Public - Volume 24, Issue 47, 2013

The rapid growth in stereoscopic cinema and television might suggest a recent concern with adding stereo depth to apparent motion, but this is not the case. Attempts were carried out by the pioneers of research on stereoscopic vision and apparent motion in the early nineteenth century. This was possible because of the instruments they invented to simulate motion and depth – phenakistiscopes (or stroboscopic discs) and stereoscopes. Sequences of still images could appear to move and paired pictures (with small horizontal disparities and presented to different eyes) were seen in depth. Subsequently, many varieties of stroboscopic discs and stereoscopes were devised and their popularity increased enormously after 1840, when combined with photography. Thereafter, sequences of stereoscopic photographs were presented in instruments called bioscopes or fantascopic stereoscopes so that the apparent motion appeared in depth. Unlike the simulation of motion and depth alone, their combination proved more difficult to achieve.

This article is an historical survey of stereoscopic painting and films and their makers. Additional consideration is given to the use of the third dimension in art and how that has affected public and critical perception of the work.

Stereoscopic imaging has had a rich history in photographic, televisual, cinematic, theme-park and gaming form since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, 3D media’s many booms and busts have led it to be treated as a cyclical ‘fad’. Its peak moments suggest a trend of death and rebirth, and stereoscopy has come to be characterized, more than any other media form, by its continual passing. But while scepticism towards this form has become a standard popular and scholarly refrain, less acknowledged is the way in which 3D imaging has remained in public consciousness and at the peripheries of popular visual culture throughout its lengthy history. This article explores the interstitial moments of stereoscopic media’s history and takes account of the determinants that have allowed it to thrive and wane while foregrounding the role that popular imagination has played in allowing it to persist.

In ‘Muybridge’s enthalpy’ I present formal and historical analyses of a stereograph by the renowned American photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The Stereograph (1873) depicts three vertical steam pumps. I contextualize Muybridge’s stereograph with his subsequent work in composite photographs, many of his techniques perfected while in Central America. I focus particularly on an 1876 image that radically distorts its content – clouds and a volcano crater – into abstraction. I claim that Muybridge’s work in stereography, and his merger of multiple images in single frames, re-position our understanding of Muybridge’s proto-cinematic work within industrial culture of the time, particularly the newly declared Laws of Thermodynamics. I argue that J. Willard Gibbs’ theories of enthalpy, or or ‘warming in’, offers a new view upon how Muybridge strove to encapsulate the ephemeral in his steam pump stereograph and cloud composite. I conclude that the stereograph may be read as a clue to the explosive abstraction of his commodity practices.

Our article focuses on Laurens Hammond’s stereoscopic inventions of the 1920s. The ‘Teleview’ system, an early example of S3D cinema, synchronized projectors and seat-mounted viewing apparatuses with the a/c motor that would later drive his musical instruments. Shortly after its acclaimed New York premiere in 1922 (mere months after the similarly ill-fated S3D Fairall system), Hammond reconfigured his invention into a live vaudeville act using his competitor’s simpler but less effective anaglyph technique. Patented and licensed to the Ziegfeld Follies, his largely forgotten ‘Shadowgraph’ astonished audiences with live stereoscopy. Our article postulates that this apparent regression from electromechanical cinema spectacles to disposable theatre glasses was due less to the technical and economic challenges of Hammond’s initial system, and more to its construction as a form of Tom Gunning’s so-called ‘cinema of the attractions’.

This article examines an early stereoscopic film made for and shown at the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York. The film In Tune with Tomorrow was commissioned by the Chrysler Motor Company, and featured 3D stop-motion animation of a car magically assembling without human intervention. This film is discussed in the context of a range of large and small screen experiments conducted at the fair. The rise of American industry’s use of film technologies as integral elements of ascendant its communication strategies is also addressed.

S3D and AR, emergence and augmentation, have certain similarities, for both call into question the surface of the image on the side of the viewer by introducing virtual elements into real space. A comparative analysis of the two strategies reveals that the mimetic program that largely structures the production and reception of technical images is not centred squarely on illusion, but more generally on immersion and more particularly on egocentric spatial immersion, which perceptually places the viewer at the centre of the virtual world. But at the present time, as they have developed so far, S3D and AR are imperfect responses to this ideal.

Transitions 3D is significant to film scholars because it is the first stereoscopic live-action IMAX film. The film also anchors important histories of Canadian film innovation and culture. From a technical perspective these histories include the development of large format cinema cameras and projection systems, early computer animation, and immersive cinema exhibition architecture. From a cultural perspective, Transitions 3D was the culmination of a prolific and wide flung collaboration of Canadian film-makers and technologists that was forged in response to the cultural mandates of the NFB and the national showcase agendas of successive world expositions. Low’s nuanced modernist ideology coupled with his sustained artistic and technical experimentation were central to these developments, driven in particular by his quest for an immersive cinema that would unite the film viewer and film subject in a stereoscopic cinematic space.

Stereoscopic film has long held an allure as the ultimate in fidelity for cinema and, as such, been a goal for those seeking the most compelling illusion of reality. However, the fundamental and technical limitations of the medium introduce a number of artefacts and imperfections that impact the viewer experience. The renaissance of stereoscopic three-dimensional (S3D) film requires that film-makers revisit assumptions and conventions about factors that influence the visual appreciation and impact of their medium. This article will discuss a variety of these issues from a perceptual standpoint and their implications for depth perception, visual comfort and sense of scale. The impact of these perceptual artefacts on the suspension of disbelief and the creation of alternate realities is discussed as is their deliberate use when artistic considerations demand breaks with realism.

The Stewardesses (1969) is an unjustifiably neglected experiment in 3-D cinema. The first in a series of hard- and soft-core pornographic features in three dimensions produced in the 1970s, it provides critical opportunity to review a ‘truism’ of media studies: that pornography drives the invention of new technologies. The Stewardesses unwitting reveals how our desire for technology (our wonder at the capacity of film to reach into our space) is at odds with our desire for what it purveys (bodies in states of desire). The film makes us aware of how a 3-D film arouses our glasses, not our eyes. Since 3-D camera lenses could not provide close-ups, the film works without a key ingredient of the pornographic vocabulary. Through 3-D technology, The Stewardesses produces a strange new genre: pornography that fosters attention to peripheral spaces and that discourages the traditional monomaniacal or cyclopic focus of the spectator of pornography.

This article examines the film Pina-3D (Wenders) as a case study for contemporary stereoscopic cinematography methods. While S3D cinema is often associated with highly kinetic and mobile qualities, especially in relation to filming dance, the author argues that the cinematography in Pina interprets dance as tactile exploration of space. The article outlines a number of formal strategies used to connect the stereoscopic image to tactile proximity in the film. These strategies include stereoscopic portraiture, oscillation between flattened and layered framing, and curtaining. The article also argues that the theme of ambivalent human touch that recurs throughout Pina Bausch’s choreography in the film also works as a rhetorical analogy for the ambivalent contact of the stereoscopic image. In particular, contemporary S3D cinematography discourse self-consciously navigates the line between stereoscopic contact as immersive pleasure and as a potential harmful assault on the spectator’s body.

One of the most debated aspects of contemporary 3D cinema is its use of the illusion of depth that extends from the screen into the audience’s space. This is known in technical terms as negative parallax and by audiences as the ‘pop-out’. Critics often equate negative parallax with low-budget 1950s 3D films, such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), wherein the amphibious claw of the title monster as it reaches for the viewer seems to exploit 3D technology for cheap thrills and quick profits. In discussions today about how 3D should be used, commentators wish for a more mature and artistic 3D cinema; this cinema would mine the depth behind the screen, using, in technical terms, positive parallax. This article investigates negative parallax in live-action films of the last two years to question the typical terms by which it is appraised within the parallax debates. I argue that negative parallax’s dismissal as gimmickry has obscured the vital functions it serves in film. The objects that appear to enter the theatre’s space help to identify essential aspects of a film’s style and genre, as well as its relationship to other media that play a role in adaptation. While, because of its hypervisuality – it breaks the fourth wall – the pop-out seems anomalous in relation to the invisible style usually associated with classical Hollywood film, it has significant ties to cinematic techniques that have previously been deployed for the purposes of visual emphasis. My goal is to suspend aesthetic arguments about negative parallax to shed light on the textual roles this key element of the 3D style and experience plays in a variety of films, including superhero blockbusters, horror and fantasy films, comedies, and art-house documentaries, while situating it in the context of past visually arresting techniques used in mainstream cinema.

All media are undergoing a major shift from traditional modes of production to new digital forms. The reemergence of 3D stereoscopic films is the product of a large number of cultural and technological changes that have come into play over the last decade. Games, graphic simulations and the web are all to varying degrees implicated in the interest that creators and viewers are showing in new forms of interactions with images as well as new production models. And, since computers of varying sorts and sizes drive all of these technologies, it is pretty clear that the age of analogue images has passed.

The 2012 Alternativa artistic project in Gdánsk emphasized the need for the return to material stability, approaching the field of the political from the perspective of a tactile and concrete point of view. Rather than absorbing the artistic positions, or the theories underpinning them, one could approach the exhibition as a process for the appraisal of a model. Alfredo Cramerotti’s response takes the form of delineating four types of models that correspond to four artistic positions that struck him as the most compelling: Partizan Publik and Arne Hendricks, Mateusz Herczka, Hiwa K and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.