Programme 3 | Memento vivere

3D cinema has been repeatedly linked to, and held back by, expectations that it offers a heightened sense of realism. “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!” promised the tagline of Hollywood’s first 3D feature, Bwana Devil —1952—. Story-telling, diary-keeping, world-traveling spectacle — cinema, the ultimate empathy machine, finally delivering the world to us in coherent temporal and spatial depth. In truth, of course, 3D movies distance us from real experience even more than regular cinema does. The distorted scale and grotesque, volumetric renderings of reality render the visible into something veritably alien and abstract, reminding us that life is for living. Cinema is for anything else.

 

This programme is dedicated to dispelling this myth of 3D realism. We begin with structuralist filmmaker Johann Lurf’s triumphant Twelve Tales Told, which compounds the barrage of movie studio logos that greet any well-funded motion picture, creating a musical composition of corporate orchestral jingles and roaring lions to underscore the all-encompassing bombast promoted by Hollywood capitalism. We then get lost in more than everything, the first stereoscopic film by celebrated “noise” artist Rainer Kohlberger, wherein optical patterns and abstractions ripple across our eyes with alarming disparity, which move in conflict with the human brain’s efforts to forge coherent images from its surroundings.