Specifically the future of cinema - specifically specifically 3D movies, as reported in this Atlantic piece .
How funny that it should happen again - there was that big craze it's-the-new-thing back in the early 1950s, audiences wearing the funny glasses, and then it petered out utterly... and then it was an even bigger craze at the very end of the 2000s and the early 2010s, and that too just petered out, almost utterly.
The piece - "The Future of Film Is Behind Us" by Daniel Engber - focuses on James Cameron, the pioneer of the most recent wave and just about the only major film maker still to be using 3D (with the who-cares Avatar series).
The monster success of Avatar "was ... enough to bend reality toward Cameron’s vision of the future. The industry rearranged itself to accommodate 3-D. New cameras were invented. New theater screens and televisions were ordered and installed. In 2011, 3-D screenings accounted for nearly one-fifth of all ticket revenue in the U.S. and Canada—a couple of billion dollars in brand-new, rocket-on-an-arrow money. Suddenly, the most famous and successful directors in the world were working in 3-D: Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, Alfonso Cuarón, Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese. For three years in a row, from 2011 to 2013, the Academy Award for Best Cinematography went to 3-D movies. Art-house auteurs were trying out the format too: Werner Herzog made a 3-D documentary; Gaspar Noé made a 3-D porn film; Jean-Luc Godard put out a deranged 3-D provocation. Wim Wenders swore he’d never make another movie flat."
But "then the bubble popped..."
"In 2014, 3-D screenings accounted for 14 percent of domestic box-office revenue, according to reports from the Motion Picture Association of America, down from 21 percent a few years earlier.
"More important, the industry had all but given up on shooting in 3-D. Now conversion was the norm: A movie would be shot the normal way, with a single-lensed camera, then shipped off to a giant team of rotoscopers who would remake it as a 3-D film by going through and splitting up each image, piece by piece and frame by frame....
"By the late 2010s, just a tiny handful of directors were still experimenting with the format. Most, like Werner Herzog, never shot 3-D again. But even those like Wenders, who’d sworn that he would only work in 3-D forevermore, have now gone back to making 2-D films....
"These days, roughly 2 or 3 percent of new releases have a 3-D version, and they account for some 4 percent of all domestic ticket sales."
I can proudly claim to have watched the first Avatar for the first time on a screen on the back of an airplane seat - not just in non-3D but about in as un-Cinemascopic viewing situation as imaginable...
But we did see several animated kiddy-type motion pictures in 3D.... also Hugo... just very retinally tiring, and once the novelty wears off...
It's a bit like 5.1 surround sound, and like quadrophonic audio systems before that... most people don't care... and some informed people think the New Thing is actually worse aesthetically or simply at odds with how the ear / eye perceives
I'm not sure if the Atlantic piece says so (it's behind a paywall), but 3-D cinema has a very specific flaw: darkness. The recent process of making 3-D leaves films suffering from dimness and colour desaturation, leaving the audience immersed in murkiness.
ReplyDeleteOf course, there are plenty of other issues with 3-D (the miniaturisation of objects, the physical maladies it can cause, its appropriateness for only a few specific genres), but surely the most significant has to be that it actively reduces the spectacle of cinema by effectively turning the lights down.
Also, experiments with stereoscopy date back to the invention of cinema. Edison, the Lumieres and others all experimented with 3-D as essentially technical exercises, and filmmakers in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union went through vogues of 3-D. The history of 3-D failing to catch on is near 130 years.
I didn't know that - I can just remember watching these films in the movie theater and feeling like my eyes were struggling. But then I was wearing those 3D glasses over my normal glasses so I was always wondering if that was the problem.
DeleteI did read an interesting Walter Murch piece who said there are technical reasons to do with human optical perception that mean that 3D films are never going to feel right or be the optimum for movies as an artform.
Ah interesting that it was tried so early. And then there's the whole thing of 3D photographs. One form of which Brian May is obsessed with and has a collection of Victorian or Edwardian examples.
I came across one kind of 3D photography myself when in Austria - the Kaiserpanorama. https://blissout.blogspot.com/2012/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_29.html
It's rather funny to watch a 3D movie in non-3D, so many gestures meant to emphasize the format seem non-sensical and out of place.
ReplyDelete