Found this interesting video the other day about why 3D movies don’t “immerse” you in them, and it’s not just because you have to wear those fucking polarised glasses (which is always an additional problem if you’re already a speccy git like me); it’s also down to things like focus and the darkness of the image. Consequently, 3D movies fail to immerse the viewer, the technology gets in the way of viewer involvement. They don’t really draw us in.
My own first encounter with 3D actually came in comic form; Eagle did a bit of an experiment with it in, I think, 1983, and around the same time I remember one of the TV stations (7?) making a fuss about showing an old William Castle 3D production called Fort Ti in actual 3D. And, of course, there was the 3D revival happening in cinemas at the same time, I remember seeing Treasure of the Four Crowns and Metalstorm on the big screen when they hit Australia. (Even as a not especially critical child, though, I felt both of them were shit.) Oh, and Starchaser (which I wasn’t a big fan of either) nearer the end of the 80s boom, and Captain EO (seen at Disneyland in 1987, I recall liking it more than any of the above-mentioned), but I don’t know how much that’s a “real” film as such.
Anyway, the problem I have with the thesis that 3D isn’t immersive is that, as far as I can tell, the whole point in the first place was that 3D came to you rather than trying to draw you in:
The 1950s 3D boom began by threatening the viewer with “a lion in your lap”. 3D was about things coming off the screen. It was about the lion in your lap, the tree branch hanging over your head, the arrow being fired at you, the hand reaching out, the paddle ball being hit at you… Years ago I watched a flat print of Douglas Sirk’s only 3D film, Taza Son of Cochise, in which I could still tell what the 3D gimmick shots were meant to be even though I was watching it flat. Cos that was what 3D did, as far as I was concerned, it jumped out at you. The Bwana Devil poster made that clear 70 years ago. Protrusion was the point. It was there in the very title of the 1981 film Comin’ At Ya!. It was technology overtly showing off.
I don’t know what post-Avatar 3D films are like, admittedly, because cinemagoing is not something I do any more for various reasons. So I haven’t seen any of the newer 3D films, I only saw Avatar itself flat on DVD, and I don’t know if they approach 3D in the same way as the old ones did. I remember thinking once I’d be more interested in 3D if it were, in fact, about drawing you in, if it weren’t so much about the foreground looming out of the screen at you as it were about extending into the background, taking you into the depth of the image… but as someone notes in the comments on that video, cinema already has plenty of ways of depicting that depth. Hugo Munsterberg noticed this way back in 1916, that the paradox of the cinematic image is that it’s flat but nonetheless we perceive things in the image as three-dimensional anyway (and camera movement produces a further impression of this flat image containing three-dimensional space). It’s not really necessary, in other words.
But either way I don’t care as long as those fucking glasses are involved, cos I think they’re still the ultimate reason why 3D doesn’t immerse you (particularly the red/green ones; possibly my eyes just work strangely, but even when I read the 3D strip in Eagle the effect never quite worked for me cos the two lenses didn’t quite cancel out their respective colours properly). They’re an additional imposition on the viewer, even if you’re not a speccy git like I said I am (and if you are they’re even worse). The last 3D film I saw was a Mu-Meson Archives screening in the oughts of The Bubble from 1966, which mostly served to remind me how fucking irritating the glasses are (particularly because of the red/green issue I mentioned); they took me out of the movie for the entire time. And if the point of cinema is, as the video suggests (and I think that point is itself kind of arguable), about drawing the viewer in and involving them in what’s happening on the screen, then it seems to me the glasses will always get in the way of that more than focusing issues and image darkness will.
You must be logged in to post a comment.