Forever Young: Cinema in relief

Near the end of the 1940s —approaching the dawn of the first, short—lived wave of 3D features produced by Hollywood studios— Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein professed his faith in the format’s forthcoming success. “To doubt that tomorrow belongs to stereocinema,” he wrote, “is just as naïve as it is to doubt the very coming of tomorrow!” As we know, history played out a bit differently. Unlike most new formats that have joined cinema’s toolbox in the last hundred years —the arrival of sound, of colour, widescreen aspect ratios, and surround sound mixes— 3D has never managed to harness its spectacle, to become subservient to narrative and character-driven storytelling. Instead, it pokes its fingers in our eyes, gets put into time-out, disappears, is reborn, fades away, and arrives once again many years later having never managed to join the industry’s adult table.

 

3D is a true Peter Pan format. It’s always emerging and re-emerging in a youthful demonstration mode, perpetually learning how to behave and what good manners are. Rarely content to merely show objects and spaces in depth, filmmakers tend to use 3D as an opportunity to provoke our eyes, to thrust things and substances out of the screen at us — a fascination with breaking the fourth wall that the format borrows from early cinema, when cineastes weren’t so concerned with pretending that the camera, screen, and audience were nonexistent. These ruptures, like the movement of life on screen and the spatio-temporal shocks of montage, offer sensations that could be deemed the films’ true raisons d'être; the best of them not only introduce us to new, previously unimaginable images, but also encourage us to learn new ways of looking and seeing.

 

Like early cinema’s “attractions” mode, which Tom Gunning reminded us never truly disappeared after narrative became the medium’s standard mode of production in the 1910s, 3D has also developed a life in the underground. While the bespectacled format has become an avatar for the industry’s march toward formulaic franchise blockbusters, global market expansion, and egregious revenue maximization, stereoscopy has meanwhile preoccupied the imaginations of a number of artists and DIY filmmakers since the 1930s. Looking back at the history of these explorations —rooted more in science, personal self-reflexivity, and genuine curiosity than any default gimmicks inflicted upon us by studio technicians— “Forever Young: Cinema in relief” celebrates a century of 3D’s most primal, intimate, and expressive energies.