Above: would Pixar's new film Up be better in two dimensions?
There are an estimated 6,000 digital 3D movie screens around the world. These screens are selling more than twice as many tickets than comparable sized 2D screens showing similar films, despite tickets for 3D films being about a third more expensive. The most commercially successful men in Hollywood—DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and directors James Cameron and Steven Spielberg—are on board. Katzenberg calls 3D “the next great frontier.” Cameron says it’s “heading beyond movies.” David Puttnam, one of cinema’s most important thinkers, looked into his crystal ball at the Edinburgh film festival in June and foresaw a future when digital 3D auditoriums would be showing the 2012 Olympic games, live theatre and more in this vein. The film world seems set on adding a Z axis to a medium that in its first 11 decades had just an X and Y.
I’m not going to write “it’ll never catch on” because it has already, but I think there’s something wrong with this Z. It’s not that I’m a movie fogey—I think that the colourised version of the Indian epic Mughal-e-Azam is better than the original black-and-white one, and I prefer the dubbed rather than the subtitled version of the German fantasy film The Singing Ringing Tree. Both of these are purist no-nos. But as I watched the new Pixar animation Up at the Cannes film festival this year along with 2,000 others, I felt that I wasn’t seeing cinema. Halfway through, I took my 3D glasses off and there was film again. On, off, on, off; cinema, something else, cinema, something else. It has taken me months to work out why the 3D technique, which uses the parallax differences of human binocular vision to create an illusion of a Z axis, is something other than cinema.
At that Cannes screening my initial sense was of a magnet behind the screen that was sucking the imagery towards the horizon. So intense was this spatial depth that it made the two things left on the surface, near me, as it were—the black edge of the frame and the subtitles (Up was subtitled for the French audience)—look puny. The Z axis was so powerful that, like a school bully, it beat the wimpy frame hands down. All my life I’ve experienced the movie frame as “a complete entity,” to borrow the description of the great film theorist Jean Mitry in The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. In digital 3D, I began to realise, it is complete no more. What is out of frame—to the left and the right of the image, above and below it, but mostly in its hubristic background—looms so heavy in one’s perception of the 3D image that it becomes almost threatening.
But 3D isn’t just about the image doing more or, if you’re with me so far, too much. What about what my mind is doing as it watches this stereo display? When I took my 3D glasses off, I had a sense of bringing something to the experience of watching—mental imagery or long evolved perceptual processes. When I put the glasses on, those processes seemed redundant. In his book, Mitry quotes the philosopher Henri Bergson: “No perception can exist without being mixed up with memory.”
That’s exactly what I mean about bringing something to the experience. Of course, it could be that I’ve seen just a handful of films in digital 3D that makes the experience of watching “memoryless.” But I believe it’s more to do with the fact that the neurological mechanisms, whereby images captured by each of my eyes are then combined to create my sense of space, are left twiddling their thumbs. The 3D technology is already making this combination. My optical psychology is out of a job.
But if it’s the case that 3D renders aspects of human perception redundant, does it matter? I’m tempted to say yes. When, I saw the film Once Upon a Time in the West as a boy, it was the ambiguity of Claudia Cardinale’s accessibility that entranced me. She was there and not there. If Once Upon a Time in the West was 3D, my brain would not be creating that ambiguity.
It would take brain-scan technology to prove my conjecture: that watching a 3D film involves some mental closedown. But I know that I’m feeling it. Mitry again is suggestive in this area when he talks about “all the ‘evocations’” of an image. He’s referring to Roland Barthes’s comment that “the signified is everything outside the film requiring expression in the film.” In the screening of Up I came to question whether there were any evocations and whether there was anything “outside the film.” The impression of space was so over-determined, and the frame was so weak, that the movie seemed to roam in infinite space.
Mitry writes that a photograph “is reality-turned-into-statement.” I believe that the 3D image is less of a statement than a 2D image. The apparent gain of 3D may actually be a loss.
