Abstract
The forays into digital three dimensionality (3D) by both mainstream directors (Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg) and established auteurs (Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders) – triggered by the groundbreaking success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) – have not simply fueled heated debate about the possibilities of 3D and its impact on industry players and critics, but have also precipitated inquiry from historical, aesthetic and cultural perspectives. We have thus been witnessing the rapid growth of scholarly interest in 3D across different disciplines to the extent that stereoscopy – which was invented before the advent of the standardized two-dimensional (2D) cinematic apparatus but has been critically neglected – was recently re-evaluated as ‘stereoscopic media’. 1 Still, this upsurge of academic interest in 3D seems long overdue if we consider it not as a special effect in the fields of cinema or photography, but as a particular mode of viewing and imagery that has been pervasive throughout the history of modern media technologies and across different forms and platforms. In the historiography of media art, the rise of 3D in Hollywood and the development of Cinerama and Sensorama in the 1950s are part of the larger traditions of immersive imaging from the 19th-century panoramas to contemporary digital artworks grounded in virtual reality (Grau, 2003). The many ways of achieving stereoscopic illusion suggest that 3D is not reducible to an integral essence or a limited set of material and technical components (such as particular glasses, head-mounted displays, etc.). Rather, following D. N. Rodowick’s revisionist ideas about the definition of a medium, it is more productive to consider 3D as ‘a set of potentialities’, or a range of perceptual effects and cultural ideas, that those material and technical components ‘are capable of expressing’ (Rodowick, 2007: 85).
Set in this context, the six articles in this special Debates section are not intended to offer an essentialist definition of 3D and its applications in cinema and television (TV). Rather, all the articles regard 3D as something through which a host of concepts, ideas, aesthetics and industrial strategies related to cinema and TV are rethought and reconfigured. This conceptualization of 3D as an investigatory tool, rather than as a medium with specific materials and techniques, is indebted to Thomas Elsaesser. In his media archaeological reflections on the relationship between digital cinema and predigital cinema, Elsaesser (2004) proposes taking the digital as neither an established technology nor a distinct medium, but as a ‘zero point’, a kind of ‘heuristic device’ that offers us the ‘chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself, and what we mean by inclusion and exclusion, horizons and boundaries, but also by emergence, transformation, appropriation’ (p. 78). Elsaesser’s consideration of the digital as a ‘heuristic device’ is indeed validated by Akira Mizuta Lippit (1999), who argues that ‘3D cinema makes visible the end of cinema as such – an end marked by the disappearance of cinemas as well as its completion’ (p. 222). Building on the work of Elsaesser and Lippit, using 3D as a ‘heuristic device’ can guide us towards an array of questions about a range of forms of visual culture, the technical and conceptual limitations of their basic apparatuses (such as screen, projection and spectator) and their cultural and industrial topology. Accordingly, this special Debates section focuses less on the specific characteristics of 3D than on a range of archaeological, aesthetic, cultural and industrial underpinnings suggested by 3D’s varying forms from the predigital through to the digital age.
Viewing the rise of 3D not as a new phenomenon but as a recurrence of ideas and discourses encourages us to challenge the established account of its emergence and decline and to excavate multiple histories of the extensive practices of stereoscopic imagery that can be traced back to the 19th century. Media archaeology may be a useful tool for these tasks, insofar as it aims to investigate media through its alternative paths, ‘neglected genealogies and minor traits of history’ (Parrika, 2012: 6). In ‘The stereoscopic attraction: 3D imaging and the spectacular paradigm 1850–2013’, our first Debates piece, Leon Gurevitch revisits the uses and consumption of early stereography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to challenge the commonly received wisdom that it was once a highly popular cultural form that was later ‘defeated’ by 2D photography. Investigating the content, subject matter and composition of early stereocards with regard to their place in media culture, he argues that they not only prefigured the ‘cinema of attractions’, but they were also ‘one of the first mass-produced, marketed and consumed forms of visual attraction in their own right’. Repositioning early stereoscopy within a broader culture of spectacular attraction that dates back to the 19th century allows us to overcome the linear narrative of its historical status (beginning with its emergence and ending with its decline) and to reread the growing popularity of stereoscopic spectacle in digital cinema, TV and gaming as its resurgence. By taking this approach, Gurevitch’s essay poses a crucial question that further studies on 3D should answer – which technical, cultural, economic and discursive forces drive the resurgence of stereoscopic viewing in the digital age?
Another profound challenge raised by 3D cinema is that it provokes us to reconsider not simply the traditional relationship between image, body and screen but also their traditional definitions: that is, although it is a truism that current digital 3D cinema has a rich genealogical link to its historical precedents, its popularity and connection to other visual experiences require us to reconsider what we mean by cinematic image, cinematic screen, and film spectator. In this respect, digital 3D cinema is seen to be in line with the emergence of a new spectator triggered by interactive interfaces, a spectator who is invited to stretch her senses beyond the confines of the traditional rectangular screen that is separated from her seat in the auditorium and to invest her perceptual and cognitive capacities in the constitution of the image itself. This makes it tempting to draw on what one might call the ‘phenomenological turn’ in cinema and media studies led by Vivian Sobchack (2004), Mark B.N. Hansen (2004) and Jennifer M. Barker (2009). According to this line of thinking, cinema and other visual experiences are defined in the light of the viewer’s multisensorial embodiment of both the image and its interface – or, to push this further, in the light of the transformation of the viewer’s body into a ‘surrogate’ screen. This means that although the screen is still maintained as a physical support for the projection of three-dimensional imagery, there emerges a different, intangible yet aesthetically experienced, concept of the screen unconstrained by the parameters of the Cartesian coordinate and Renaissance perspective systems. In this context, Miriam Ross asks ‘where is the screen’ in 3D cinema in order to develop some preliminary thoughts on how to elaborate upon this complicated ontology of the screen and embodied spectatorship in 3D cinema. Drawing on its moments of negative parallax, in which the content of the moving image appears to come towards the viewer, she argues that 3D cinema gives birth to a new screen that ‘makes possible a fundamentally different viewing experience to that experienced in 2D cinema’, one that is constantly reconfigured by the viewer’s sensory – not only optical but also haptic and kinaesthetic – perception and that embodies 3D’s moving objects and their spatial coordinates away from the traditional plane of the screen.
As suggested by Ross’ phenomenological perspective, what is remarkable in the recent rise of 3D is that the new conceptualization of the body–screen relationship that it demands is not confined exclusively to the movie theatre, but has become pervasive throughout the non-cinematic (scientific, industrial, engineering and military) visual applications as well as throughout the other kinds of visual interfaces – as in the Wi-Fi equipped TV screen and interactive small-screen devices such as mobile phones, tablet PCs and portable video game consoles. That is, the new kinds of spatial vision and restructuring of the viewer’s sensorial activities enabled by 3D allow us to see it within a broader media-ecological perspective which encompasses the transformation of the human sensorium. In this connection, this special Debates section also aims at extending Elsaesser’s highly illuminating insight that 3D should be viewed less as a special effect unique to the theatrical movie-going experience and more as a ‘new default value of digital vision’ that is ‘changing our sense of spatial and temporal orientation and our embodied relation to data-rich simulate environments’ (Elsaesser, 2013: 221, 238). Implicitly echoing Elsaesser’s thesis, Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini discuss the theoretical and historical implications of 3D by revisiting Marshall McLuhan’s famous distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. Today’s popularity of 3D across the different yet convergent digital interfaces, Casetti and Somaini argue, both dates back to the culture of ‘high-definition’ that originated in traditional commercial cinema and is symptomatic of the broader cultural tendency of ‘intensifying the shock of the image and allowing an immersion into the represented world’. The authors’ positioning of 3D within the larger traditions of ‘hot media’ recalls Paul Virilio’s ‘logistics of perception’ that has explained the historically maintained complicity between cinematic perception and the scientific and military fields of vision for surveillance and probing. Rather than simply updating Virilio’s thesis on the subjugation of human sight to the technologies of vision, however, they also see certain experimental film and video practices – such as those of Harun Farocki – as opening up a possibility for the politics of the ‘cool’ or ‘low-definition’ image to act as a critical antidote to the ‘high-definition’ culture lead by digital 3D.
Industry professionals and scholars alike have speculated upon the possibilities for accommodating 3D’s immersive effect and its affective potential within the cinematography, composition, editing and narrative of conventional 2D cinema as well as upon aesthetic challenges and opportunities that the former brings to the latter (Prince, 2012: 183–220; Purse, 2013: 129-151). The aesthetics of digital stereoscopic cinema hinges on the effective management of the volume of its diegetic space created both within and beyond the screen in ways that work with all the cinematic elements to enhance or even intensify a movie’s storytelling. The techniques for creating depth effects in stereoscopic cinema necessarily enable directors and other production professionals to reconsider the stylistic templates of 2D cinema, as in, for instance, the tendency to privilege longer shot durations in order to highlight deep focus and allow the viewer time to perceive new spatial information positioned on its z-axis (Brown, 2009: 156; Prince, 2012: 224). It is this impact of digital 3D film’s stereoscopic effects on cinema’s narrative form and a range of its components that Barbara Klinger evaluates when she characterizes the use of 3D in recent Hollywood cinema as the ‘new normal’ that now regulates the production and reception of its movies. Examining a group of commercial US films released during 2011–2012, Klinger argues that recent 3D styles in Hollywood cinema – marked by its use of negative parallax, positive parallax, aerial shots and dynamic camera movements – have become more complex. Those styles now tend to accentuate the narrative drive of the spectacular blockbuster and create a new spatial dimensionality rather than rely purely on the depth illusionism of their 1950s predecessors. Despite its potential to expose the diegetic space as a construction due to its sheer visibility, 3D in recent Hollywood cinema both strengthens and reinvents classical Hollywood style by incorporating continuity editing and offering the coherent exhibition of spectacle. This normalization of 3D, Klinger concludes, results in ‘a stylistic hybridity that demonstrates the relationship between existing and emergent storytelling techniques’.
To be sure, this normalization process has been occurring not simply in the stylistic and formal aspects of mainstream Hollywood film, but also in its industrial ones, including its distribution and exhibition (projection). The recent digital 3D bandwagon advocated by the influential players of major studio, such as James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg and so on, has promoted the rapid conversion of projection systems in theatres worldwide to 3D as a new norm of exhibition. As John Belton (2012) compellingly points out, the industry’s efforts to establish digital 3D as a means for revolutionizing its spectacle can be seen as an attempt to ‘artificially manufacture a novelty phase for digital cinema’ (p. 190), even though 3D itself is not a genuine novelty and digital cinema relies considerably on simulating key properties of its analogue 2D counterpart. Belton’s point suggests that the industry’s adoption of a new technology must involve a degree of remodeling or recycling the very things – its genres, spectacles and narrative conventions – that have long contributed to making its outputs both powerful and influential. The dialectic of the new and the old that underlies the so-called ‘3D revolution’ in the contemporary Hollywood cinema is what Chuck Tryon addresses in his contribution to this Debates section entitled ‘Reboot Cinema’. For Tryon, the use of digital 3D in The Amazing Spider-Man (Mark Webb, 2012) is aligned with the industry’s recent ‘reboot’ strategy to rekindle audiences’ interest in their franchise blockbuster worlds by returning to the characters’ origins. Extending Belton’s insight into digital 3D, Tryon argues that this strategy has a more profound implication as it is intertwined with another idea of rebooting – an array of ‘technological and industrial ideologies of progress meant to invigorate interest in theatrical moviegoing through promises of technological novelty’. Indeed, Tryon’s compelling account of the two modes of rebooting suggests that studios’ rigorous promoting of 3D technology both for production and exhibition is the very means by which they seek to update their franchise blockbuster model, in which the centrality of theatrical viewing meets with the demand of transmedia consumption in synergetic ways.
The importance of probing the industrial and economic factors in thinking about the adaption of 3D to existing 2D formats and content is certainly evident in the field of TV studies, with global electronics manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.) aggressively promoting their brand-new models of TVs and the gradual increase in the number of programs converted into stereoscopic imagery. Keith M. Johnston’s case study of the British pay TV service SKY 3D rounds off this special Debates section by providing a timely contribution in this area, while also alleviating the paucity of previous research on 3D TV. He argues that the production models of 2D TV have strongly regulated the digital 3D TV aesthetic to the extent that its genres and formats are still delimited to sports, live concerts and documentaries. Johnston’s study very effectively and appropriately (in the light of the other contributions to the Debates section) demonstrates that, although 3D offers a vast domain for experimenting with the image’s extended spatiality and the viewer’s affective engagement, within the media industries its potentialities are realized in ways that negotiate with a set of existing material, economic and conventional constraints.