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.

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?

James Cameron's Avatar

I’ve not been updating this site as frequently as I’d have liked over this past month, mainly due to having a rather hefty load of work to get finished. Still, as January rolls to an end, I thought it was time I got at least one more post out, especially as I’d left my discussion of Avatar at the end of last month dangling with the promise of more to come. The original plan was to take a look at another title to investigate in more detail the concepts of realism and spectacle in cinema. However, with James Cameron’s film now counted the highest-grossing of all time and a news report this morning that the broadcaster Sky is launching its new 3d channel this Saturday with a live Premier football match that will be beamed out to nine selected pubs across the country, I get the feeling that we could be discussing the virtues of 3d, CG graphics, and all the other issues raised by these technologies and where they’re taking us, for quite some time (even though I find the prospect of legions of footie fans across the nation settling down on the sofa wearing 3d specs rather unrealistic in itself). Heck, even Mayor of London Boris Johnson weighed in with a rather strange article about how people are struggling to cope with life in our recession-stricken capital in this dreariest of seasons after being immersed in Cameron’s world.

The film industry has always been driven by new technologies (sound, colour, widescreen, digital cameras are but a few), and one of my interests is in how these have shaped the form of its resulting products. So now seems as good a time as ever to begin exploring the question, what the hell is reality? I want to return to Avatar for the moment, a film that looks set to be honoured at the Oscars this year. First of all, lets ignore the quality of the story-telling. For me, Avatar was more than just an entertaining diversion in that it throws up all sorts of issues to think about, even though I don’t think its 100% successful in what it says. It is undoubtedly one of the reasons the film is proving so successful, if only due to word of mouth – it is a definitely talking point title, and I think it’s great that its getting people into cinemas, if only because the industry as a whole really needs this at the moment.

I don’t, however, think its going to have a lasting legacy in that all Hollywood action blockbusters are now going to add a third-dimension. One only has to look at the lacklustre reception to Roland Emmerich’s 2012 last year to realise that you can only go on making things bigger and more spectacular before the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Avatar gives us something new for the moment, but once 3d ceases to become a novelty, I think it will be difficult to justify the expenses of productions such as these unless there’s more to them than just the visuals. For the moment at least, however, I think a precedent has been set that will pave the way for other more inventive works, and for that reason, it is definitely the film of the moment.

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 - A 'flat' spectacle.

“Aha! But what more inventive works?” I hear you ask. Avatar seems to present us with a number of other ways to go, but I think if 3D is to be more than a gimmick, then new narratives or modes of expression will have to emerge to exploit the possibilities it provides. I’m intrigued by projects such as Wim Wender’s Pina, a dance film about legendary choreographer Pina Bausch (not sure what the status of this is now, since the death of Bausch, but there’s more on this film here). This could be one application of celebrating human movement within three dimensions.

As for the use of computer graphics, I find it a little disappointing that most animation always tries to emulate live action cinema when the medium has the potential to create any sort of world they can, by experimenting with presentational/representational modes. Of course, it is easy to indulge in pie-in-the-sky thinking about what could be possible, and obviously economic factors play a role. Due to the sheer costs involved, I don’t think cinema will ever see a complete break from its representational roots in the way that painting, for example, did at the beginning of the last century. The best example I can think of that experiments with these sort of ideas is Mamoru Oshii’s Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters from 2006, a fascinating film to analyse and meditate over, but I’m sure Oshii would be the first to admit it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, and it is not what most people would desire from a good night’s worth of entertainment.

New forms? Mamoru Oshii's Tachigui

So anyway, as a critic of cinema rather than a creator, and as such not as dependent on its economic realities, you can consider me as playing something of the devil’s advocate in my opinions. But I think the next few years are going to be interesting in terms of what people are doing with these new technologies, so I think I’m going to continue with these posts for a while, using this website as a sounding board for my ideas. To this end, I’m posting the first half of an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the Deutches FilmMuseum’s Ga-Netchu! The Manga Anime Syndrome book, which was to lead into a discussion of Oshii’s film but was cut from the finished publication due to limits of space. I think it probably elucidates what I was driving at in my first post on this subject, and to some extent where Thomas LaMarre is coming from with some of the arguments he presents in Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. I look forward to hearing your feedback… (and if anyone could tell me how to put a damn space between this line and the next using WordPress, I’d be really grateful!)

Tunnel Vision: A Western Malaise

“It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” observed artist Maurice Denis in 1890. As well as drawing attention to the role of aesthetics in art, Denis’ statement highlights the limitations of collapsing a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional surface, something keenly felt by painters at the time.

Maurice Denis' Holy Women Near the Tomb, 1894

For over 500 years, the dominant form of pictorial representation in the West has been linear or fixed point perspective, developed by Renaissance artists and set in stone by the Classical painter and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). Depth is signalled geometrically, with all lines converging towards a fixed point and distant objects appearing at a smaller scale than those closer to the viewer. Alberti’s observation that his paintings represented the visible world viewed as if through a window has led to this method being labelled Alberti’s Window, and it soon became the guiding principle for artists.

In his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, British artist David Hockney hypothesises the widespread use of lenses and mirrors by Western artists from the Renaissance onwards to render nature more efficiently and realistically. Lens-based devices like the camera obscura and camera lucida allowed artists ranging from the Italian and Dutch schools, namely Caravaggio and Jan Van Eyck, to the Salon painters of the continental academic tradition like Bougeureau, to paint from a projected image rather than directly from nature, or at the very least, to use this projected image as a drawing aid. The use of optics accounted for the abrupt emergence of a new kind of pictorial realism that to the modern eye still appears almost photographic. It was marked by a greater sense of detail, especially in the rendering of light and shadow (chiaroscuro). Among the mountain of evidence Hockney presents is the close ties between painters and glass- and mirror-makers in the 15^th century (who in the Low Countries shared the same guild), the emergence of the ‘still life’ genre at this point, and that Vermeer was a close friend and neighbour of van Leeuwenhook, known for his work on lenses and microscopy. He also makes the analogy between artists’ studios, which employed assistants to aid in the image-making process in tasks ranging from mixing paint and arranging the scene to actually rendering parts of it on the canvas, and the image factory of Hollywood: painters such as Rembrandt were not the solidarity creative geniuses we might imagine, with a role akin to film directors today. The difference was that, rather than the mass market, the artist was reliant upon the patronage of the Church or powerful political figures, who thereby effectively controlled the creation and distribution of images.

Camera Obscura

That there are ruptures contained within the works Hockney discusses with what would have emerged had the artists adhered entirely to the rules of classical perspective indicates the distorting effect of the lens, specifically with regards to issues of lighting, depth of focus and relative scale. For example, the fragmented non-Euclidian space or “wrong perspectives” (as opposed to the Euclidian space of “correct” geometrical perspective) art historians have detected in Flemish painting is attributable to the scene being reproducing from different viewpoints, with the lens re-focussed to take in the various figures, objects and details contained within the tableau. In effect, the works are a collage of multiple ‘exposures’; the scene as viewed from a number of different windows within the one main window. Moreover, linear perspective alone would never have allowed even the greatest of painters to depict the detailed patterns following complex contours like the folds on the clothes of their subjects.

Look, the heads are the wrong scale - Jan Van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin , c. 1435

Optical methods presented a sense of realism that was compelling and, as the technology advanced, evermore expedient. In the 1820s, photography emerged, allowing the projected image to be fixed permanently by chemical means. Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and the advent of cinema followed at the end of the 19^th century to create the illusion of movement from the synthesis of its constituent parts. In addition to the two-dimensions of the screen, within the moving image a third dimension was introduced, but it was not depth, it was time. Still, the dynamism of the moving camera brought about its own changes in our understanding of space and of objects’ positions in relation to one another, both in the physical and temporal dimensions, and thus a different conception of reality. However, this new cine-realism was still constrained by the monocular viewpoint of the camera lens. Furthermore, cinema is an ephemeral phenomena. Its individual elements exist only as they are projected, at a rate now standardised at 24 frames a second.

Muybridge's horses, 1878

Human perception does not work in the same way as the camera. We have two eyes, and the images that fall upon the retinas are seldom static. Perceptually, humans are active participants in their environment, never mere passive observers. Our knowledge of the world is build up through complex processes, with the body and both eyes actively moving through nature. These physical processes are transformed into experience, as the perceiver constructs an internal mental model of the external world. In interpreting a scene, the eyes dart around the salient details of line and form, in what is termed by psychologists as saccadic movements. This is why we don’t immediately notice the “wrong perspectives” in Flemish painting, as our eyes flick over the different parts of the picture, and also why we accept, though never entirely believe, the simulacrum of cinema.

As the photographic image became more widely distributed, artists began to question and eventually break away from the static ocular centrism that had dominated Western presentations of the world since the Renaissance. The lineage of Modern painting can be traced from the Impressionists and post-Impressionists like Paul Cezanne, through Cubism (on which Hockney, as an artist, himself draws upon in his multiple-perspective photo-collages) to abstract art’s complete break with representation. These movements explored the quandaries presented by recreating a solid object on a flat canvas; the difference between “seeing” and “knowing” the world, and breaking it down into its aesthetic atoms. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, they couldn’t hope to compete with the tunnel vision presented by the photographic snapshot or the moving pictures, which were easier to produce and to circulate, and more attuned to the demands of consumerism.

David Hockney's Mother I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1985 #1

Whether the image was moving or not, the emergence of the new consensual reality brought about by its mass circulation during the twentieth century had profound social and political ramifications. Through photographs, cinema and its more pervasive small-screen relation television, it became the primary mode through which people experienced the world beyond their immediate environs. “The camera never lies,” goes the maxim, leading to Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote that “Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second” (though he later added the caveat “Every edit is a lie.”)

We rarely doubt the lens’ vision, but perhaps we should, as Hockney challenges us: “Look through an old stereoscope and ask ‘where am I?’ You are in a black void looking out. Alberti’s window seems to be a prison. Has photography pushed the world away? Has it done something to our view of the world? The optical projection dominates the world, but it is only one way of seeing, and one that separates us from the world. This might not have been a problem six hundred years ago, but it is a very big problem indeed NOW.”

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

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

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