3-D

OR NOT

3-D

From Bwana Devil

\o Avatar, how far
has the technology
come and how much
further must it go?
By DAVE KEHR

This time, 3-D is here to stayor so

Holly-wood is eager lu assure us. Ir won't be
like it was in the early Fifties, the studios
claim, when the fad for stereoscopic films
ended after a couple of stressful years of
bulky, two-strip technology and uncomfortable glasses. And it definitely won't be like
it was in the early Eighties, when a simpler,
single-strip projection system still couldn't
move the format beyond forlorn exploitation films {Comin' at Ya!) and creatively
exhausted sequels {Jaws -D).
For a number of reasons, the studios
might be right this time. This new
round of stereoscopyarriving right on
schedule, at the standard generational
interval of 30 yearsis grounded in a
new digital technology that requires little more than the push of a button to
produce sharp, vivid three-dimensional
images. Equipment that once required
the skill and strength of a driver of 12wheel trailer trucks, can now be operated by a concession stand employee
with one finger.

60 \\\mcoraacnx january-i-ebntary zoio

zoio filmconimcni 6 i

1838-1952, traces the basic concept of

anaglyphic 3-Dthe process that uses
red and blue lenses to filter images for
the left and right eyeback to the early
19th century, in the pre-cinema of the
magic lantern shows.

The most important factor, though, is

the economic imperative driving the new
technology. Hoping to abandon the bulky,
fragile, and expensive .35mm prints that
bave been the industry standard since Edison and replace them with the handy little
bundles of data called DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages), the studios are pushing
digital projection on the theater owners.
But exhibitors stand to benefit less from
tbe expensive new setups than the distributors, and they've been slow to move on
digital projection systems, which require
an immense capital outlay at a difficult
time for the industry.
But if digital 3-D becomes the norm,
exhibitors will be forced to spring for
the new gear if they want to show the
latest blockbusters. The cost of James
Cameron's Avatar ($230 million according to Fox, up to $500 million according
to the rumor mill) may be hard to justify
only in terms of box-office revenue, but
if Cameron's epic forces a critical mass
of theater owners to make the
changeover to digital, Fox will more
than recoup its investment in future savings (and earn the undying gratitude of
the entire industry).
And so, the studios are lining up to
release 3-D filmsnot just tent-pole attractions like Up, Avatar^ and A Christmas
Carol, but bread-and-butter pictures like
the horror films My Bloody Valentine 3D
and The Final Destination: in 3-D., or the
concert documentaries Jonas Brothers:
The 3D Concert Experience and Larger
Than Life in 3D with the Dave Matthews
Band. Only by keeping the pipeline full
with little films as well as big will Hollywood succeed in normalizing stereoscopyin making it a standard and
expected component of the filmgoing
experience, as the industry did with
sound and color.

A
mayfinalKhave
found itsway of normalizing
.VY), of bringing it into line
with color and sound as technologies that contribute to the
suspension of disbelief crucial
to Flollwood realism, rather
than distracting from it.

OME OBSERVERS HAVE SUGGESTED

hopefully that Avatar will prove to

be the Jazz Singer of 3-D, the one
breakaway hit that will shift the paradigm
forever. But we now know, thanks to historians like Donald Crafton, that the standard account of The Jazz Singer
transforming the industry overnight was
only a press agent's fantasy: the actual transition from silent to sound was a gradual
process that required several years, in
which no single title played a decisive role.
indeed, the standard textbook account of
film histor)' as a series of breakthroughs
that produced the "revolutions" of sound,
color, widescreen, and 3-D, is largely just
another of those progressivist myths that
creep so frequently into Western culture.
No one set out to create black-andwhite, silent films. The dream of a total,
sensually immersive cinema was always
uppermost in the minds of the Victorians
who set out to invent the movies. Ray
Zone's fascinating history. Stereoscopic
Cinema and the Origins of J-D Fihn,

6 2 filinconimenl7i//Mi)ry-F;rMdr>'

zoio

Among the pioneers, Thomas Edison in

the U.S., the Lumire Brothers in France,
and William Friese-Greene in Fngland all
initially envisioned a cinema with sound,
color, and depth, and all conducted experiments with that elusive goal in mijid. No
less a personage than Edwin S. Porter
demonstrated an anaglyphic system to the
press in June 1915. "The pictures marked
a distinct advance over any of the kind
made in the past," wrote Lynde Denig in
Moving Picture World (as quoted by
Zone), "and many in the audience
appeared to regard them as the forerunners
of a new era in motion picture realism. Just
how soon the invention will be used in the
production of pictures for the regular market has not been decided, although Mr.
Porter believes that the day of such a development may not be far off."
It wasn't. Experiments with other
processes continued (history does not
record what derailed Porter's project) and
on September 27, 1922, the director, producer and cinematographer Harry K.
Fairall screened the first anaglyphic feature
film, The Power of Love, for the press. (A
tale of thwarted passions in Old CaHfornia, the film never received a commercial
release, and has since been lost.) In
December of that same year. The New
York Times favorably reviewed a program
of films (one a short drama set on Mars!)
at the Selwyn Theater which were photographed in a rival process. Teleview.
D. W. Griffith was impressed enough
with the prospect of 3-D to issue a statement to the Times the same year: "The
true stereoscopic effect will add a mighty
force to motion pictures. It will make
them beyond any comparison the most ^
powerful medium of expression of which ~
anyone has dreamed." But he also offered d
a warning: "If a powerful dramatic scene <
were put into a film with absolute stereo-
scopic vividness, I don't believe an audi- g
ence could stand it. For instance, suppose
|
we were to show a dagger thrust driving ^
into the verv faces of the audience? What '

would happen? . . . It would be appalling."

Ray Zone's book documents a steady
stream o patent applications that continued through the Twenties and Thirties,
occasionally resulting in theatrical exposure {MGM released a series of "Audioscopic" shorts in the mid-Thirties), and
by the end of the decade, 3-D films were
standard attractions at world's fairs and
festivals. Edwin H. Land's polarized
lenses came to replace the red-and-blue
glasses, allowing for more faithful color
reproduction and a brighter image.

Y T952,TW'O HOLLYWOOD CAMILRA-

men, Lothrop Worth and Friend

Baker, had developed a practical
3-D system that they sold to the screenwriter Milton Gunsberg and his brother
Julian (an ophthalmologist from Beverly
Hills). Christened "Natural Vision," this
was the process that the independent producer Arch Oboler licensed to make
Btvana Devila low-budget jungle adventure largely shot in Malibii that broke boxoffice records when it reached theaters in
December. The 3-D craze was on.
Bwana Devil did not thrust a dagger
into the very faces of the audience, but it did

thrust plenty of other items, including

spears, stuffed animals, and Barbara Britton. But rather than being appalled, as Griffith predicted, spectators were delighted.
Here was something new, sensational,
andcrucially for the anxiety-ridden film
industry of the early Fiftiesdefinitely not
available on television.
Bwana Devil was unmistakably an
exploitation picturethe one-sheets promised "A Lion in Your Lap! A Lover in Your
Arms!"and what was conceived in sin,
lived in sin. Warner Brothers, mindful of
their Vitaphone experience, became the
first major studio to license Natural
Vision, and immediately applied the
process to a remake of a property, Mys-

tery of the Wax Museum, that had

served the novelty of two-strip Technicolor back in 1933. Retitled House of
Wax, the 1953 remake was produced by
Bryan Foy, the former head of Warners'
B-picture unit, and directed by Andr De
Totha gifted filmmaker but perhaps
not the most natural choice for the job,
given that he was blind in one eye and
could not appreciate the depth effects
that his film deployed with such enthusiastic abandon.

The effects in House of Wax range from

the obstreperous (a sidewalk pitchman bats
a paddleball right into the viewer's face) to
the relatively subtle (during a climactic
fight, a figure in the foreground rises,
apparently out of the audience, and clambers into the scene). Instinctively, De Toth
had discovered the two major modes of 3D address, which might be described as
"innies" and "outies." Outies (forever epitomized in my tnind by that shot in the 1953
Three Stooges 3-D short Spooks! in which
a mad scientist jabs a hypodermic needle at
the spectator's eye), were immediately associated with all that was allegedly tacky and
exploitative about stereoscopic film. For the
critics, such cheap effects only distracted the
audience from the nuances of plot and character, and were much to be deplored.
Outies played to the matinee audienceprimarily in the form of Westerns
(like Budd Boetticher's Wings of the
Hawk, 53], horror films (John Brahm's
The Mad Magician, 54), science fiction
(Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space,
53), thrillers (Rudolph Mate's Second
Chance, 53), and particularly leggy musicals [Lloyd Bacon's 1953 The French Line.
produced under the close supervision of

Jamtary-Fcbrtiar^' zaio filmcomment 63

Howard Hughes, and with the ads this

time promising that the film would
"knock both of your eyes out").
Innies, on the other hand, seemed to
extend the space of the frame in ways that
seemed similar to the depth effects that
Welles, Wyler, and Toland had been creating with lines of perspective and extreme
depth of field. The press found this to be
an honorable technique (perhaps because
it stirred subliminal associations with the
theater stagea vastly more respectable
art form than the movies}.
As the novelty appeal of tbe outies
waned (the filmgoing audience could only
stand so much ocular abuse), tbe studios
realized that any chance of taking the format to the next level, that of critical
respectability and long-term viability,
rested on shifting to an innie approach.
Bigger-budget films began to appear, featuring major stars like Rita Hayworth
Avatar {\1]

{Miss Sadie Thompson, 5), Martin and

Lewis (Money from Home, 53), and John
Wayne [Hondo, 52>). Most of these more
prestigious productions carefully eschewed
"lions in your lap" in favor of regressive,
depth-enbaneed long shots. Clearly, 3-D
had to be absorbed into tbe language of
Hollywood realismjust as the once disruptive elements of sound and color bad
been reined in and naturalizedif the
process was to be anything more than a
sideshow attraction.
But just as these films were beginning
to appear, the 3-D fad came to a sudden
end. Twentieth Century Fox's CinemaScope process"see it without glasses,"
the early advertisements proclaimed
offered a similar kind of televisiontrumping visual spectacle without the
physical discomfort associated with 3-D.
Fox was smart enough to launch their
process not with a cheap genre picture

like House of Wax but witb a big-budget

effort in what was then, in the early
Fifties, the most honorable of all Hollywood genres: the Biblical epic.
Tbe success of The Robe (53) led the
other studios to shelve tbeir 3-D projects,
just as the process appeared to be reaching a kind of maturity. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (54) used only
a single (but astonishing) outie effect;
when Grace Kelly reaches out to the
audience, as if in supplication, during the
strangulation scene. With its subtlety
and restraint, Dia! M might have provided a paradigm for tbe stereo film of
the future. (Joe Dante, in his fine, mysteriously unreleased 2009 3-D feature The
Hole, has sagely followed Hitchcock's
path.) But Warner Brothers, the first studio to jump on the craze, ultimately
decided to release the film only in a flat,
conventional format. The world would
not see Hitchcock's version until 1980,
when Warners re-released it in the simplified, one-strip process called Stereovision, which used an anamorphic lens to
squeeze the left and right images onto a
single frame.
Stereoscopic films continued to be
released tbrougb the Sixties and Seventies,
though by now they were almost exclusively exploitation picturesif not frankly
pornographic. (Stereovision was launched
witb The Stewardesses, a 1969 softcore sex
film cbat carried a self-imposed X rating.)
Most likely, tbe technology would have
remained frozen at that point of development, only trotted out every decade or two
to enliven an Emmanuelle 4 (84) or Friday
the 13th Part 3 (82), its image too closely
associated with grindhouse trash to ever
attract serious money again.
Bur in the mid-Fighties, respectability
returned from an unexpected source. The
IMAX Corporation, a company that specialized in wide-gauge film presentations
for museums and fairs, discovered that
their 65mm format yielded a particularly
robust 3-D image, particularly when combined witb so called "shutter glasses"
lenses made of LCD panels that can be
used to sequentially block out tbe left
and right eye images 96 times a second.
Tbe effect is far brighter and more stable
than that which standard polarized

64 fiiincomment jatiujry-Februai-y

loio

HERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A KIND OF

roy-theater or pop-up-book feeling

to tbeatrical 3-D presentationsa
paradoxical sense that, as the image has
gained in depth, it has also shrunk in
stature. For a long time, the figures in 3-D
movies seemed smaller than life, tiny players arranged on a miniature stage, and the
figures themselves bave lacked relief, as if
they were two-dimensional cutouts.

lenses can produce; alas, the technology

is also more complicated and more
expensive, and after a few years of use,
IMAX bas now apparently dropped the
shutter system in favor of polarized
glasses once again.
But while it lasted, IMAX's shuttersystem 3-D yielded both impressive
imagery (as in Wings of Courage^ tbe 40minute dramatic feature directed by JeanJacques Annaud in 1995) and cultural
redemption. IMAX's family-friendly fare,
mainly travelogues and science films,
helped diminish lingering associations
with frolicsome flight attendants and
knife-wielding serial killers. Stereoscopy
again became friendly to mainstream
moviemakerscrucially in the case of a
certain James Cameron, who used the
IMAX process to create bis 60 minute
documentary about the Titanic, Ghosts
of the Abyss (03).
Ghosts of the Ahyss^ in which
Cameron and his crew visit the submerged wreck encased in pod-like diving
bells, may well prove to be one of tbe
most influential films of the eariy 21st
century. A direct ink between Cameron's
1997 iiber-blockbuster Titanic and
Avatar, the film represented Cameron's
first experience with digital 3-D, using a
camera system that he helped to devise
the Pace Fusion, which links two Sony
HD camerasand which he went on to

use, with modifications, on Avatar. And

in the film's second part, a virtual tour of
the Titanic as it might have existed, reconstructed with the use of CGI, Cameron
seems to anticipate the alliance of 3-D and
digital animation that would drive the
format's revival for the rest of the decade.

There has aKvays been a

kind of tov-thealer or poj)u|)-ljok feeling to theatrieal
3-1) presentationsa paradoxical sense that, as the
mage has gained in depth,
it has also snrunk in stature.

Space in stereoscopic films does not

appear continuous so much as it seems to
he built out of a series of flat planes
stacked one atop another {the image that
always comes to my mind is Disney's Multiplane camera, which arranged a group of
flat animation eels to create an illusion of
depth}. This sense was probably accentuated in the 3-D films of the Fifties by the
technical limitations of the time: the gigantic cameras required to shoot 3-D Technicolor (they look as daunting as the
battlebots in Aimtar) could be moved only
with great difficulty; the relatively lowspeed fiim stock of the time required massive lighting rigs to produce a sufficient
depth of field; lenses had to be short in
order to maximize exposure and minimize
jitter. Ail of tbese factors would have made
a rigid proscenium framing tbe simplest
solution for most directors, with close-ups
used sparingly for special emphasis.
All of these issues go away with digital
animation, as Robert Zemeckis discovered midway through tbe production of
The Polar Express in 2003. The compiex
CGI environments that Zemeckis and his
team had created to contain their motioncaptured performances were already in 3D as far as the computer was concerned;
only a bit of recoding was required to produce another perspective on tbe action,
yielding tbe left-eye/right-eye separation
that once required two cameras. The virtual camera of CG knows no weight and
no dimension; it could pass through a
keyhole and fly like a bird. And wben the
figures were animated rather than human,
the miniaturization and flattening effects
were less obtrusive: if 3-D made humans
seem smaller, it made cartoons seem bigger and more substantial.
Disney followed in 2005 with the 3-D
Chicken Little, shown in tbe digital Real D
process (a cheaper, Polaroid-based alternative

Jjmiary-Febriiary loio filmcnmmcnt 65

Film Studies MA
at the
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FILM DIVISION

The Masters degree in Film Studies is

designed for students who have already
completed significant undengraduate or
graduate work in t|ie study of film or
associated fields.
The program wilpiow sUidents to
deepen their knovsdge and familiarity
with contemporary issues in fiim theory
and history in the context of a major
fi I mlaki ng p rogram,
Rim Studi students will share many
classes with MFA filmmakers, but are not
eligible to take classes n directing, screen
writing or film production,

to the IMAX shuttle system chat soon

came to dominate the shopping mall market). Zemeckis and Co. riposted with
Monster House in 2006, and the race was
on: Henry Selick's stop-motion Nightmare
Before Christmas was re-released in computer-converted 3-D in 2006, followed by
Meet the Robinsons and Zemeckis's teasingly photorealistic Beowulf in 2007, and
the undistinguished Bolt and Fly Me to the
Moon in 2008. In 2009, the floodgates
opened: Sehck's Coraline, DreamWorks'
Monsters vs. Aliens, the independently
produced Battle for Terra, Pixar's Up (converted to 3-D during production), Fox's
Ice Age 3, Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of
Meatballs, and the 3-D conversions of
Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2.
The year ended with the two most
impressive 3-D productions to date,

For more details and application please vist

Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol and

http://wwwapp.cc.colu m biaedu/art/app/
arts/adm issions/fi I m-ma-materials.jsp

Cameron's Avatar. Though superficially

similarboth films draw heavily on performance-capture technology as well as
3-Dthey reflect two very different conceptions of the format, which I expect
will represent the basic alternatives for
some time to come.

APPLICATION DEADLINE:
JANUARY 25, 2010

For Zemeckis, A Christmas Carol is the

Finding the right image

for your project is
nothing to sneeze at...

PHOTOFEST
Can help
visit our website:
www.photofestnyc.com
or cali 212 633 6330
for more information

66 tWmcomment Jcinnijry-Fehrujry

loio

culmination of the director's longtime fascination with deep focus and long takes,
which the new technology allows him to
take to lengths that were previously inconceivable. The film's 1840 London seems to
extend infinitely in every direction, the
tiniest detail held in perfect focus. And his
virtual camera moves through it with perfect freedom, gliding over rooftops,
snaking through sewers, daiting in for a
close up or pulling back for a cosmic perspective. The film's longest take is the 12minute sequence that covers the "Ghost of
Christmas Past" episode, although there is
no practical reason why the entire film
couldn't have been presented as one continuous camera movement (an option that
Zemeckis considered, but discarded
because he felt it would be too distracting
for the audience).
Avatar, on the other hand, has very little in the way of long takes. Cameron is a
more typical director of his time in preferring rapid cutting and shallow focus, and
he brings those stylistic choices to 3-D with
some slight but significant modifications.
His (relatively) light and small digital camera allows him to move with the action in
wavs that the Fifties directors could not

Some observers have suggested hopefully MAvatar

will prove to be the Jazz
Singer of 3-D, the one hreakaway hit that will shift the
[)aradigTn forevor.
have imagined, and much of the movie
yields the impression of spontaneity and
immediacy of contemporary handheld
camera work (an illusion, of course, since
each seemingly impulsive pan or focus pull
must be integrated with a dense field of CG
effects). Early in Avatar., an extreme closeup of Sam Worthington's Jake Sully, asleep
in his cryogenic coffin, suggests how far
3-D optics have developed since Bwana
Devil: Sully's face is not a flat plane against
a receding background, but an entire landscape in itself, opening vast reaches
between cheekbone and eyelash.
Compositionally oriented, Zemeckis
retains a powerful sense of the frame as he
moves through A Christmas Carol. The
action-oriented Cameron, on the other
hand, tries to erase the borders of the
image by keeping his camerawork loose
and unsteady, focusing on vectors of
movement rather than relations of objects,
individual shots often have the extreme
shallow focus common to contemporary
movies; the 3-D effect emerges instead in
the montage, in the rapid integration of a
multiplicity of points of view. Zemeckis,
one imagines, would have been perfectly

happy shooting in the studio era with a

single camera; Cameron seems to require a
whole air-squadron of cameras (be they
actual or virtual) circling his central subject, covering the filmic event ironi every
available perspective at once.
Avatar draws on the experience of
Ghosts of the Abyss in many ways, most
obviously, perhaps, with the rentacled,
phosphorescent creatures that populate the
rain forests of Pandora: it's as if Cameron
had brought them up with him in his diving bell from the bottom of the Atlantic.
But there's also an undersea quality to his
treatment of the film's 3-D space: he's filled
in the gaps between objects with a continuous field of moving particlesdust mites,
tiny insects, mistthat give a visual density
to the ostensibly empty space. Everything
seems to be swimming in the same, threedimensional ether. It's an effect that overcomes that toy-theater sense of a series of
flat planes grouped together and instead
creates something continuous and perceptually whole. With tbis viscous space,
Cameron has brought an entirely new element to the game. The contrast between
foreground and background no longer
seems quite as harsh and conspicuous as it
did in the 3-D of the Fifties; it has all
become mid-ground, a continuum closer to
the way we actually perceive the world.
If this effect can be carried over to liveaction stereoscopy, Hollywood may finally
have found its way of normalizing 3-D,
of bringing it into line with color and
sound as technologies that contribute to
the suspension of disbelief crucial to Hollywood realism, ratber tban distracting
from it. Only when that moment comes,
through Cameron's technique or through
another, will 3-D cease to be a gimmick
and become a routine, unremarkable component of the moving image. It's taken a
hundred years to get this far, but we still
have a little way to go. D

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mtciry-fehrttary

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fUmcomincnt 6 7

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