New Review of Film and Television Studies

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‘There never really is a stereoscopic image’: a closer look at 3-D media Nick Jones To cite this article: Nick Jones (2015) ‘There never really is a stereoscopic image’: a closer look at 3-D media, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 13:2, 170-188, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2015.1007264 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2015.1007264

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Date: 17 January 2017, At: 19:19

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2015 Vol. 13, No. 2, 170–188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2015.1007264

‘There never really is a stereoscopic image’: a closer look at 3-D media Nick Jones* Department of Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK This article surveys the distinctive optical properties of stereoscopic 3-D in a cinematic context. Through an analysis of the nineteenth-century stereoscope (and the theories of vision that underpin it) and then a critique of the equation of stereoscopy with mimesis, the article works towards identifying several aspects of stereoscopic cinema that are insufficiently explored in contemporary film studies. These include the medium’s immateriality, inherent subjectivity and use of visual distortion. The broader argument of the article is that, in line with the work of Jonathan Crary, there ‘never really is a stereoscopic image’; that is, the phrase stereoscopic image is oxymoronic since the content that stereoscopic exhibition presents is not imagistic and monocular but embodied and illusionistic. This observation has important consequences for how we interpret 3-D cinema. Keywords: 3-D cinema; binocular vision; mimesis; stereoscopy; the stereoscope; subjectivity

The distinctiveness of 3-D media While 3-D has been used as a mode of film exhibition before, most notably by Hollywood in the early 1950s and early 1980s, it has persisted in mainstream cinema over the last few years in a manner quite unlike these earlier periods of adoption. Unsurprisingly, there are those who suggest the embrace of 3-D by contemporary Hollywood studios is little more than a corporate strategy designed to thwart piracy and inflate revenue from ticket sales, with 3-D screenings commanding a premium price above non-3-D alternatives (Ebert 2010, 2011; Kermode 2011). Though such financial factors are no doubt important in the current implementation of the technology, film scholarship has thankfully responded to digital 3-D with more nuanced accounts. These include descriptions of 3-D’s haptic aesthetics (Ross 2012); discussions of digital 3-D’s place in the implementation of digital screening technology (Belton 2012; Elsaesser 2013) and use within the military – industrial complex (Elsaesser 2011); as well as investigations into the manner in which 3-D combines with other cinematic tools in expressing narrative meaning (Higgins 2012; Purse 2013, 129– 151). This work all attends to contemporary stereoscopic exhibition in valuable ways,

*Email: [email protected] q 2015 Taylor & Francis

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exploring not only its industrial determinants but also its representational strategies, and often proceeds through case studies of particular films. In this article, I take a different approach, engaging in some detail with the long history of stereoscopic media in order to ascertain what marks it out from other media both perceptually and aesthetically. Such work will reveal some aspects of 3-D cinema that are often overlooked or little dwelt upon. These aspects lead me to conclude that stereoscopic screenings are inherently different to their 2-D or planar counterparts, and that this difference should be borne in mind by film studies scholars in their analysis of cinematic 3-D content. At root this is far from a new position, as many writers on the subject have explored what they consider to be the unusual relationship between viewer and screen that is produced by stereoscopic exhibition. For instance, Eisenstein ([1948] 1959, 134) proposed that 3-D bridges the chasm between ‘spectacle and the spectator’ in a manner planar cinema can only dream of. Similarly, writing in the midst of increasing 3-D film production in the 1950s, Hawkins (1953, 333) suggests that stereoscopy in cinema might have the capacity to ‘bring audiences into a new and intriguing relation with the picture’. More recently and less optimistically, Sandifer (2011, 62) suggests that 3-D ‘demonstrates’ itself whenever it uses emergence effects (when objects or people seem to protrude from the screen and into the space of exhibition itself), making a viewer aware of their position in the cinema itself in a manner that hinders rather than aids story and which ‘violates the essential metaphor of film’. Belton (2012, 194) also understands 3-D cinema to violate ‘the segregation of spaces that lies at the core of the experience of classical cinema’, condemning it to be an occasional novelty. While a source of 3-D’s power as a medium, then, the abnormality of its presentation also seems to inhibit the widespread adoption of stereoscopic 3-D as a cinematic format. In what follows, I identify in more detail some aspects of this abnormality and explore their consequences. This research is therefore applicable to any period or mode of stereoscopic presentation, but should be of particular use in (and is itself primarily directed towards) the contemporary cinematic era, in which dozens of digital 3-D blockbusters are released on an annual basis. Before either praising or condemning the immersive spectacle of such films, it is imperative that media scholars better understand the structure and implications of stereoscopic material. This article seeks to provide groundwork in this area. As a result, I do not analyse particular film texts in depth, and instead focus on the medium of stereoscopy itself. Many existing accounts of 3-D film understandably map it in relation to planar content. They describe its creations of deep space (behind the screen) and emergent objects (in front of it) as either embellishments of existing cinematic practice and grammar or, alternatively, total denials of them. Yet to consider planar cinema as a stable reference point from which 3-D does or does not deviate fails to take full account of stereoscopy’s representational attributes. As Hall (2004, 245 –246) proposes in his essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1953), the film is a ‘substantially different experience’ in the 3-D format, using a cluttered mise-en-sce`ne of domestic bric-a-brac (lamps, bottles, furniture) to

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create an additional distance between the audience and the film’s characters. The use of layered planes of action and the placing of the drama behind a tangible but inert foreground deliberately directs attention, in Hall’s view, upon the mechanics of narrative over and above emotional identification. This is an accurate and useful observation, but in this article I argue that there are more crucial differences between planar and stereoscopic content that need to be explored, differences that make it difficult if not impossible to describe what 3-D presents as ‘images’ in any accurate sense. These differences go beyond – but directly account for – why, in the above case, the kind of staging Hitchcock employs in his thriller functions so differently in each format. As is shown, a viewer of stereoscopic cinema perceives optical stimuli as relational and volumetric, as spatial, and in the process works to create something of an unreal, supra-optical environment out of these stimuli. For this reason, stereoscopic content has both a palpable materiality as well as a palpable immateriality, the former related to the seeming affinity of the media to everyday binocular spatial perception, the latter related to the felt illusionistic quality that is a result of the abnormal perceptual work being performed by the viewer. While some planar cinema may be thought to invoke these ideas (particularly films involving special photographic or digital effects), this is a far cry from stereoscopy’s inherent impression of phantasmagorical, immaterial spaces, its appeal to subjective experience, and the range of perceptual distortions that can be managed by the 3-D filmmaker. It goes without saying that these aspects of the format are relevant whether viewers are conscious of the use of stereoscopy in any given film or not. This article is split into two halves: in order to account for the particular qualities of stereoscopic content, I first examine critical work on the original device for its distribution, namely the nineteenth-century stereoscope (and its various incarnations). As the history of this entertainment makes clear, realism and illusionism are key concerns in any analysis of 3-D media: that is, it is often asked whether stereoscopic material is more life-like than photographic or pictorial representations, or whether it is inherently unreal and ‘unnatural’. Though this dichotomy is frequently evoked, as I demonstrate here any appeal to stereoscopic media’s potential for mimetic representation is highly problematic. Therefore, in the second half of this article, rather than arguing that stereoscopy in cinema either increases realism thanks to the addition of depth cues or ruptures narrative due to its spectacular effects, I identify some attributes of the format that escape these categorisations and mark 3-D out from other modes of film exhibition. These include 3-D’s demonstrable immateriality, the sense of subjectivity it engenders, and the manner in which it distorts visual space. The stereoscope The principles of binocular vision upon which stereoscopy relies were described by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. His investigations into vision led him to

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design and build the mirror stereoscope, a device that splits vision using angled mirrors and so presents different images to the left and right eyes. As made clear by Wheatstone’s extensive account of this device in his Scientific Papers (1879, 225– 283), his primary purpose was to investigate the physiology of optical perception. He suggests that this project was at least in part prompted by his attempts to discover why pictorial representations of nearby solid objects were not ‘faithful representations’ (226); that is, why such images were always somehow lacking in realism. Placing an object a few inches from one’s face and covering each eye in turn reveals that the left and right eyes discern proximate objects slightly differently: the left eye has a fuller view of the left-hand side of the object than the right eye, and vice versa. The mirror stereoscope supplies pairs of abstracted artistic renderings of such nearby objects (their differences mimicking the differences between left and right eye views), and separates the vision of each eye so that they look at one image alone. As a result, the user of the stereoscope does not perceive these paired images as paired images but as a single 3-D scene. Two flat pictures appear to become a deep space. The stereoscope demonstrates that our cognitive operations provide information about depth and shape through the simultaneous reception of the visual material received by each eye. This phenomenon, known as binocular disparity, operates only at close distances, since the further away an object is, the less disparity between the views of it that are seen by each eye. Wheatstone in this way proved that monocular, pictorial representations of objects in the immediate vicinity of the observer necessarily lack the dimensions that would otherwise be associated with them, and that the fusion of two monocular representations was a closer approximation of human vision than a single planar rendering. He would claim this was a new scientific insight into the perception of depth and shape, although some of his contemporaries suggested it was a commonly known fact (see Zone 2007, 9); regardless of the truth of the matter, the mirror stereoscope was the first technical demonstration of this phenomenon. The large size and logistical intricacy of Wheatstone’s mirror stereoscope kept it from being more than a piece of lab equipment. However, several years after Wheatstone’s initial experiments, Sir David Brewster designed a more popular version of the stereoscope using angled lenses or prisms rather than mirrors to keep the left and right eye views separate. This allowed Brewster’s stereoscope to be smaller and, moreover, to mimic a pair of binoculars, a quality also shared by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s even more user-friendly 1861 version of the device (Schiavo 2003, 123; Zone 2007, 10 –12).1 Hand-held stereoscopes of this sort were presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, where Queen Victoria’s impressed reaction led to the mass commercial success of the apparatus – close to a quarter of a million stereoscopes were sold in Paris and London following her glowing commendation (Gernsheim and Gernsheim 1969, 255). Stereoscopes of this kind were easily loaded with sets of stereocards featuring side-by-side images. These images were often photographic; indeed, the invention and development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century

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greatly contributed to the stereoscope’s popularity, as photographic content had the capacity to be more detailed and more easily aligned than the geometric drawings (and, later, daguerreotypes) that Wheatstone had used in his original mirror-based stereoscope. However, despite being a generally popular amusement throughout the latter nineteenth century, the stereoscope nonetheless eventually fell out of favour in the 1920s. As a result, and regardless of the fact that it was purchased in large numbers and was used in various contexts throughout Europe and America for many decades, the stereoscope became all but forgotten within popular memory. Decline and difference Accounting for why the stereoscope faded away in this manner is crucial for understanding the place of stereoscopy in cinema. After all, in the twentieth century cinema has been an overwhelmingly photographic medium, and a commonly offered theory around the decline of stereoscopes suggests they were displaced by the rise of photography. This explanation is convenient but incomplete. As Gurevitch (2013, 397) argues, far from being commercial and visual equivalents, one more successful than the other, stereoscopic content and photographic content ‘performed very different functions and were consumed in quite different ways to quite different ends’. He locates stereoscopy’s particularity in its depiction of spectacle, be it industrial (trains, zeppelins, ships) or natural (exotic animals, mountains, valleys).2 This was in marked contrast to photography’s association with the more banal or everyday aspects of Victorian life. However, though the stereoscope fell out of fashion, as Gurevitch (2013, 402 –403) shows stereoscopic exhibition remained a viable form of spectacular presentation across various visual media throughout and beyond the twentieth century. This spectacle lay not only in the content being presented but also the manner in which it was presented. Unlike Gurevitch, Thomas Elsaesser suggests that photography was to blame for stereoscopy’s waning popularity, but in an even more insidious manner than merely through photography’s markedly greater popularity. For Elsaesser (2013, 232), the clear popularity of stereoscopes was ‘repressed’ in the twentieth century in order to maintain the supremacy of the ‘painterly paradigm’ upon which cinema and related monoscopic media rely. Closer to the camera obscura than the stereoscope, cinema and photography demand that the illusion of volumetric space be created on a planar surface according to geometric codes.3 Like painting before them, both cinema and photography disregard the fact of binocular disparity in human vision and propose instead that realistic, indexical representations of the world can be generated through monocular means. Under such a regime, Elsaesser suggests, stereoscopy’s quite different proposals regarding the perception of space and its disclosure of how this perception can be tricked had no place. Similarly, Clair (1978, 103) proposes that photography displaced stereoscopy thanks to the

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former’s ability to enter capitalism’s circuits of material and symbolic exchange, something that he suggests cannot be accomplished by the intangible, ‘totally transparent’ creations of the stereoscope. As a consequence, 3-D cinema seems to become an impossibility before it has been put into practice. Burch (1990, 6– 7) tellingly proposes that film’s seemingly innate ambition to depict deep and realistic space – its ‘aspiration to threedimensionality’ – was satisfied more completely by the institutionalisation of continuity filmmaking in the 1910s (which Burch terms the Institutional Mode of Representation) than could ever be achieved by ‘red-and-green or polarising spectacles’. Paradoxically, for Burch as for many filmmakers, audiences and critics, spatial representation can be more satisfyingly realised through monocular cues and standardised editing than through a technology that provides palpable binocular data regarding depth and shape. Moreover, adding depth information potentially threatens accepted ideas about the artistic possibilities of the cinematic medium. For a formalist like Arnheim (1957, 12 – 14), the absence (or ‘obliteration’) of three-dimensionality is one of the many ways in which film distinguishes itself from real life and thus becomes a distinctive art form. Sitting somewhere between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, films can productively cut up the planar image through superimposition and framing, and meaningfully stage in depth to make some objects or people much larger in the frame than others. These effects, Arnheim suggested in 1933, would be lost in stereoscopic presentation (as they are, it seems, in everyday life). This implies that he considered stereoscopy in the same vein as colour and sound – unnecessary modifications to an artistic medium that is better off (that is, more artistic) without them. Yet while cinema is and always has been overwhelmingly monocular, the wealth of patents and inventions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century that all sought to create moving stereoscopic scenes from sequential presentations of stereocards (exhaustively described in Zone 2005; see also Belisle 2013, 121 – 122) testify to the unresolved nature of cinema just prior to and during its codification as a discrete medium. These and later attempts at 3-D cinema may not have led to stereoscopy becoming an innate aspect of film exhibition, but their presence should serve as a reminder that monocular moving images were not (and are not) the stable, unquestioned telos of film exhibition. As Gurevitch (2013, 403) shows, a broad historical analysis of stereoscopy indicates its persistence as a ‘popularly embraced technique applied to multiple media forms’. This persistence seems to imply an affinity between monocular and stereoscopic exhibition, their co-presence signifying that they are alternative delivery systems for essentially similar content. Rather than taken as read, this equivalence should be rigorously questioned. Burch’s clear delineation between the continuity style and 3-D – and his implication that only one or the other is needed – shows on the one hand the potentially similar goals of these two techniques; but it also once again emphasises the inherent difference between these forms of exhibition. This

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difference, as indicated, lies in divergent codes for spatial representation: on the one hand geometric and schematically planar, on the other embodied and avowedly illusionistic. The experience of the latter, as Elsaesser suggests, destabilises the assumptions of the former to the extent that it is actively ‘repressed’. The insights into perception offered by the stereoscope, and its disruption of existing theories of sight, are described by Laura Burd Schiavo. While Renaissance perspective was founded on a ‘single, ideal eye’ that functioned as a ‘passive mechanism for recording the external world and transmitting its image [to the observing subject]’ (Schiavo 2003, 116), Wheatstone’s stereoscope revealed that the mind could be fooled into tangibly seeing depth where none existed. Intriguingly, the stereoscope sought to prove the fact of binocular vision through its artificial replication. Moreover, it showed that it was the observer herself that fused two dissimilar images into a three-dimensional perception of the world. Schiavo (2003, 116) suggests that, as a result of this, the stereoscope ‘insinuated an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation’, challenging what was previously an ‘assumed correspondence between objects and their retinal projections’. While previous visual paradigms had suppressed the subjectivity of the viewer, the stereoscope seemed to disclose it in a very direct manner. These inherently subjective qualities lead Jonathan Crary in his influential book Techniques of the Observer (1990) to propose that the stereoscope was not an alternative to photography – that is, a method of presenting similar visual content which provided more depth information yet was fundamentally alike – but was rather a direct challenge to it. For him, stereoscopy shows monocular, objective visual representation to be a fiction of visual mastery rather than its scientific attainment. The stereoscope’s manipulation of the physiological fact of binocular disparity reveals the provisional nature of the content perceived by each eye (Crary 1990, 48 – 49). The manufactured binocular scenes generated by the stereoscope prove that the physiology of the viewing subject is a crucial part of their perception of the world. As Crary (1990) puts it: There is no longer the possibility of perspective under such a technique of beholding. The relation of observer to image is no longer to an object quantified in relation to a position in space, but rather to two dissimilar images whose position simulates the anatomical structure of the observer’s body. (128)

The illusion of depth that the stereoscope provides is therefore a subjective event, coupling the observer with the apparatus and presenting a fused, contingent optical production. This is very different to the singular and seemingly objective point-of-view constructed by photography. While Crary is clear that this makes stereoscopy indicative of a new and highly modern form of vision, Schro¨ter (2014) questions this assumption. He argues that while Crary’s comments are valuable, his work in Techniques of the Observer confuses the extent to which multiple forms of what Schro¨ter refers to as ‘optics’ can be co-present at any given historical moment. As such, while for

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Crary stereoscopy inaugurated a modern form of subjective vision, Schro¨ter (2014, 4– 27) proposes that we think of stereoscopy as a form of ‘physiological optics’, relying as it does upon the physiology of the observer, while photography and other monocular media are ‘geometrical optics’ thanks to their use of geometrical projections upon a flat surface. The dominance of one or the other of these forms might be persuasively argued, but only through bias and distortion: as Schro¨ter (10) points out, Crary’s reference to the appeal (or lack thereof) of 3-D ignores the format’s use beyond mass media, including its ‘increasingly important role within the diverse scientific or media practices’ (see Crary 1990, 127 n. 45). Schro¨ter thus helps expand our understanding of stereoscopy beyond Crary’s important groundwork, emphasising the consistent presence of the medium since the nineteenth century and further arguing for its distinctiveness as a visual form. Though the stereoscope uses planar source material (the images shown separately to each eye), it submits these to unusual and highly novel contemplation, and it is this that makes its form of media presentation distinctive, not only from planar media but from everyday perception. The eyes of the stereoscope user focus upon a fixed distance (always the distance from the observer to the twinned planar content) even as they converge at points in front of or behind this distance, angling themselves to perceive objects which are not corporeally present. This is not a sensation we come across under our normal conditions of vision, and contributes to the uniquely illusionistic quality of stereoscopic media. Two ordinarily linked visual systems – focus and convergence – are dislocated from one another and operate independently. This becomes obvious when stereoscopic material is insufficiently coordinated, as eyestrain (potentially leading to headaches) results from image misalignment or overly extensive disparities between focus and convergence points. Such visceral reactions point towards the way in which stereoscopy involves the body and its systems of perception to a greater extent and in different ways than do planar media, including cinema. That said, Schro¨ter (2014, 15) somewhat surprisingly groups stereoscopy with planar cinema itself in his category of physiological optics, thanks to film’s reliance on and exploitation of ‘the physiological conditions of perceiving movement’. Even accepting this it can still be asserted, in line with Schro¨ter’s (401) suggestion of co-existing and multiple forms of observer (as well as his promotion of continuums of optical forms over disconnected and discrete categorisations), that stereoscopy sits nearer physiological optics and planar cinema nearer geometrical optics. After all, instead of a geometric scene upon a plane that can be measured, and so mastered, the stereoscope provides a visual experience that is embodied and ephemeral, that exists ‘nowhere but in the mind’ (Jay 1993, 132, n. 181). In his own account of the stereoscope, Brewster (1856, 53) describes how it generates the effect of relief through a rapid succession of moments of coalescence: our eyes sequentially unify different parts of the scene presented one after another as our eyes wander across it. Crary (1990, 122) concludes from this comment that ‘there

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never really is a stereoscopic image’, that the visual experience it provides ‘is a conjuration, an effect of the observer’s experience of the differential between two other images’. The very phrase ‘stereoscopic image’ is therefore oxymoronic, placing stereoscopic content into a monocular optical bracket in which it does not fit. It cannot be claimed that this is solely a semantic distinction: stereoscopic content is not two side-by-side or overlain images; it is their fusion and surmounting by our own perceptual apparatus. This is as true for cinematic 3-D as it is for the stereoscope. Understanding stereoscopic media this way reveals the extent to which it differs from planar media. It also indicates the gulf between stereoscopic 3-D and everyday perception. The illusion of realism, the realism of illusion Tellingly, not only did Wheatstone’s original experiments apparently proceed from his interest in the insufficient ability of monocular artistic representation to depict proximate objects, but in one of his earliest comments about his mirror stereoscope he asserts the capacity of the apparatus to rectify this inability. Foreshadowing the applicability of photography to the stereoscope, Wheatstone (1879, 233) suggests that the right amount of ‘attention’ in the drawing and painting of the twinned images being used would make real things and their representation through the stereoscope indistinguishable from one another. This marks the beginning of a long and troubled equation of stereoscopic media with mimetic realism. In the popularisation of the stereoscope, its initial emphasis upon scientific inquiry was replaced by a conception of the device as an unparalleled method for faithful, seemingly unmediated representation (Schiavo 2003). Stereoscopes and stereographs were sold on the basis of their ability to show unusual or far-off sights and places in a manner that was akin to witnessing them with one’s own eyes, in the process offering consumers ‘a new canon for truth’ (Fowles 1994, 91). Designer of a hand-held stereoscope and vocal advocate of the medium Holmes ([1859]1980, 74), for instance, states that though a pictorial image may have ‘the effect of solidity’ (that is, may appear faithful to the depth and volume of a real scene) only in the stereoscope is this effect ‘so heightened as to produce an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth’. Similarly, in 1867 visual theorist Helmholtz ([1867]1985, 303) suggests that stereoscopic photographs ‘are so true to nature and so life-like in their portrayals of material things’ that encountering the reproduced object in real life can add no new information about its form and shape. For Holmes and Helmoltz, as for many others, part of the spectacle the stereoscope offered was its convincing illusion of reality. The ‘parlor stereoscope’, as Schiavo (2003, 131) calls the commodified form of Wheatstone’s earlier invention (and of which Holmes’s stereoscope was an example), ‘enacted a confidence in vision and in the transparency between the object and its representation’. This for her seems quite contradictory to the original intention of the mirror stereoscope, and its crucial but soon seemingly forgotten revelation that ‘vision occurs independent of reality’ (Schiavo 2003, 113).

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Nonetheless, a positivistic understanding of stereoscopy – a presumption that it is able to disclose a stable external world – is eventually imported into cinema. As a result, 3-D films are sometimes described as a revolution in cinematic technology similar to the application of synchronised sound in the late 1920s or the comprehensive take-up of colour film stock in the 1950s and 1960s; in other words, as another milestone on the road to a fully mimetic cinema. As Maltby (2003, 235 –236) suggests, this fits a pattern whereby technological innovations are sold through the invocation of greater realism, even if the attention paid to the generation of this realism turns it into a form of spectacle. In the case of 3-D, it is argued that since human vision is binocular, stereoscopic cinema more accurately reflects real-life perceptual conditions than does planar cinema. As Pennington and Giardina (2012, 5) sum up at the beginning of their book on digital 3-D, ‘proponents of the format argue that since we see in three dimensions 3D is simply a more realistic, more natural approximation of how we experience life’. The stereoscopic camera system designed by cinematographer Vince Pace and director James Cameron for underwater IMAX documentaries, and which was later used on Avatar (2009), is evocatively called The Reality Camera System (see Prince 2012, 216– 217), and in interviews Cameron stresses the biological usefulness of binocular perception (Zone 2005, 143 –144). As already seen, Arnheim’s (1957, 12) implication that stereoscopic exhibition might dilute cinema’s meaningful composition of objects within the frame is based on what he sees as a close equivalence between 3-D and ‘real life’ perception. However, equating stereoscopic exhibition with mimesis can lead to hostile evaluations of the 3-D format precisely because it seems to fail at this level. In 2010 and 2011 Roger Ebert’s widely circulated complaints regarding 3-D films centred on the fact that 3-D is clearly not like natural vision, and never can be: 3-D requires human vision to work in ways that it was not designed to, and is therefore ‘inherently brain-confusing’ (Ebert 2011). As the above-mentioned work on the stereoscope has shown, Ebert’s comments are entirely accurate, but should not be used as a condemnation of the medium. Rather, they should once again draw attention to the unusual perceptual work that stereoscopy asks us to execute, work quite unlike that performed in either real-life or monocular pictorial perception. As Krauss (1982, 314) describes in relation to the stereoscope, stereographic space – unlike everyday vision – is organised ‘as a kind of tunnel vision’, its ‘experience of deep recession’ being ‘insistent and inescapable’, the ‘micro-muscular’ efforts the eyes undertake when re-focusing between depth planes producing a ‘kinesthetic counterpart to the sheerly optical illusion’ presented.4 Earlier accounts of cinematic 3-D also show an awareness of the uniqueness of the format, of the strange phenomenology of its optics. In an essay from 1953 on Hollywood’s use of technological innovation, the great believer in cinematic mimesis Bazin ([1953]1997, 88) initially implied that stereoscopy adds realism, since he included the absence of the third dimension on a list of conventions that contribute to film’s ‘abstraction’ of reality; but he noted subsequently that objects

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represented stereoscopically exist in a ‘ghastly or impalpable state’, and so create an ‘unreal, unapproachable world’. For Eisenstein, writing in 1948, 3-D cinema had the potential to overpower the spectator in ways that were not available to its planar alternative. He suggested that in 3-D films, the screen ‘“swallows us up” [ . . . ] and “pierces” us with unprecedented force’ (Eisenstein [1948]1959, 132), and that stereoscopic moving images had the potential to provide ‘new, unheardof qualities in the sphere of expressiveness’ (133). Moreover, in its evocation of movement through space and volume 3-D cinema had an affinity with architecture as much as it did with traditional film. These were not empty aesthetic effects for Eisenstein, but were instead part of 3-D cinema’s ability to be an expression of technological and social change, a necessary adaptation in the sphere of filmmaking that allowed it to better illuminate the revolutionary times in which he was living. Unlike the ‘palliatives’ of traditional art, sculpture and cinema, the new art of stereoscopy is for Eisenstein (136) able to keep up with the ‘new ideologies of the new times, with the new potentialities of the new people’, and new methods of possessing and influencing the world. This may be ‘realism’ as far as it enacts a mapping of shifting cultural realities, but it is far from mimesis. Elsaesser to some extent updates Eisenstein’s words in his recent piece on the format and the broader socio-cultural changes it augers. Elsaesser (2013, 221) proposes that in its digital incarnation, 3-D is working to alter our ideas of what an image is and what it is for, and does so in order to keep up with a computerised environment of multiple data screens and endlessly hyperlinked images and text. He rightly takes critics of 3-D to task for considering it to be a (failed) method of ‘enhanced realism within Renaissance space’ (238), when it is actually being used in more subtle ways to evoke a wider array of perceptual cues than those that suggest spatial verisimilitude.5 As in the visual experience offered by the stereoscope, 3-D cinema does not transparently recreate reality, does not make objectively existing space more visible; it instead eradicates presumed correspondences between the observer and that which is observed, creating an unreal space through a novel mode of perception. 3-D films generate a visual illusion in which the observer’s perceptual apparatus is implicated, a physiologically produced sensation entirely particular to stereoscopic media. Interpreting stereoscopic cinema Since stereoscopic content is not only presented to a viewing subject but also created by them, ideas around its form and aesthetics should be adapted accordingly. Far from an (admittedly problematic) attempt to bring cinematic representation closer to the perceptual conditions of a viewer’s life outside the auditorium, 3-D film screenings – in tandem with their attendees – create ephemeral yet strangely material-seeming optical illusions quite different from cinema images or real life experiences. Stereoscopy is a production of media, apparatus and observer; through the arrangement of these the sensation of deep,

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layered space is generated. Projected onto the cinema screen during 3-D exhibitions are two images which, without the aid of polarised or active shutter glasses and the use of binocular vision, do not cohere for the spectator into an impression of stereoscopic space. Without the successful operation of all these elements cinematic 3-D does not exist, since it is not a separate, stable, monocular representation but is instead dependent upon an observer’s perceptual attention. How might this central fact, as well as the properties of stereoscopy outlined earlier, lead to an assessment of cinematic 3-D on its own terms rather than through the lens of planar cinematic representation? In order to begin to answer this question in the remainder of this article, I describe some aspects of cinematic 3-D which are inherent to its method of representation and which have significant consequences for any interpretation or consideration of 3-D film. This is neither an exhaustive list, nor does it provide in-depth examples. Instead it seeks to point to the range of visual and spectatorial effects that mark 3-D cinema as being distinct from planar cinema. Immateriality Continually referred to in the accounts of the stereoscope and 3-D cinema cited earlier are the sensations of presence and non-presence produced by stereoscopic content – the perception of objects and spaces as simultaneously corporeal and elusive. It goes without saying that non-stereoscopic media also activates these considerations, asking us to become involved in a fictional story-world while we remain firmly seated in the cinema or in our living rooms, but this latter experience lacks 3-D’s trait of what might be termed tangible immateriality. Stereoscopy produces scenes in which objects and figures have a highly novel insubstantiality, even though they are more substantial than planar cinema in that they enter (and recede from) the space of viewing itself, an effect that makes them seem to corporeally exist in our spatial surroundings (Ross 2013). For Bazin ([1953]1997, 88 –89) stereoscopic content was ‘impalpable’, ‘unreal’ and ‘unapproachable’ as a result of this quality, an assessment that led him to suggest that the medium was only appropriate for fantasy and horror films. These impalpable objects and spaces are moreover being created by the viewer’s own attention. We know on one level that we are being fooled, but the illusion is a more embodied and tactile one than that offered by photography or planar cinema thanks to the overt involvement of the viewer’s own perceptual processes. These are put to a kind of use that is unique to stereoscopic presentation, depth and volume generated by our own faculties rather than geometrically presented as in planar cinema or geographically present as in everyday experience. The resulting impression of tangibility is false because it is solely visual. 3-D media seems to invite ‘tactile exploration’ (Ross 2012, 386) even though it cannot truly provide this since it is an optical rather than spatial experience. In this, 3-D is similar to haptic visuality, in which ‘the eyes

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themselves function like organs of touch’ (Marks 2000, 162) and the observer is drawn into the observed media in a manner that evades a mastering or detached viewpoint. But 3-D increases the intensity of the disconnection between the tactile and the (purely) optical through its use of binocular depth cues and the resulting sensation that the stereoscopic content has a direct bearing on our own spatial milieu. These ideas are most often discussed in relation to 3-D’s use of emergence, or moments of negative parallax, when objects (often weapons or explosive debris) are thrown through the screen and seem to enter the space of the audience (Paul 1993; Sandifer 2011). However, moments of emergence are just the most overt presentations of stereoscopy’s distinctive quality of tangible immateriality, a quality employed in all 3-D films regardless of their use (or not) of attentiongrabbing spear-throws. Subjectivity The necessity of a viewer who is perceptually creating this immaterial content also highlights the seemingly subjective nature of 3-D images. As Crary (1990, 129) describes in relation to the original Wheatstone stereoscope, ‘The illusion of relief or depth was thus a subjective event and the observer coupled with the apparatus was the agent of synthesis or fusion’ (emphasis added). Sandifer (2011) also notes this phenomenon in relation to 3-D films of the 1950s, suggesting that stereoscopic exhibition is a radical break from Renaissance art and perspectivebased imaging, these latter being built upon an implied – that is, not necessarily present – viewer. 3-D, by contrast, requires the physical presence of both viewer and media, creating a new kind of correlation between them: When an object extends off the delineated space of the screen and into the theater, the object attains a real presence and is in an actual relationship with the apex of vision, which, instead of being an arbitrary point, is now the actual viewer’s eyes. (Sandifer 2011, 67)6

Therefore ‘the objects in a 3-D film always exist not only in relation to diegetic space but also in relation to the actual viewer and the theater in which the film is being watched’ (69). In this way, stereoscopic cinema appropriates the viewer into the media being viewed. Using phenomenological film theory, Miriam Ross argues that 3-D films are not just the object but also the subject of perception, and that this becomes most acute when objects or people move towards the implied observer in negative parallax space. In such moments, 3-D ‘expresses its subjectivity in an almost direct form of address’ (Ross 2013, 411). Hollywood studios marshal this sense of subjectivity in their efforts to solicit theatrical audiences, stereoscopy used particularly in the 1950s, 1980s and 2010s to promise a specifically cinematic experience not available elsewhere. 3-D presentations may currently be possible across a range of platforms, including televisions, computer screens and mobile phones, but at present the uptake of these devices is for various reasons marginal.

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Thus, instead of a single commodity that is consumable in a variety of contexts (cinema, DVD rental, internet streaming), 3-D works in tandem with complex sound systems and increasing screen sizes to make cinematic exhibition into a special event, seeking to (re)instate an aura, false or not, around the theatrical film-viewing experience. This imparts a further sense of exclusivity to the cinema as the primary place for the viewing of stereoscopic content.7 Such a positioning of cinematic presentation as unique has ramifications for critics as well as audiences. In her article ‘Spectacular Dimensions: 3D Dance Films’, Ross (2011, n. 1) usefully highlights this when she describes in a footnote how, since the films she analyses were unavailable on DVD in the 3-D format at the time of writing, she was denied the normal critical tools of ‘pausing, slowing and rewinding films in order to undertake detailed textual analysis of screen content’. Refusing to see this as a limitation, she explains how she was forced as a result ‘to engage with the experiential quality’ (n. 1) of the theatrical experience. This kind of critical approach underlines the subjective aspects of stereoscopic exhibition under current technological circumstances. Ross’s comments prove once again, but in a different manner, that there is no such thing as a ‘stereoscopic image’, if an image is thought to be an objective representation that can be impartially scrutinised and which exists independent of our presence. Instead, 3-D conjures ephemeral, fleeting spatial representations in a manner that relies upon a contingent nexus of observation, technology and media. Distortion In the words of Purse (2013, 137), 3-D’s ‘constructed spatial configurations do not have to correlate directly to our real-world experience of space’. This results in a kind of insistent and emphatic stereoscopic vision that, as Prince (2012, 217) describes, ‘occurs in ways that are spatially untrue to our experience of the world’. Used by 3-D filmmakers to emphasise aspects of emotion and narrative within their films, this distortion of spatial cues is more than simply another reason why any equation of stereoscopic media with mimetic representation is problematic at best. Planar representations do not correlate directly with our realworld experience of space either, and are themselves subject to extensive artistic alterations, yet stereoscopy introduces new modes of distortion in the realms of depth, volume and shape, as well as proximity and scale. The greater the distance between an observer and the object or scene observed, the lesser the binocular disparity (the difference between left and right eye views). For this reason painting, states Wheatstone (1879, 225), is an effective replication of vision for objects or scenes that are distant enough that ‘the perspective projections of it, seen by each eye separately, are similar, and the appearance to the two eyes is precisely the same as when the object is seen by one eye only’. By contrast, stereoscopic representation faithfully captures a given object up close. Stereoscopy is therefore innately a medium of closeness. Cinematic stereoscopic effects are most noticeable when they simulate depths of

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up to 10 m, Pennington and Giardina (2012, 5) suggest. In a book on visual cognition, Solso (1994, 162) offers even tighter parameters, proposing that binocular perception only usefully comes into play in the vicinity of our own physical reach, and ‘contrary to common opinion, is not critical for most forms of depth perception’. While the makers of Dial M for Murder capitalise on the innate intimacy of stereoscopic perception by setting most of the drama within a highly cramped London apartment, other films do not restrict themselves in this way and instead adapt stereoscopic cues to make them palpable even within scenarios in which they would not be employed in real life. Filmmakers and stereographers are not limited to mimicking the make-up of our own perceptual equipment (i.e. the average distance between human eyes), and can vary the width between lenses and their respective angles both on physical dual-camera systems and in postproduction in ways alien to our everyday experience of space. This is often undertaken to heighten senses of volume, depth or emergence as required by the needs of story or sensation. The most palpable stereoscopic effects recreate proximity (when the dissimilarity of binocular vision is at its most acute), and so these values are applied to add stereoscopic impact to moments that might not themselves represent proximate or highly immediate content. This indicates the extent to which stereoscopic sensations are a malleable creative tool. Such distortions can be very difficult to detect, but in tandem with the qualities of immateriality and subjectivity they contribute to stereoscopy’s unique visual schema. Characters, spaces and objects can change their volumetric and positional properties between or during shots, or maintain consistent properties that do not match up with other co-present elements. This can be used for expressive purposes. Cubist distortion and spatial flattening is used in Coraline (2009) to highlight the sensations of restriction felt by the film’s protagonist. TRON: Legacy (2010), as Purse (2013, 136) shows, uses mismatched depth cues in order to emphasise the ‘non-reality’ and boundlessness of the film’s digital paraspace. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) employs hyperstereo effects to make certain action scenes ‘pop’, the distance between visual planes accentuated to produce an overtly layered effect. Distortion can also be used to aid spectacle and clarity – in Pacific Rim (2013) stereoscopic cues are carefully managed to retain depth but avoid miniaturisation during moments of large-scale combat between giant monsters and skyscraper-tall robots (scenes in which such cues, if depicted faithfully, would have little or no bearing thanks to the great distances involved).8 Stereoscopic media, then, presents something of a distorted representation of space, making space and objects flexible in ways that can join up or contrast with modes of distortion employed by planar media, but which are nonetheless quite different. Considered in tandem with stereoscopy’s tangible immateriality and innate appeal to subjectivity, these distortions are all the more perceptually unusual. Moreover, variations in screen size between auditoria, and in screen viewing amongst different sections of a single auditorium, can lead to unintended

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stereoscopic effects – the flattening of planes of action, or the miniaturisation of figures or objects, and so on. Such effects have a corporeal impact on the spectator thanks to the embodied experience and perceptual work undertaken during stereoscopic exhibitions. ‘We should not be afraid of the coming era’ Writing nearly one hundred years after the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the first popular adoption of stereoscopic viewing devices, but before the first concerted wave of 3-D film production in Hollywood in the early 1950s, Eisenstein considered stereoscopic filmmaking to have enormous potential. He believed filmmaking, art, and the world itself to be on the cusp of a major transformation, and suggested that 3-D was not only an expression of this but also an appropriate tool for communicating it. He was fascinated by the Soviet stereoscopic film Robinson Crusoe (1946) and was eager to apply 3-D to his own filmmaking. ‘We should not be afraid of the coming era’ he urged: ‘We should prepare our consciousness for the coming of new themes which, multiplied by the potentialities of new techniques, will demand a new aesthetics for skilfully realizing these new themes in the new, breath-taking works of the future’ (Eisenstein [1948]1959, 136).9 His death in 1948 prevented him from contributing to such works. It is not novel for 3-D technology to prompt considerations of cinematic revolution. Words like Eisenstein’s seem in hindsight to be at best naive after a twentieth century of only occasional 3-D adoption in cinematic contexts. Rather than trace such ‘waves’ in this article I have returned to the first method of popularised stereoscopic imaging, the stereoscope, and sought to use historical and contemporary considerations of the nature and qualities of the stereoscope’s presentation of media to better understand 3-D cinematic exhibition. My intention has not been to provide any kind of teleology of cinematic representation, but to indicate how and why stereoscopic films are inherently different to their planar counterparts. The root of this work is the notion that there is no such thing as a stereoscopic image, that stereoscopy is perceived as something other than an image, and that this has important consequences for how we think about 3-D cinema. This fundamental difference of 3-D media is often concealed thanks to the circumstances of its exhibition. As much as cinematic 3-D is marketed as a different, spectacular experience over-and-above standard, planar cinema, it is nonetheless positioned in direct relation to this 2-D alternative. Any cinema screen showing stereoscopic films probably also shows non-stereoscopic content some of the time. In addition, the vast majority of mainstream films released in 3D are also released non-stereoscopically, and audiences are free – depending on their preferences, the availability of screening times, and so forth – to choose between the two formats. As a result, these releases carefully negotiate the competing aesthetic and formal requirements of on the one hand providing

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noteworthy 3-D spectacle (including but not limited to the moments of emergence that Sandifer and Belton focus upon in their studies) and on the other hand being successful, acceptable entertainments when not exhibited stereoscopically. This dualism has haunted cinematic 3-D since at least the 1950s, when audiences allegedly flocked to planar screenings of Dial M for Murder but stayed away from the 3-D version (Furmanek and Kintz 2013). 3-D’s categorisation as a format of exhibition that modifies content destined to be more widely viewed in 2-D (in both cinematic and home entertainment contexts) unquestionably hinders the development of a 3-D aesthetic that stands as and for itself. However, it does not make the above-detailed qualities of the medium – those of immateriality, contingency and distortion – any less pertinent. Whether or not films continue to be exhibited stereoscopically at the rate they have been in the years immediately following the release of Avatar, stereoscopic media will nonetheless persist in exerting a strange kind of fascination. It is necessary both to evaluate this fascination on its own terms and, subsequently, to consider how it changes the meaning and content of individual film texts as well as the landscape of cinema generally. This crucially involves getting beyond both the narrow definition of 3-D as successful or unsuccessful mimesis, as well as the evaluation of it as an aesthetic attraction that is at best optional to any interpretive work, and instead requires appreciating the perceptual qualities it offers on their own terms.

Notes 1. Despite leading the field in the subject, Wheatstone and Brewster disagreed heavily on the origins of the concept of stereopsis (Zone 2007, 5 – 10). 2. Though it is possible to see these groups of spectacle as oppositional, Gurevitch suggests that they are linked by their appeal to a consumer culture that brought both man-made and natural forms under its sway for productive, capitalist ends (Gurevitch 2013, 399–400; see also Fowles 1994, 92). 3. The camera obscura, an apparatus with a two-thousand year history which was directly responsible for the development of photography, suggested that the world could be flattened into an image, and that this image was objectively true and accurate (Crary 1990, 41 – 43). In a camera obscura, light enters a sealed chamber through a small hole and produces an (upside-down) image of the view beyond this hole; this can then be traced or captured using chemical means (as in analogue photography). 4. Somewhat like Schro¨ter, Krauss (1982, 314) links the experience of stereoscope viewing to (planar) cinema, suggesting that both isolate the viewer and provide the pleasure of a simulacrum of reality. 5. Elsaesser here draws on Bordwell’s (2009) piece on Coraline (2009). 6. The marketing of 3-D in the 1950s often stressed this subjectivity. Bwana Devil’s (1952) tagline promises ‘a lover in your arms! a lion in your lap!’, and House of Wax (1953) similarly asserts that ‘the hand is at your throat . . . the kiss is on your lips . . . ’. 7. Parts of the media industry expect that the 3-D format will sooner or later become standard for nearly all distribution, so any stereoscopic product is future-proofed for when this tipping point is reached. 8. This kind of distortion – increasing inter-axial distance (the space between the two cameras) to endow depth cues to objects of immense size – was also deployed in stereoscope photography of the 1850s (see Silverman 1993, 748– 754).

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9. Eisenstein (1959[1948], 135) intriguingly considered 3-D to be evidence of the forward-thinking Soviet mindset, in contrast to critics living in the ‘bourgeois West’, who in their ‘stagnant conservatism’ did not accept the possibilities of 3-D and so revealed themselves hostile to ‘the tendency towards perpetual development inherent in all true art’.

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