3D Attractions: Recycling the Monomyth in Post-Cinema (original) (raw)

Stereo Vision and The Imaginary Man: The Influence of 3D Technology on the Experiences of the Film Viewer

Kultura Popularna, 2013

The article is an attempt to conceptualize the impact of 3D technology on the experience of a contemporary film viewer. The theoretical framework of the analysis is determined by Edgar Morin’s anthropological interpretation of the cinema, which is, however, considerably re‑interpreted by the author of the paper. The aesthetic distinctness of stereo vision is particularly appreciated here. Besides, French theoretician’s thesis that “the subjective increase [of image’s value] is a function of its objectivity” is discussed. The author argues that in the case of stereo vision it is just the opposite. 3D technology disturbs the projection‑identification process, thus interfering with the fundamental mechanisms of the cinema.

Stereoscopic-3D Storytelling: rethinking the conventions, grammar and aesthetics of a new medium

Journal of Media Practice 12:2, 2011

The film and broadcasting industry is currently at a very exciting and key defining moment in its evolution: the much heralded third age of Stereoscopic 3D (S3D). This current resurgence sees a proliferation of S3D film cinema releases, new S3D television channels, live S3D coverage of sporting events and S3D viewing technologies becoming a viable and affordable option for the home viewing experience. This provides a timely context in which to re-examine and re-evaluate Stereoscopic 3D in an academic context. Film and cinema studies have evolved significantly in the past century in their responses to the two-dimensional film-making medium; its production techniques, storytelling capabilities and audio-visual narrative devices. We are now at the precipice of a pivotal moment in film-making and cinema history, which calls for new ways of thinking about and articulating this new form of visual storytelling. This article maps the development of S3D fictional film-making, its technologies, its physiological effects, the discourses that have surrounded it and the division of industrial opinion that currently concern its future. Interwoven with commentary and reflection from industry practitioners, the article also investigates some contemporary examples 139 Sarah Atkinson of S3D fiction film-making in an attempt to provide a contribution to the foundations for the ongoing study, articulation and documentation of stereoscopic-3D storytelling.

Surface & Projection – an investigation of the event of cinema

Master of Fine Arts report/thesis - supervisor John Gillies UNSW College of Fine Arts, 2004

Surface and Projection is an investigation of the cinema event, defined as image, projection, space and audience. The project interrogates the place where cinema occurs for the viewer, starting with the special viewing conditions for film watching and the accepted roles they create for the film maker, the exhibitor and the spectator. The artworks in Surface and Projection have been a series of reassemblages of the elements of the cinematic event. The film installation Moving Still Life is the key work. The report starts by defining the event of cinema, drawing on French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1970 essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus. As Moving Still Life took shape, identifying its art and film historical contexts became part of the wider investigation of the cinematic event. Section 2 teases out resonances with Italian Arte Povera and outlines a brief history of super 8 art film making in Australia. It links these to the specific material grounds of Moving Still Life. Art in the public domain is discussed as the art work was initially conceived as an installation for outdoor public spaces. Section 3 discusses expanded cinema, a primary art historical context. There is a general survey of this early intermedia form as it developed in the US and Europe and its presence in Australia. While I make a case for the four elements that comprise the cinematic event, I expand upon the development of the artwork, where image became a dominant strand of its own. A specific form of film making evolved, focusing on the layered image. The final sections of the report, ‘Image’ and ‘Sequence’, focus on this image work, drawing on Umberto Eco’s 1960 essay The Open Work and American art writer Rosalind Krauss’ writing on installation and post-medium artwork. The deconstructive ethos of the project leads to an analysis of the frame within the sequence and the attacks on the frame made by Moving Still Life and my image work in general. The analysis of sequence within moving images, draws on a seminal 1945 essay by American writer Joseph Frank, Spatial Form in Literature. This builds to a discussion of new media, interrogating its claim for interactivity in moving images, an impossibility while the frame remains the primary unit.

Augmenting cinema: the Kino-Variété (1913-14)

Early Popular Visual Culture, 2020

Efforts to lend cinema-going a sense of liveness and cinematic projections a bodily presence are in vogue today. The recent rise of phenomena like ‘augmented cinema’ or ‘event cinema’ has largely been framed as responses to digitalization, home media consumption, and an experience economy in the digital age. However, they possess a long genealogy. This article examines the German Kino-Variété of the years 1913–1914, which conceptualized cinema not as a two-dimensional virtual window but as a multimedia embodied performance. Combining film and live performance, Kino-Variété productions sought to intensify filmic images through texture, depth, and various combinations of virtual and physical attractions. While the transitional era of film history has received attention primarily as a period of narrative integration, the Kino-Variété testifies to opposing tendencies gaining traction as well. The years before World War I set the course for cinema’s future: Should the medium become a feature-length form of bourgeois fiction or remain a physical, sensual, and diverse realm of short-subject variety? Although the Kino-Variété can be seen as a failed response to the specific challenges of its time, it was not merely an empirical phenomenon, but embodied an idea of cinema, an imagined future for a kaleidoscopic medium with unanticipated prescience for our own era of cinema events.

Public 47: 3D Cinema and the Great Beyond!: The Fictional Referent as Signifier in 3D Photography

In this paper (and portfolio) I claim that the deliberate use of fictionality within the stereo photographic image space, can be used as a tool for criticality and conceptual intent within the medium. Using Slavoj Zizek and Dsiga Vertov’s analogy of the camera as a partial object, as an “eye” torn from the subject and freely thrown around. Stereographic space is used, as an imagined, subjectless space. In addition, I claim that the stereoscopic effect of space in film and photography positions the viewer in an extremely individualised spacial matrix within the 3-D world. Stereoscopy can be used to call attention to the way in which vision functions within our bodies, and to make the point, that stereo disrupts the traditional Cartesian structure of vision. Furthermore, I argue that 3-D needs to be an integral part of an artworks conceptual meaning, not merely a spectacularized gimmick.