Programme 1 | Invention Without a Future

*May affect photosensitive viewers.

Taking its name from Louis Lumière’s famous declaration about cinema at its very moment of inception, this programme looks at stereoscopic films made in five different formats more than 90 years apart — all celebrating acts of looking and varieties of movement; all implicitly posing the question: where can we possibly go from here?

 

We open, as the medium itself did, with a train entering a station. Louis Lumière’s dream throughout his cinema practice was to create images that moved in depth, which finally became a reality at the French Academy of Science’s meeting in 1934, where he projected a suite of stereoscopic actuality films, including this 3D remake of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat —1896—.

 

This elemental curiosity for the medium and its possibilities continues throughout the programme. Ken Jacobs’ magical Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 —1991— utilises the Pulfrich effect to reveal hidden depths from archival train and boat footage shot by Lumière cameramen in Paris, Venice, and Cairo. Lillian F. Schwartz’s Olympiad —1971— and Kerry Laitala’s Orbit —2006— both call upon the stunning prismatic technology known as ChromaDepth to append depth onto their electric images of pure, saturated colour. One of the final films made by the transgressive underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger —and the only one made for a 3D format—, Airship 1 —2013— is the opening movement of a triptych comprising newsreel shots of inflatable military aircrafts, using Anaglyph glasses to exploit the material’s radiant reds and blues, which get divided between our eyeballs.

 

The programme concludes with two recent dissections of American life: Scott Stark’s Tulsa —2025—, a flickering fantasia composed of found stereo-images of upper class cocktail parties and colonial tourism, and my own film FELT —2025—, which documents a trek across the Western United States immediately after the 2024 presidential election.