British Kinematography (1953)

November, 1953 SPOTTISWOODE '. CURRENT 2-D AND 3-D TRENDS 125 techniques. Modest as this proposal is, it has been turned down temporarily at least, by the British Film Producers Association ; and while it would be improper to comment further on a subject which is still under discussion, it is permissible to suggest that even if the proposal were accepted, it would barely scratch the surface of what needs to be done. The film equipment industry in this country is not much less backward than, on the technical side, are the producers without whom many of them would not be in business. Some of these manufacturers are engaged in making " Chinese copies " of American equipment ; others follow the American lead under licence and produce to specification what has been originated and developed across the Atlantic ; and where an original idea, be it in camera, screen, or editing equipment design, is actually fathered over here, its sponsors will have the greatest difficulty in getting it accepted by producers who innately distrust the home article. It is against this background of an industry which can scarcely be persuaded to look beyond the next picture that I wish to set the technical crisis of the present year. It was on September 30, 1952, that the first of the great innovations, Cinerama, was presented to a wildly excited public in New York, and one year later it was still running the same film in the same theatre. Cinerama was the invention of Fred Waller, who had designed a 16mm. gunnery trainer during the war. Great as was the impact of Cinerama on New York audiences, it aroused little excitement in Hollywood, as I know from personal experience, and this principally because Cinerama had found its backing in the East, and everyone on the West Coast agrees that no other part of America knows anything about making movies ! The revolution brewing in their midst left the producers completely undisturbed. For at this very time, another outsider, Milton Gunzburg, was preparing the first American 3-D feature film. Parenthetically it should be said that the prior development of 3-D and its viewing by the modern polarized method had also been ignored by the film studios. It owed its origin to the Polaroid Corporation, a supplier of material for scientific instruments and for sunglasses, and to the energy of John Norling, a New York producer of documentary films. In this country there had been virtually complete stagnation in the commercial development of 3-D between the experiments of Friese Greene in 1889 and the initiation of the Festival of Britain programme in 1949, a period of 60 years. The Festival programme was carried forward without support from the British feature film industry, which showed little or no interest in what was displayed at the Telekinema ; the 3-D films were severely criticised even in the pages of the Journal of this Society, but no attempt was made there to analyze the reasons for its outstanding commercial success and for the world-wide reactions which it evoked. The same disdainful detachment greeted the efforts made by Milton Gunzburg in Hollywood to enlist the support of the studios in the making of his 3-D film. Conscious of his lack of technical background, he implored their help in supporting the film and giving it the benefit of their knowledge. He knocked on their doors in vain ; no one would help him ; finally he made the film himself, and in spite of its crippling technical imperfections, it became one of the greatest box-office successes of the year. No sooner was its success apparent than the studios, large and small, ordered a spate of 3-D pictures into production, and this in spite of the fact that none of them had studied what had been done before ; none had technicians who were able or ready to grasp the wholly new optical principles involved, or who had given a thought to what a space medium could do beyond the hurling of objects at members of the audience. So the call went out that where one camera had sufficed before, two were now to be used ; and there came into existence the most incredible breadboard contrivances in which cameras were mounted at every possible angle to one another with only the very slightest regard for optical accuracy and operational convenience. As soon as this craze had begun to germinate, a third innovation was brought out,