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

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