Movie Note: The 3-D’s

The received idea has long been that the movies, because of their photographic nature, tend to make “unreality,” the fictive premise, seem “real”; as a way of making the verbally proposed Scarlett O’Hara take on the snapshot look of Vivien Leigh in an old-fashioned dress, there is validity to the assumption. Remember that Frankenstein’s monster was a musty old melodrama in obscure print till the movies began exploiting the theme with pictures of moving actors. Certainly, stage and cinema are the arts which require the least active mental cooperation from the witness and in this regard all sense of conviction comes more easily to him. The image does not have to be gathered from the significatory page: it is literally present; the spoken word does not have to be translated to his inner ear: it is addressed directly to his actual ear. At the same time that the new “third dimension” in cinema makes the photograph more like nature, and hence a likelier candidate for the spectator’s vicarious experience (which angle determined the “promotion”), the truth is that the 3-D’s are to be conceived as an important step in the opposite direction: making “reality” seem “unreal.”

The analysis of the technique of three-dimensional movies is relatively simple. It is the stereopticon device, and in one variety of them the stereopticon mechanism is actually involved. The panoramic types, with much wider screens, do not require eyeglasses to produce the effect of “relief,” though these types are also less sharp in depth-illusion. However, the panoramic types approximate the range of the human eyes, assuming in this range an automatic shift to right and left, as when a large landscape is confronted and one focuses first on one side then on the other. What is optically registered by individual spectators varies, for both psychological and aesthetic reasons, even with the traditional cinema range; quantitatively, that is, optical attention can absorb only so much, and qualitatively, the formal modulation of an objective sequence of images relates itself to the modulation of what the individual spectator makes of it.