natural hallucinogens, activating the part of the brain that perceives movement without the external stimulation provided via the optic nerves. A key part of shamanic rituals is that they often take place in conditions of sensory deprivation, in low-lighting conditions, at night or underground. David Lewis-Williams sees the very origins of art in the trance-like states attained in shamanic rituals in his book The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art , a brilliant study of Paleolithic cave art and the biological mechanisms that may have invoked it. Ideas of “vision quests” and psychedelic “trips” derive from these artificially invoked sensations of motions. I refer you also to this fascinating article on the geometric basis of tunnel hallucinations here.

This is why I am so eager to see the results of Werner Herzog’s recently announced 3D documentary on primitive cave art. As one of the world’s most insightful filmmakers, I am sure he’s going to lead us through all manner of exciting visual possibilities in his study of mankind’s most basic reproductions of his environment using today’s cutting edge technology.

Prehistoric spectacle. Panoramic cave art in Chauvet, with the rock surface used to provide an illusion of depth

I should point out that I’m not entirely sure what conclusions I am stumbling towards with these perhaps rambling posts, just that there might be other ways of looking at cinema, animation and 3D in particular, in which form, format, technology and content are all inextricably linked. I intend to look more closely next time at the issue of colour in film, in relation to James Cameron’s suggestion that 3D would become the standard format in a couple of years, “definitely less than the 25 years it took colour movies.”

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 4: 3D or not 3D?

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

Posted at 14:33 on 27 May 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• 3D
• Avatar
• CinemaScope
• Cinerama
• Coraline
• David Bordwell
• hallucinations
• IMAX
• James Cameron
• John Belton
• Todd-AO
• Up
• widescreen

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