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!

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?

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

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

Avatar in 4D

You know, I hate to keep harping on about Avatar, but it seems you just can’t get away from the film at the moment. I managed to catch some of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony on the morning of Monday 8th while I was still in Tokyo, and was somewhat relieved that it didn’t pick up as many plaudits as first anticipated. The Hurt Locker, after all, was in most respects a far superior work, even if it didn’t make as much money.

Still, though I guess I’ve made my feelings pretty clear about the film itself by now, there’s other interesting aspects to the Avatar phenomenon. While in Yubari, I heard from some of the Korean guests that Cameron’s film had just been released in Seoul in 4D (more here). What, another dimension, I hear you ask? But which one? Have they perhaps added ‘time’ to the equation, so that the 162 minutes doesn’t seem to stretch for an eternity? Or maybe some actual depth has been added to the characterisation? No, actually these special screenings at selected venues have instead opted for juddering moving seats, wind and water effects and synthetic smells. This is all very interesting, this attempt to draw viewers into cinemas for the type of all-round sensory experience that you could never hope for at home, although personally I have my doubts as to whether Pandora and its population of noble savages could ever smell quite as good as they look.

I’m not sure if the moving seats will ever be more than a novelty either. I remember a couple of years back at Puchon Festival there was a guy attempting to corral all the foreign journalists into having a go on a prototype of this new gimmick. I was subjected to about five minutes of being vibrated along to some suitably brash Hollywood action movie – I’m not sure if it was Con Air or Black Hawk Down, but it was something of this ilk- and the impression I was left with was that unless the film was specifically made with such technology in mind, it didn’t really add much to the viewing experience, and was actually more of a distraction. I felt a little queasy afterwards.

Putting the cynical old curmudgeon in me aside for one moment, I should say that if this kind of cinema floats your boat, Avatar seems tailor-made for such auxiliaries in that it is ultimately about creating an all-immersive viewing experience. As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, it trades in what we might call cinematism rather than realism. The viewer is pitched headlong through Cameron’s world at a dizzying velocity to create an exaggerated hyper-reality of the type that we could never experience in real life, with an emphasis on dynamic movement throughout all three dimensions.

Another Avatar pic

I’ve always preferred my viewing experiences to be of a more contemplative nature myself, but still, different horses for different courses; one can’t deny that Avatar is lighting up the exhibition sector in a way that hasn’t happened for quite some time. If only because of this, it is of great historical significance. In any measure, it’s pretty clear that the 3D boom isn’t going to go away anytime soon, so I was intrigued to hear of a recent Japanese film that attempts to get in on the act, the second release I’ve heard of from the country after Takashi Shimizu’s Shock Labyrinth 3D (Senritsu meikyû 3D), soon to be unveiled in the UK.

J-horror in 3d: Takashi Shimizu's Shock Labyrinth

I’m actually pretty bloody amazed no one else has been talking about it either, as it seems pretty much tailor-made for the overseas midnight movie circuit. The film in question is the latest instalment in the Perfect Education (Kanzen naru shiiku) series that began some ten years or so back (I reviewed the first entry for Midnight Eye back in the early days), although which largely seems to have slipped beneath the radar of most foreign observers, for perhaps fairly obvious reasons. Despite the first being scripted by living legend Kaneto Shindo, the Perfect Education films are to the world of Japanese softcore what Friday 13^th is to the horror genre. Still, their largely formulaic narratives revolving around solitary men capturing comely young beauties and ‘grooming’ them until they fall in love with them seems to have attracted some interesting directors in the past, including Bashing helmer Masahiro Kobayashi (Perfect Education 5: Amazing Story), and Koji Wakamatsu (Perfect Education 6 : Red Murder). Neither of these filmmakers are strangers to the world of erotic cinema – you’ll find plenty of references to them in my Behind the Pink Curtain. The latest offering, however, is the work of Kenta Fukasaku, best known as the son of Kinji, who took over the reins of his father when the latter died during the early stages of shooting Battle Royale II.

Kenta Fukasaku's Perfect Education: Maid For You

Perfect Education: Maid For You already has a pretty irresistible hook in that its victim is a worker in an Akihabara maid cafe. Not content with this, the producers have gone that one step further by utilising 3D in a similar manner to how pink films from the 1960s livened up their saucier sequences by bursting into colour. Unlike Avatar, Maid For You’s application of the third dimension clearly prioritises volume and form over movement, and it’s somewhat comical to picture the viewers donning their polarised specs and extending their hands while grope towards the shapely torso of the main actress and Gravure model Ayano every time she disrobes.

Maid For You

I should add that I’ve not seen the film as yet. It ended its brief single-theatre run only a month before I got to Tokyo, so I can’t really vouch for how the 3D scenes worked out, but my curiosity has been piqued. What is interesting is why a title like this, part of a series that is ultimately targeted at the home-viewing market, should adopt such a cinema-specific approach. How many times will it ever be seen in this way? Although, of course, 3D HDTV’s are already there on the market, so perhaps its films such as these that are going to provide one of the impetuses for upgrading to the new equipment.

Britain's first 3d feature, Pete Walker's Four Dimensions of Greta (1972)

Maid For You is certainly not the first sex film to make use of 3D. I recently heard something about a pink film released by Shintoho in the 1980s (ok, so I missed this one in the book!), although I’m not sure what its title was. In America, Al Silliman Jr. gave us the Stereovision spectacles of The Stewardesses as early as 1969, touted as one of the most profitable releases of all time (you can see the trailer on youtube, flat version only I’m afraid), while Britain’s first ever 3D feature came in 1972 in the form of Pete Walker’s Four Dimensions of Greta (also known as Three Dimensions of Greta – not sure where the other dimension came from). And before I sign off, here’s a link to a piece about Tinto Brass’ plans to remake Caligula (1979) with the new 3D technology – without the smells, wind, water and juddering chairs, one assumes…

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 4: 3D or not 3D?

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

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

Like many of us, I’ve been indulging in my fair share of festive film-watching this past week, both catching up on some of the year’s more important titles and looking back to past gems. As the decade draws to a close, it would be difficult not to give some mention of the talking-point title of the holiday season, James Cameron’s Avatar, although having just come more or less fresh from it, I’m not sure quite what to make of it in terms of its self-touted status as a landmark in film history. For the first 40 minutes or so, I was absorbed in the immersive detail of its alien world, before the sheer idiocy of the story loomed into the foreground: one-dimensional characters and plots in a three-dimensional world. There’s no need to go into too much detail regarding the story, as I’m assuming many of you have already seen it, and if not, you’ll probably already have heard that it’s a banal hotchpotch of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Princess Mononoke and Fern Gulley – yes, the soundtrack even includes pan pipes. The end impression, however, was something akin to how I felt coming out of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. All very impressive, yes, but just how significant is it in the long run? Will we still be talking about the film in a couple of years, and just how will it play on the small screen?

Just as the Final Fantasy film did, Avatar got me thinking about technology and cinema, this time primed by the fact that I’m currently absorbing the implications contained within the opening chapters of Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation , Thomas Lamarre’s fascinating and perceptive look at how technology has influenced the form and content of Japanese animation, and basically THE book I’ve always been waiting for on the subject. One of the axioms of Lamarre’s argument is that cinema’s development has been shaped by its technology, the movie camera, which allows movement in three dimensions, and enforces a strictly rational viewing mode upon the world, that of vanishing point perspective, whereas the basic machinery from which animation is constructed, the animation stand, provides a very different means of lending the illusion of three dimensions to its images, with the camera shooting from a fixed position and the way that the individual layers of cels are composited to work with one another just as, if not more important than the actual drawings upon them. He labels the differences cinematism, a dynamic, cine-realistic interpretation of the world, and animetism, an aesthetic unique to anime born of the machinery that produces it. Both, however, are only means of arriving at representations of the world: artists and psychologist have been arguing for at least the past century that this is not how humans actually perceive their environment.

Of course, the use of digital technologies over the past 20 years has revolutionised the way animation is made, and its aesthetic, but I think it is particularly interesting that Japanese animators have made judicious aesthetic decisions to either reject computer technology for the very purposes for which it is most suited (i.e. movement in depth), as is the case of Hayao Miyazaki, or explore other ways of representing ideas with it, the best example of which being Mamoru Oshii’s The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters. After all, why use a purely man-made medium that is so intrinsically non-rooted in reality to emulate the lens-based reality that has so defined the last century?  I’ve written about this phenomenon in some depth, notable in a series of articles for the magazine 3D World, and in my chapter “Between Dimensions: 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime”, included in Ga-Netchu: The Manga Anime Syndrome published by the Deutsches Filmmuseum back in 2008, although due to word-count constraints in this publication was not able to pursue my ideas as much as I would have liked. My basic view is that cinema of any description always requires a suspension of disbelief. Cinematic realism (cinematism) is only one way of representing the world, and total onscreen realism is a straw man. The more you strive for cinematic realism, which in the case of animation means adding more visual detail and more dynamic movement within three dimensions, the further you depart from reality, or the more you draw attention to the unreality of cinerealism. The new vogue for 3D cinema only emphasizes these points.

The visual aesthetic in Avatar attempts to dazzle with its spectacle. That is its purpose, and perhaps I’m being unfair, it is its only purpose. It has always been thus with Cameron – think Terminator 2. He delights in showing us what is possible at the cutting edge of technology. We are to be as much impressed with the machinery behind what’s onscreen as what’s onscreen itself. Avatar’s tragedy, perhaps more so than Final Fantasy, is that it fails to find its own unique form within its technical possibilities. It is pure cinematism. There was a brilliant article by Ben Walters and Nick Roddick earlier this year in the March edition of Sight and Sound, entitled “The Great Leap Forward” that looked at some of the considerations that filmmakers working in 3D need to consider; rapid editing forces the viewer to change their focal point quickly, leading to headaches, but also jolting them out of the onscreen world, while in contrast, long moving shots make one feel very much part of it. It brings about its own set of problems too – just where does one put the subtitles along the depth plane? Nevertheless, there is still a sense of liberating potential about the new technology, if used inventively, to revolutionise film aesthetics and the way we experience cinema. Rather than constructing action sequences by editing together lots of short, explosive shots to create the illusion of an impossible, dynamic hyper-realism, perhaps the new aesthetic should be a return to longer, more fluid sequences that fully exploit cinematic depth, focussing on the created worlds and how, by way of proxy through the characters who inhabit them (our avatars), audiences interact with them. For a while Avatar managed this. I revelled in every magical detail of the lush jungle planet environs of Pandora. But then it was back to fiction once again.

Form and content are inextricably linked, a factor which animators as diverse as Mamoru Oshii and the talents at Pixar seem to understand perfectly. It doesn’t help that from a narrative point of view, Avatar’s corollaries with real-world events are too obviously silly; an alien race whose blue reptilian skin and flattened noses serve as indicators of their otherworldly status (though their bare, body-painted torsos and Maasai braids seem rather closer to home) sitting on vast resources of the precious resource unobtainium (you couldn’t make this stuff up) are infiltrated and subsequent invaded by mechanized, militarized cartoon-evil humans with America accents. We’re firmly rooted in la-la land here, with nothing to take back home to reality with us. It’s all about about as heartfelt as the ersatz anti-Neocon tract of one of the daftest films of the decade, Eagle Eye. The underlying message is that war, imperialism and explosive violence may be bad things, but nevertheless, they provide the building blocks for a certain kind of action cinema born out of the 1980s, one in which bodies can fall hundreds of metres without so much as bruising, in which whole worlds are created only to be destroyed, and we can all go home with the cosy feeling that it was all only a movie, only a movie, only a movie…

Avatar was unfortunate to have been preceded into theatres this year by Coraline and Up, neither of which can be described as “realistic” in the same sense as current conceptions of “reality” – the reality of  cinema and computer games – and yet which, adopting a more simplistic visual style, were far more convincing, far more immersive in their story-telling and their action sequences, and far more attuned to the aesthetic considerations brought about by the addition of an illusionary third dimension. For me, both ranked among the best of the year, fully cinematic experiences that I will treasure for a long time. James Cameron’s fascist aesthetic feels more like an evolutionary dead end than the the future of cinema, which for me seems to be better represented by Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker , and it’s evident that if the resurrection of 3D is to be any more than just the gimmick it was in the 1950s or its brief revival in the 1980s, then its possibilities must be used more inventively. I think I’ve already reached the saturation point where I won’t go and see a film just to be dazzled by the 3D unless it can do something new, a state I reached with CG animation in the ake of Toy Story around the time of the appearance of Ice Age. I’m less excited by Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland than Takashi Shimizu’s The Shock Labyrinth, because I think that given his Juon films, Shimizu’s handling of depth and shadow to create shock and suspense are going to result in something that I haven’t seen before. In the meantime, I adhere to the belief more strongly than ever that cinema is a delicate smoke-and-mirrors balancing act between what you show and what you don’t. By showing us everything from every conceivable angle, Avatar leaves no room for the imagination, making us painfully aware that actually there’s nothing really there.

Links to the rest of these articles:

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?

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