by Mark Kermode
Except that in the alternative universe of this hypothetical example, David Lean has decided to shoot this scene in 3-D. So, rather than marvelling at the clarity of the camerawork, the composition of the shot and the emotional power of the scene, you are instead squinting at a smudgy image through uncomfortable and ill-fitting glasses, which have darkened the brightness of the screen by around 30 per cent, have caused the colour saturation to decline into something approaching a pastel smudge, and are in the process of giving you a headache in order to create artificially the illusion of depth through a bizarrely concocted polarised parallax process that your brain does not recognise from ‘real’ life. As Sharif approaches, two competing images of him wrestle with your right and left eye, messing with your head, which could quite happily have worked out from a monocular image that what you are looking at is not a man and a camel magically growing in size but a man and a camel gradually getting nearer and nearer.
How would your brain know this? Well, loads of ways, including focus, depth of field, occlusion (nearer objects getting in the way of further objects), comparative colour saturation (distant objects being naturally desaturated in comparison with nearer objects), comparative brightness (ditto) and – perhaps most obviously – comparative size. Oh, and sound. All the ways, in fact, in which movies have been telling us whether something is near or far away for over a century. And all without having to wear those bloody silly glasses.
The human brain is so agile and so developed in its understanding of monocular visual information that it can (and, more to the point, will) impose a sense of spatial awareness, including distance and nearness, on to even the most basic image in which only one of those signifiers mentioned above is at work. Don’t believe me? OK, try this test. Look at the two pictures below.
As you can see, they are in black and white. (If they’re in red and blue then you’re still wearing those rubbish cardboard glasses that came with your recent DVD purchase of Piranha 3-D – take them off now!) These pictures contain no spatial clues in terms of stereoscopy, focus, depth of field, occlusion, comparative brightness and/or colour saturation. Or sound. Obviously.
So, what do you see? Unless you’re being really bloody minded (and that may be the case) I’ll wager that what you see is a man standing by a fence that is of constant size, but that recedes in size as it moves from the foreground at the left of the picture to the distance in the middle of the picture. In the first picture, the man is standing some way away, and therefore appears to be quite small. In the second picture, the man has moved closer, and therefore appears larger.
That’s what you see, isn’t it?
OK, so how about if I tell you that in fact what you are looking at is a picture of an irregular quadrilateral shape (with bisecting lines) which is presented face on, and is simply larger on the left than on the right. As for the man, that is in fact two men – one big, one small – situated in the same place in relation to the weirdly shaped thing that is most definitely not a fence.
Got that?
Good.
Now look at the picture again. What do you see?
Be honest.
What you see is a fence stretching away into the distance and a man walking toward you, isn’t it? Oh, you can make yourself see the irregular quadrilateral thingy and the stationary giant and the dwarf if you try, in the same way that you can look at one of those line drawings of a cube and then see it turned inside out if you concentrate hard enough. But even as you do so, your brain is still telling you that what you’re looking at is not flat or ‘two-dimensional’ at all. Your vision may be effectively monocular, and the picture may be cruddy hand-drawn black-and-white 2-D, but your brain, which is a thing of wonder (unless perhaps you are Michael Bay), sees in 3-D. Naturally.
So, that being the case, why is Hollywood currently spending so much time and so much money trying to convince us that unless we play ball with their latest movie fad, we’re just not seeing the big picture? Why is James Cameron telling us that ‘everything looks better in 3-D’ and waving Smurfs in our faces to prove it? Why am I getting a headache watching Clash of the Titans, a movie that was shot in 2-D but has been ‘converted’ to 3-D to make it ‘better’ when it actually now looks far worse? Why did Warner Brothers blithely announce in the summer of 2010 that the same conversion process was going to be applied to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 despite the fact that everyone clearly hated it on Clash of the Titans? And why is Martin Scorsese, the one-time doyen of edgy American New Wave cinema, now looking me straight in the eye and telling me that ‘while you and I are sitting here talking, we’re talking in 3-D’ as if that somehow justifies making a new movie that we’ll all have to watch through those bloody silly glasses?
What’s wrong with this picture?
Let us be absolutely clear about this: 3-D cinema is a con. For a start, it’s not 3-D; rather, it is a technical illusion that uses an artificial ‘parallax effect’ (the process through which your left and right eye see slightly different images) to confuse your brain into thinking that flat images on a flat screen are either nearer or further away than a designated ‘point of convergence’. At least, that’s what it’s meant to do; in terms of audience experience, the system is at best flawed, producing ‘wall-eye’, ‘ghosting’, ‘unfusable images’ and a range of other equally exciting sounding optical blips, along with those old favourites headaches and eye-strain – any one of which should be enough to put off potential viewers. But the current 3-D revival is not about enhancing the audience’s cinematic viewing experience. On the contrary, their entertainment is entirely secondary to the primary purpose of 21st-century 3-D, which is to head off movie piracy and force audiences to watch badly made films in overpriced, undermanned multiplexes. It is a marketing ploy designed entirely to protect the bloated bank balances of buck-hungry Hollywood producers. It is not a creative leap on a par with the advent of colour or sound; if it were, it would not have faltered on so many previous occasions.
Far from being new and exciting, 3-D cinema is the oldest trick in the book – as old, in fact, as cinema itself. And there’s good reason why it has been consistently rejected by audiences for more than a hundred years.
Listen …
In his snappily entitled book Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film 1838–1952, Ray Zone notes that the patent for Edison’s Kinetoscope (patent no. 493,426), issued on 14th March 1893 and titled ‘Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects’, ‘had several stereo claims [and] depicted an optical system with two lenses for stereoscopic viewing of moving objects’. Apparently Edison never got round to using the system, but clearly the concept of 3-D moving pictures actually predates the projection of film. At around the same time, a 3-D motion picture system was being patented by British photographer-cum-inventor William Friese-Greene, an eccentric character referred to by the British Film Institute’s ‘ScreenOnline’ as ‘the most maddening figure in early British film history [who] obsessively patented insufficiently thought out devices’. These early 3-D outings were clunky and cumbersome and clearly had no future – although having seen Tim Burton’s ‘converted’ stereoscopic Alice in Wonderland I’m starting to wonder whether those 19th-century experiments could possibly have looked any worse.
Then, in the mid-1890s, the Lumière brothers began startling audiences with the projection of their experimental short film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, aka Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, aka The Arrival of the Mail Train, a thoroughly immersive 2-D experience that effectively gave birth to the modern popular cinema that has been with us ever since. Various controversies attend the first public screening of this documentary short, ranging from the date of the performance (either late 1895 or early 1896 depending on whom you believe) to the effect the film had upon its audience. Slightly less than a minute in length, the film shows (as the title suggests) a train pulling into a station, the image of the engine growing in size as it moves toward the camera, s
tarting in the right of the frame and moving across to the left, filling one side of the screen, with the passengers on the platform occupying the right side of the frame (and initially occluding the view of the distant train). If you can’t quite picture that (it’s amazing how hard it is to describe something really simple) then just YouTube it. It’ll take you less time to watch than boiling the kettle. Don’t worry, I’ll wait …
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Done? OK, so now we’re all on the same page. Great. Anyway, according to folklore, when audiences first saw this film (either in a Parisian cafe in December 1895, or – more probably – in January 1896) they were so overwhelmed by the sight of the approaching locomotive bearing down upon them that some ran screaming to the back of the room while others attempted to vacate the premises forthwith. No matter that the audience weren’t wearing 3-D glasses or having forced perspectives rammed in their faces through complex dual-image projection and separation systems. Nosirree, audiences saw an allegedly flat-screen image of a train coming toward them and understood it well enough to run in the opposite direction.
Or did they?
Magazines at the time certainly reported ‘fear, terror, even panic’ in response to early screenings of L’arrivée d’un train, reactions that the Lumière brothers (who were nothing if not showmen) would have exploited to the hilt. And why not? As Whale, Hitchcock, Spielberg et al. would discover over the next hundred years, nothing sells movie tickets like a really good scare. Yet eminent scholars have since written at great length about the lack of hard factual evidence to support accounts of the crowd-shaking effects of L’arrivée d’un train and in recent years a rather more contentious theory has been forwarded as to the source of those stories. You want to hear it? OK, pay attention …
As is often noted, the Lumières (like so many other photographic pioneers) had been playing around with stereoscopy for some time, and in 1935 (or possibly 1934 – accounts vary) Louis exhibited a 3-D remake of L’arrivée d’un train to the French Academy of Science. (Such a film may have been viewable on a stereoscope as early as 1903, but only by one person at a time.) Is it possible that it was in fact this later 3-D screening of the early silent classic from which audiences fled in terror? Has history somehow conflated the reactions to these two very different versions of L’arrivée d’un train and imposed the hysteria provoked by the latter upon the former? Was the real power of the image contained not in its motion, but in its stereoscopy?
In a word, no.
Think about it. By the end of the 19th century, audiences had become familiar with the phantasmagorical fairground projections of ghost trains and funhouses, with zoetropes and whirring animation devices, with shadow-shows and cleverly orchestrated tricks of the light that could make apparitions appear as if by magic. They had also seen 3-D photographs, which date back to the 1840s. But the projection of a realistic moving image was still new enough to produce startled and even fearful reactions amongst those faced for the first time with the minute-long film of an oncoming train.
Yet the history of cinema moves fast, and by 1915 audiences were happily settling down to D.W. Griffith’s spectacular epic The Birth of a Nation (a cinematic milestone marred by its unfortunate fondness for the Ku Klux Klan) and wondering whether noisy snacks would be available in the interval. Come the twenties they were being treated to Cecil B. DeMille taking a walloping bash at The Ten Commandments and listening to Al Jolson telling them they ain’t heard nothing yet, thereby signalling the death knell of silent cinema. By the time the thirties rolled around the emergence of full-colour three-strip Technicolor seemed set to make black-and-white movies a thing of the past (although mainstream monochrome cinema would bravely soldier on for another 30 years). All of which meant that the audience who saw Louis Lumière’s newfangled 3-D train film in Paris in 1935 would have been about as cineliterate as most movie-goers are today, well versed in the all-singing all-dancing razzamatazz of mainstream blockbusters, and highly unlikely to have been sent screaming from the theatre by the sight of an approaching train – 3-D or not 3-D. Moreover, if you actually bother to watch Louis’s 3-D remake (which I have), you’ll discover that the approaching train very quickly breaks the left frame, just as it did in the original, but thanks to miracle of 3-D this means that the train never appears to come out of the screen at all, merely to approach it. Doh!
Nope, the truth of the matter is that if anyone ran away from L’arrivée d’un train (which they may not have done but, hey, print the legend) then they would have done it in 1896 rather than 1935, and the train from which they were fleeing would have been black-and-white, silent and two-dimensional. It is this version of L’arrivée d’un train that has passed into popular folklore because this is the version that everyone saw and talked about for years to come. As for the 3-D version, who the hell has even heard of it? Be honest – unless you’re a scholar of early cinema or an enthusiastic devotee of the tortured history of stereoscopic movies, then this late entry in the filmography of Louis Lumière (who had effectively stopped making movies in 1901) is little more than a footnote, a curiosity, an intriguing but ultimately ephemeral bit of movie trivia – much like 3-D itself. In a strangely poetic way, L’arrivée d’un train, one of the first films ever made, contains within its genetic pattern both the blueprint of all future cinema and the proof of the obsolescence of 3-D. It exists in two versions, and only one of them is any good.
What does all this prove? Simply that in their role as pioneers of modern movie-making the Lumière brothers very quickly discovered both the magic and the limitations of cinema. They patented their Cinématographe in 1895, toured the world with their amazing device in 1896, patented an Octagonal Disc Stereo Device in 1900, and then effectively gave up film-making to pursue other projects, having concluded that ‘the cinema is an invention without any future’. Others were more stubborn – for better or worse – and experiments with allegedly new cinematic formats, including 3-D, continued throughout the 20th century. According to Ray Zone, the first public presentation of ‘anaglyph’ motion pictures in America took place in 1915 at the Astor Theatre, New York, where viewers got to experience the dreary brown smudge produced by wearing those red-blue glasses (a process that dates back to the mid-19th century) that have now become shorthand for ‘old school’ 3-D. Multiple anaglyph shorts followed, with the 1922 feature The Power of Love (which many cite as the first ticket-paying 3-D feature) reportedly (and perhaps apocryphally) allowing the audience to watch alternate endings through either the red or blue lenses. How’s that for a gimmick? In 1936, the anaglyph oddity Audioscopiks was nominated for an Academy Award in the splendidly self-explanatory Best Short Subject: Novelty category. (If only Avatar had been eligible for a ‘novelty’ award …) In the same year, Edwin H. Land started demonstrating his version of the polarised 3-D system with which we are now all depressingly familiar, and which we are all being assured is once again the future of cinema.
Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany, Goebbels had become a 3-D fan, his propaganda ministry commissioning ‘Raum film’ (or ‘space film’) productions such as So Real You Can Touch It and Six Girls Roll Into Weekend which kicked off a long-standing Third Reich obsession with 3-D (they were also into occult magic, numerology and time travel). Later, and with some poetic justice, the Allies used 3-D photography to identify and destroy Nazi missile silos in ‘Operation Crossbow’, reckoned by some to be the world’s first 3-D powered military operation.
Outside of warfare, however, 3-D remained little more than a novelty, with film studios and movie-goers continuing to show little interest in or enthusiasm for the format, despite its great technical leaps forward. And then, in the early fifties, everything changed, and the reason for the change was not artistic but financial, driven not by consumer demand but by studio pressure. Sounds familiar? As always, the main impetus for the so-called 3-D revolution in cinemas was the need to compete with the home-viewing market, which was threatening to put a major dent in box-offi
ce figures. In the early fifties, the greatest threat to cinema (at least as far as the studios and theatres were concerned) was the rapid rise of television, with oversized sets becoming more established items of household furniture than three-piece suites and handy heated hostess serving racks. Why pay good money schlepping the family to the local fleapit when you could all watch stuff at home for free?
The movie industry’s answer was to big up the whole ‘theatrical experience’, with widescreen framing and projection, scorching colour, epic spectacle and inevitably pointy-pointy 3-D all doing their damnedest to lure punters out of their sitting rooms and back into the cinemas. In 1952, Bwana Devil offered audiences ‘A Lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!’, neither of which (like that hoary old joke about lobster thermidor) you were going to get at home. In 1953, Jane Russell starred in the stereoscopic romp The French Line, the tagline for which promised that ‘She’ll knock BOTH your eyes out’ (oo-er, missus). Meanwhile Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon delivered a man in a rubber suit with weird gills emerging from the watery depths and looming toward the camera with his arms outstretched – an image that still holds an enduring fascination for nostalgic horror and sci-fi fans today. Until fairly recently, this delightfully creaky creature-feature had a place in history as the only 3-D movie to spawn a successful stereoscopic sequel, Revenge of the Creature (boasting an early appearance by Clint Eastwood), although by the time they got round to shooting the third instalment, The Creature Walks Among Us, the 3-D craze had run its course and it was back to good old ‘flat-screen’ business as usual.