More Dimensions, More Fun!
by Olaf Möller
One of the most popular representations of a classic cinemagoing experience is a theater full of people wearing red-and-green glasses looking at the screen half-exultant, half-distressed—this has to be a 3D movie; so much fun for the audience! The bourgeois guardians of taste, however, soon lost interest, as 3D cinema became the dernier cri of the moving image in the early 1950s. In masterpieces like House of Wax (1953), André De Toth’s horror parable on the thin line between appearance and reality, or Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Jack Arnold’s sensitive, sensuously scary tale of a beast’s longing for beauty, they saw nothing but spectacles that were culturally worthless and therefore had to be written off.
Yet the technology was by no means new when in 1952, Arch Oboler’s big-game-hunting adventure Bwana Devil sparked Hollywood’s first brief but severe big-screen 3D frenzy. These films have existed since the beginning of cinema. The oldest attempt dates from 1891. And there have been experiments with stereoscopic recording and projection devices ever since. Innovators kept introducing new technologies, short films were created en masse, and in the United States, even two feature films were produced in 1922. Jacob F. Leventhal and John A. Norling’s 3D documentary adventure Audioscopiks (1935) was nominated in the category “Short Subject (Novelty)” at the 1936 Oscars. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union saw the opening of Moskva, a cinema for all spectacle-less 3D pleasures, in 1940. While it took until the early 1950s for stereoscopic cinema to be used on an industrial level, many had already seen one or the other 3D movie by then.
3D could have become anything and everything—now, it’s first and foremost a spectacle of staggering effects, which can definitely take on amazing forms, like the gorgeous plea for world peace Souvenir (1977) by the master of puppet animation, Elbert Tuganov. This is why, despite fluctuations in the popularity of 3D, the format has proven indestructible. Artistic trends come and go, they flow and ebb, but film as a source of joy, as a rollercoaster or ghost-train ride, as a place of excitement, is always en vogue. You’d have to be a real sourpuss not to delight in swords, spears, and arrows flying left and right in Zhāng Měijūn’s martial-arts romp Dynasty (1977), or not to breathe deep on the rare occasions that only popcorn and yo-yos float past you in Steve Miner’s subtly brilliant Friday the 13th: Part 3 (1982)—because there’s a whole other level of crazy still to come! Ferdinando Baldi, in contrast, shows in Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983), his last work for the incomparable Tony Anthony, how a story with countless surprising twists and genre-bending turns can reach perfection through mind-boggling 3D images. Or take Paul Morrissey’s Warhol production Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Rachel Talalay’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), a bright, MTV-esque popstravaganza about dreams, space, and reality—don’t they make clear once and for all that the separation of art and commerce, of the lofty and the folksy, is nothing but empty propaganda, especially when Udo Kier’s inner life is viscerally dangled before your eyes, or Johnny Depp gets the skillet right in the kisser?