Paul Sweeten

It would be a well-educated guess to suppose that 3-D cinema will never yield an artistic masterpiece. That may not be enough to stop it becoming the dominant format in near-future years. Now that Avatar has broken every money record in film history, we should be bracing ourselves for the 3-D revolution. First, old lookers will be revamped in three dimensions: Jurassic Park, Terminator II, Return of the King, and so on and so forth. I doubt anyone will bother with 8½, The Pianist, or 12 Angry Men—and perhaps that tells us something about the artistic integrity preciously preserved within the traditional format. According to some predications, however, 2-D is in danger of becoming the new black and white. Children will cringe at the sight of anything flat shown on television, and film as we know it may never be the same again. 2-D may become the reserve of art house, demand its own category at the Oscars, and any director working in two dimensions may have to do so under the accusation of “trying to make a point”.

Anyone who has peered over their frames at the raw projection of a 3-D film will notice two things: the glasses significantly tone down the brightness of the picture and the 3-D-ness of any object is created by putting in lots of fuzz. You can have a grand time watching Avatarian fuzz if ever James Cameron’s script compels you to switch off for a scene or two. It’s a perfect opportunity to look around, try to work things out. What exactly is happening here? Art is reaching like it never has before.

Art has never reached; it has only been motionless in glass cases, or hanging on walls, or when it has moved it has moved within the unbreakable seal of a stage or a screen. Now film has escaped that seal. It is among its audiences, and perhaps the reason a 3-D picture will never be taken seriously is that it cannot sit still for us to consider it as an artefact. Look at it. It’s just flopping out all over the place.

When Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, the girl in the red coat symbolised the unobserved tragedy of the Holocaust. It remains an iconic moment in cinema, and its effect is almost unexplainable. Even without its wider meaning, there is something profound in that redness moving through the monochrome world; a profundity made greater by the distance that black and white forces between an audience and reality. With a single dash of colour Spielberg reminds us that this is a film, and yet, this is not a film. When 2-D is as ancient as black and white, perhaps it will be the use of a three-dimensional object which adds meaning to a historical drama. The effect in Schindler’s List may not then be so moving, particularly when the little girl’s appearance will be anticipated by an on-screen prompt: PUT ON YOUR 3-D GLASSES NOW.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.