Above: would Pixar’s new film Up be better in two dimensions?
There are an estimated 6,000 digital 3D movie screens around the world. These screens are selling more than twice as many tickets than comparable sized 2D screens showing similar films, despite tickets for 3D films being about a third more expensive. The most commercially successful men in Hollywood—DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and directors James Cameron and Steven Spielberg—are on board. Katzenberg calls 3D “the next great frontier.” Cameron says it’s “heading beyond movies.” David Puttnam, one of cinema’s most important thinkers, looked into his crystal ball at the Edinburgh film festival in June and foresaw a future when digital 3D auditoriums would be showing the 2012 Olympic games, live theatre and more in this vein. The film world seems set on adding a Z axis to a medium that in its first 11 decades had just an X and Y.
I’m not going to write “it’ll never catch on” because it has already, but I think there’s something wrong with this Z. It’s not that I’m a movie fogey—I think that the colourised version of the Indian epic Mughal-e-Azam is better than the original black-and-white one, and I prefer the dubbed rather than the subtitled version of the German fantasy film The Singing Ringing Tree. Both of these are purist no-nos. But as I watched the new Pixar animation Up at the Cannes film festival this year along with 2,000 others, I felt that I wasn’t seeing cinema. Halfway through, I took my 3D glasses off and there was film again. On, off, on, off; cinema, something else, cinema, something else. It has taken me months to work out why the 3D technique, which uses the parallax differences of human binocular vision to create an illusion of a Z axis, is something other than cinema.
If you are a subscriber, please log in »
This article is available to subscribers only
Subscribing to Prospect is the most reliable and convenient way to receive the magazine every month, and offers the best value.Subscription Types:
Online
An online subscription offers you complete and unlimited access to the entire website, including our searchable archive of every back issue of Prospect, and a PDF edition of each new issue: all this for just £20 per year. Purchase an online subscription »Renewal
Renew an existing subscription »Institutional access
If you are a library, business organisation or any other large institution that needs a multi-user licence, you can obtain institutional access.
Share
Subscribe to post comments
Print
