Cinema Canada (Apr 1976)

the audience itself. For it seems to me that film’s basis as an art lies in this process of the creative selection of images on the part of the filmmaker or makers. A 3-D person looking off at an angle just “‘ain’t the same thing” as a 3-D person staring you right in the face. In this sense holographic film is simply too 3-D for its own good. Having said this how do we re-classify “holographic cinema’’? Electronic theater? Perhaps — it would seem to have more in common with the stage than with the screen. (Imagine Hamlet or Macbeth performed with real ghosts!) But it may just as well come to be considered as a separate medium in its own right. Certainly moving holograms will have many applications in science and communications. No longer is it groundless to speculate on the possibility of having a sit-down face-toface discussion with someone who is thousands of miles away. Laser-based television sets are already being developed. If and when a stereoscopic film system not requiring glasses is developed such movies could perhaps be transmitted and reproduced holographically. But if moving holograms came to be considered the sole form of 3-D cinema, I believe that the art of film would suffer. Stereoscopic Cinema Stereoscopic cinema (or any film system using pairs of images to produce binocular disparity) is not new, but it is largely untouched. And yet even in its present awkward and crude form stereo film has many possibilities for expanding the film artist’s potential for expression. I have recently taken a large number of stereoscopic slides and based on my observations of these still pictures I have extrapolated some possibilities for film. 1) Depth quality: As a general rule the stereo scenes with the strongest sense of depth are those which already have a good sense of depth through monocular cues prior to stereopsis (such as scenes of platforms or streets, which emphasize linear perspective). 2) Viewing pyramid: When viewing any film we see through an imaginary four-sided pyramid whose apex is our eyes and whose lines extend out to the four corners of the screen and beyond to infinity. This pyramid becomes important for stereo films as the closer an object is meant to appear to the viewer the more centrally it must be located in the frame. As that same object moves towards one side of the screen the pyramid will push it back until it finally reaches the picture plane at the screen edge. When the central portion of the picture connects in some direct way with the edge, as in a linear perspective shot, the viewer will tend to see the whole scene as behind the screen. 3) Use of lenses: By bringing in more peripheral vision and exaggerating perspective, wide angle lenses produce very effective stereo shots. Telephoto lenses, which in 2-D flatten perspective, nonetheless produce interesting stereo shots — there is a sense of depth between foreground objects and background, but the objects themselves look rather like flat cardboard cut-outs. One can see how in this situation the zoom lens is invested with even greater power. 4) Separation of images: Normally pairs of stereo images are photographed from positions separated by three to four inches in order to roughly correspond to the displacement of our eyes. But this separation can be varied in order to alter the spatial relationships of the objects in the scene — the greater the separation the greater the binocular disparity and so the greater the depth. This technique can be used to photograph city-scapes where a separation of four inches would have little effect on buildings hundreds of yards away. An interesting side effect is that as the depth Moving through a vacuum in 2001: A Space Odyssey. of a scene is increased by greater separation of the images the apparent size of the scene decreases. And so a city taken with image separation of a hundred feet tends to look like a miniature model of the same city viewed at close distance. In combination with camera angles this could be used to make one person appear smaller than another. Or it could be used to show the gradual separation of two people by increasing the depth space between them. Or perhaps for special effects a model could be made to appear life size by decreasing the separation of the images. 5) Mixing 2-D and 3-D: Many interesting effects could be obtained by purposely photographing the two images “out of synch”. For instance you could have a street corner in which all the buildings and sidewalks were in 3-D but where the people and cars were flat and moving through each other — transparent two dimensional ghosts who didn’t really belong in the picture. Or you could have a two dimensional double exposure in which one or both of the images gradually changed (through a zoom lens and/or camera movement) so that they would eventually come together, fuse, and form a single 3-D image. And just as many films today mix black and white and colour, so too could stereo films mix 2-D and 3-D (as well as black and white with colour) to suggest different times, locations, or states of mind. Whether or not 3-D films will use a two-image system is not known. But no matter what system is finally developed, the possibilities for its utilization will be limited only by the artist’s imagination. I have included these examples merely to suggest a few of these possibilities. The list can only grow longer. Quo Vadis, Cinema? “the film medium (besides working with the compulsive realism of photography) gives us more of physical reality than any other art. The fact that the cinema presents so comparatively complete a picture of the real world is sometimes referred to by describing cinema as a total art, and it has encouraged people to think that the way to artistic perfection lies in ap April 1976 / 47