More Is Less

I've only seen one of the new generation of 3D movies currently breaking into the mainstream cinema repertoire - 20th Century Fox's Ice Age 3 (hey! - the kids wanted to see it) - and the technology is absolutely stunning; up to a point.

A fuzzy image is what you see until you put on a pair of specially polarized spectacles and suddenly the screen jumps into a full colour illusion of volumes and depth. The pleasure was marred only by the distinct sense of having a headache at the end of the screening but my prejudice against 3D movies (sustained by memories of screenings of the crappy efforts of sensationalist 1950's and 1980's movies) was, I have to admit, substantially overturned. At least with respect to an animation. Within minutes, the technology is largely invisible, and what drives the movie, in this case, is the way in which plot and character is revealed; true to the best animated movies it's achieved through movement coming from the observation and imagination of human animators. The 3D element is more a case of added value rather than the engine of the film. But, my headache was real enough because watching a 3D movie is essentially an elaborate optical trick which skews our normal optical processing.

For example, when we look at something, our brain is computing it's location in space in three primary ways. The first is more the simple to describe - our eyes are constantly focusing and refocusing on the objects we are looking at and these are either nearer or further away.

The brain notes this.

The second, a bit more complicated, is that most of us have the use of two eyes and this means that we have two points of view on the world which gives the brain data to pinpoint objects in space using triangulation. You can try this at home - look at cluster of objects near to you (something on the desk, or a nearby chair). Quickly look at them alternately with your left then right eye. You'll notice that some objects appear to jump left or right. The brain synthesises these two images and calculates the relative positions of objects.

A third element is the body's constant movement relative to the objects around it - even when you're sitting down, your eyes are not fixed in space. The resulting 3D perception of the world we have does not exist as some kind of screen projection in our brain - it is a highly complex physiological/perceptual interaction which chews up a massive 25% of the brains processing power. We think that what we are seeing is simply a picture recorded by the eyes and take it for granted as if we are some Hi-Def TV camera. In fact, it's much more than that; it's a stunningly complex, continuous interpretation of sensory data which we've come to accept, in a rather simplistic way, looks like a picture - but really, pictures only look like our optical perception.

Pictures are not what we see. Seeing is thinking.

It must have been extraordinary, in some cozy neolithic cave, when someone translated thoughts into marks on a wall - marks which isolated and made real thought perceptions of animals, activities and experiences. I can imagine this because I've witnessed people enthralled by a similar process since I was a child; people look at an artist's work (and I'm not talking about masterpieces) and say something like 'I see that'. What I mean by this is that from their continuous consciousness artists' will isolate some part of that thinking and find a way of visually transcribing it. Because humans share the same input devices, and because we share the same planet, what the brain comes up with as a transcription is not too alien to others and so the veiwer can share in the artist's source through their own perception and experience of the artwork. It's a complex interaction between artist and viewer utilising perception, memory and imagination - call it, emotional lateral thinking. Photographs, in contrast, are simply physical manifestations of the first stage in our optical perception - the focused fall of light onto the retina (our eyes being the model for all cameras).

All of which brings me back to that headache. 3D movies essentially use the fact of our binocular vision. Two camera lenses, spaced apart like eyes, record two different points of view (POV). These are then screened in a relatively conventional way except that the projected frames alternate between left and right POV - frame one, left eye; frame two, right eye, and so on. Each point of view is also treated with a different polarizing layer which is then cancelled out by the respective lense in the polarized spectacles - each eye only receives its corresponding left or right image, because the other is blanked by the polarized filter. When the brain synthesises what's coming in to each retina - bingo - that's enough 3D data and the illusion stands up. But in this stereoscopic system there's also a lot of data missing.

Our eyes, for instance, are expecting to change focus on objects in relative space, but they are locked in focus on a screen of fixed distance. So, although action moves things nearer and further away, our brain is confused because our eyes are locked in focus at the distance you are sitting from the screen. Additionally, even the smallest movement of the head, left or right, should reveal a bit more information about objects masking those behind, but the image is counter-intuitively stuck - you can't see round something no matter how much you move. The result of this is that 3D movies can seem to be made up of flattened objects in a picture space like a strange cut-out theatre.

These conflicts are at the heart of the physical head-ache. Essentially, you've been had - it's an optical illusion, and to sustain it you have to shackle yourself to the limitations of the technology.

But there's another head-ache which I can't shrug, and this lies in more aesthetic territory. At the heart of this is the notion that we don't see in pictures; visual perception being something altogether more complex. Pictures are simply frozen optical compositions contained within a frame. In some ways, the subtext of western art has been about mapping what you might call the pictorial genome - the genetic code of composing images, even abstract ones. By the second half of the 2oth century all the possibilities of pictorial art had been identified - the genetic code had been fully mapped leading to a loss of confidence, as if the end of art history had been reached; where do you go next? A huge catylyst for rushing into this temporary cul-de-sac was the invention of photography in the 19thC. This helped drive pictorial art away from the optical based representations of the world towards more analytical approaches; if you're representing the world, after all, there's no point in doing it in way that competes with the mechanical process of photography. Equally, photography on it's own - the capture of light on a picture plane - cannot convey the complexity of experience. Photography required a more poetic layer to allude to human experience and the great photographers have always, intuitively or by design, plundered the grammar of pictorial art to achieve this.

That poetic layer - what I'd call visual poetics - is a key ingredient, here; pictorial art is inadequate without it. No picture records what we actually perceive because it is incomparably less complex than our perception - how can it begin to contain what we experience? The poetic in this context, is about compression and equivalence: compression of an experience (and the life experiencing it) into a situation, an image, a gesture; and in that one thing finding a comprehensible equivalent to the source experience. In other words, taking a unique moment of experience and making it transferable - shareable.

No mean feat - and a defining human one.

Paradoxically, the simpler, the more compressed the form, the greater its potential to touch the greatest number of people. Perhaps this is because there is no clutter of specific information. It's as if an essence has been found - a rare and reduced substance which somehow triggers an awareness of a whole, rich, complex experience.

Less is More.

What seems to be happening at the moment between conventional moving image technologies on one hand and 3D cinema and the race for a viable 3D television technology on the other, resembles the 19thC. tussle between painting and photography. Then, the questions were: is photography art; was painting inherently superior? Now, equivalent questions lay bare again the schism between art and entertainment, a split which surely erupted in the 19th century with the new mass audiences

and the mass entertainment industries. Entertainment became about sensation - the fair ground, the music hall, the nickelodeon. Simply to be present, to take part assaulted the senses with some provocative invention: physical excitement at the fairground; bawdy language and song at the theatre; remarkable illusion at the pictures. The common link between them all was that they were all low-admission-fee democratic businesses; to attract the customers back you had to offer something new. None of this has changed, even in the 21st Century - the fairground still has the bright lights but modern engineering throws bodies about in ever more fantastic ways; live comedy has supplanted the music-hall but it is arguably the heir of beyond-the-limits stage entertainment; and cinema has become ever more spectacular and fantastic.

The problem is that a form that engages with sensation in a market place must constantly seek to provide more sensation in order to compete with rivals and bring audiences back. Hence the need to have more. More thrills, more risqué language, more on-screen spectacle; more bangs for your bucks.

When I began writing this, I'd planned to invoke the German psychologist and film theorist Rudolph Arnheim, whose 1932 book Film As Art (Film Als Kunst) - which I read as a student -

has skewed my notion of cinema. In a good way, I think.

For Arnheim, the apotheosis of cinema was the black and white, academy ratio, silent feature, with live orchestral accompaniment. Far from being technically limited, he argued, this form provided a narrowing of view in which the greatest artists would find ways of depicting the world in an essence which then required the audiences imaginative engagement to complete. For instance, blood in a black and white movie is deep black (a photographic phenomenon - reds read as black on film). But it is likely that an audience will see a more intense blood 'colour' because they have had to imagine it or recall it; an imagined blood red will be more accurate and vivid that 'bad', ketchup, technicolour red. Equally, black and white photography, free of the distractions of colour, renders texture powerfully. In addition, the subject of any frame or scene can be foregrounded by artificial lighting to great expressive effect.

Writing in the 30's - with full length feature-films still a young art - Arnheim must have been propelled to write his defence of the international medium of silent-cinema by the recent arrival of sound pictures (The Jazz Singer, 1927). For him this was a disastrous return to parochial theatrical forms with audiences segretated by language. And indeed, following the sophistication of cinema's early masters - Eisenstein, Griffith, Gance, von Stroheim, Keaton - the first sound films were turgid 'filmed-theatre' affairs, shackled to their technical crudity.

But as the technology evolved, Arnheim was no less critical. As he saw it, the coming of colour movies continued the downward slide, as did the evolution of wide-screen formats in the face of competition from television. His final revisions to subsequent editions of Film As Art berated the innovation of 3D experiments.

Arnheim was no traditionalist - no Canute-like anti-popularist. His objections seem more about defending the essential, unique qualities of what was, after all, a massively popular, international cultural phenomenon. The argument he puts forward is disarmingly simple - advances in film technology are simply in pursuit of the unachievable - rivalling reality. They might mimic our senses but, for Arnheim, this process lacked that essential quality - poetry.

But, although Arnheim's thinking has massively influenced the way I look at and think about art, not just cinema, I can't go all the way with his purism. Reluctantly though I might admit it, 3D films do utilise compression and poetry - they compress time and use allusion at the very least. 3D films are also a young form - film-makers are still coming to grips with the best way to stage scenes - perhaps mastery of their artistic potential lies beyond what we currently understand cinema to be; afterall, painting today would baffle the Renaissance viewer except in the fact that paintings are still generally rectangles on walls.

What troubles me about 3D cinema is its convergence with the fairground experience - the thrill ride. In the fairground (and I love fairgrounds) each entertainment lifts you from your normal environment - you can shoot things - crash dodgem cars - generate loud noises - be flown in the air - assaulted by the dead in a ghost train. In each one you are equipped using extra-normal tools or machines to expose you to and lock you into a particular - usually adrenal - experience. In 3D cinema (and in forthcoming TV and computer game technology) you must wear special glasses - you cross a threshold of normal to extra-normal experience; you are locked in by the glasses and are, in fact, altered.

This tethering of our optical senses to 3D media almost works: in the cinema you are already constrained by the auditorium seating; in computer games where you are fixed by interactive consoles it could be revolutionary; day-to-day TV seems more of a longshot though the TV industry is banking on sport to be the grandstand event to lure audiences (as the Queen's coronation and a colour Wimbeledon were for previous TV innovations). But the inescapable constant is those spectacles; no matter how familiar the wearing of something identical to sunglasses might be, we are, in quite a profound way, filtered.

The result is undoubtedly a thrill-ride. It will no-doubt generate new audiences. However, it's not so simple to say that technology-based art is merely about sensation and so, in order for it to advance, must find greater and greater sensations; the whole trajectory of cinema could be summed up in this way - black and white nickelodeon to surround-sound, 3D widescreen. But there's a more complex relationship going on here, I suspect, because since the Renaissance, the link between knowledge - especially the sciences - and art has led to new ways of seeing. The mathematical breakthroughs which led to perspective imagery didn't exactly destroy the poetic in representational painting. It's arguable that painting took 400 years to assimilate perspective and not be bound by its limitations. It will probably be a long time - maybe not that long - before we assimilate the nature of 3D motion pictures enough to acquire mastery in its production, to see through its filter enough for it to be able to offer up a condensed, individual equivalent of someone's life, and then for that to be recognised as part of our shared human experience.

Maybe.

For all it's technical sophistication, for all its increased sensation, when we don those polarized 3D spectacles - when we apparently enhance our vision - we are actually using less of ourselves. And surely, the real value of art, its real purpose, is the engagement of one complete individual with another through a medium - across time and space - unfiltered, unaltered.

As so often, more is actually less.

GSJ
Jan.2010

Illustrations from Top: 3D cinema audience; Camera Optics, Human Optics; Human Pupil and Iris (detail); Panasonic Prosumer 3D video camcorder; Antique Merry-go-Round; Cover, Film As Art by Rudolph Arnheim; Film poster, My Bloody Valentine 3D, Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1981; Contemporary thrill ride (unknown location); Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2010.