Dimensions of The Mask

This is where previous posts on this blog and the world of The Mask conjoin in an analytical look into the use 3-D in cinema. I am of the belief that stereoscopic cinema (3-D) is like a circus coming to town. It’s a novelty. If the circus is always in town the excitement it generates goes away. So I’m always looking to find films that utilize 3-D, not just as an ad-on but as something integral to their being.

Today Hollywood treats 3-D (as they have in the previous 3-D eras of the 50‘s and 80‘s) as a value added effect. In an attempt to combat illegal downloading and VOD (in the 50’s it was television and by the 80’s home video and cable were the threat), Hollywood is hoping that digital 3-D will bring people back to the theatre and their old model of doing business will continue as it did before. But things change, as they did in the previous eras.

It’s the art-house masters that are turning to 3-D as an artistic extension of their work. It’s not an accident that these once great film makers have almost abandoned narrative film for documentary. Directors like Warner Herzog and Wim Wenders have used 3-D to simulate the real world in place of the reel world. In The Cave of Forgotten Dreams Hetzog used the stereoscopic technique to add volume to the curvature of the rocks on which the oldest know human artwork exists. Wenders, in turn in Pina, uses 3-D to simulate the experience of Pina Bausch’s unique dance choreography in a way that no other form of visual documentation can.

But these cinema artists are turning to 3-D to simulate reality while director Julian Roffman does something quite different in The Mask. Sure, his movie uses 3-D as a gimmick to get audiences out to the theatre, but within the context of the film the 3-D serves a different purpose. The effect is not used to represent reality but to represent the subconscious, the protagonist’s, Dr.Barnes, darkest nightmares. Roffman understood that 3-D is an illusion, that while it cannot truly represent reality, it can pull the viewer into something immersive that both represents reality but is very much removed from the real world. Much like dreams and hallucinations, the fodder of the 3-D sequences used in The Mask.

I’m just scratching the surface here. But these thoughts do lead me to the hope that this 3-D era continues so that artists and filmmakers can begin to explore the artistic potential of stereo cinema and that it can evolve. The previous eras have been to short for real exploration of 3-D’s potential to be realized beyond the “circus effect”.

NOTES: I’d like to credit Dan Symmes for the circus analogy. He was the first I’d heard to use it and it rings true to me.

PINA at TIFF

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is in full swing and like last year the festival is presenting a new 3-D feature, the third in three years.

In 2009 TIFF presented Joe Dante's family horror film The Hole. It the first 3-D film ever to play the festival. At its premiere screening the fire alarm went off and audiences missed the last 20 minutes (myself among them). It did take quite a bit of effort to clear the theatre as many audience members continued to watch the film as they were ushered out of the auditorium.

Last year TIFF screened Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary and meditation on the oldest cave known to feature drawings and artwork on its walls. Again a screening mishap occurred as the newly inaugurated Bell Lightbox suffered a power failure mid screening and the theatre went black. The staff quickly fixed the problem and the audience was able to enjoy the entire film.

This year another German cinema master, Wim Wenders, is screening his flirtation with 3-D technology, a documentary/performance dance film entitled Pina, featuring the choreography of the late Pina Bausch. I'm unaware of any mishaps yet. The film opened on the 8th of September and will screen again on the 17th.

Wenders was in Toronto in mid June of this year, the keynote at the Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Convention, to discuss the production of the film at length and show a few featured clips. The 3-D was spectacular, and like Herzog, Wenders managed to utilize the technology not simply as an exploitive gimmick but to further explore the film's subject, dance. By capturing Bausch's choreography in three dimensions, Wenders is better able to recreate a live performance venue and emulate the immediacy of the art form. A key discussion point during the TIS3DC came directly from Wenders talk and his belief that the stereoscopic 3D camera captured a sense of the “embodiment” of his subjects, the dancers in his film. This discovery came to Wenders late in the shooting of Pina during the filming of his “portraits” material (individual shots of the dancers looking directly into camera, which in the film are accompanied by voice-over interviews). Wenders asked the dancer on camera to turn to look into the lens as if it were their best friend. During the shooting Wenders would look down at his hand-held 3-D monitor and was struck by a sense of holding the individual in his hand. It was this sense of the 3-D image capturing the essence of a person (perhaps an element of their soul) that created a magical moment for Wenders, one that had not occurred before in the shooting of Pina.

Unfortunately I'm not in Toronto this year to see the film in its entirety, but I have a writer in the wings who has promised me a review and I plan to be posting that as soon as I can. However if anyone out there has seen the film I'd love to hear your impressions of it. Please leave a comment.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: A Review

As promised here is my review, scribed in haste, from the second screening of Cave of Forgotten Dreams at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

Warner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is less of a documentary that a meditation of the filmmaker’s thoughts and impressions of the Paleolithic paintings found in the darkness of the Chauvet Caves. But, should we expect anything else from Herzog?

Located in Southern France, the caves of Chauvet contain the oldest cave paintings known to man, painted over 30,000 years ago. Due to the age and fragility of the artwork and artifacts found in the cave, Herzog and his small crew were limited to six days of shooting in the caves and only allowed 4 hours per day.

The result is much introspective narration, delivered by Herzog, over long meditative shots of the cave walls’ rudimentary artwork photographed in three dimensions. As a result Cave of Forgotten Dreams is not a landmark moment for the 3-D documentary film, (after all IMAX 3-D has been showcasing stereoscopic cinema for decades), but it’s one of the first 3-D films that feels like cinema verite in 3-D. For fans of Herzog’s documentary films, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a real treat, but more information about the Chauvet caves can be found on its wikipedia entry then in the film.

Firstly what’s wrong with the film, from a stereoscopic point-of-view. A large number of scenes are presented in converted 3-D, pseudo 3-D or just plan technically poor 3-D. Many of these, such as Herzog and his crew’s first walk through of the cave (a scouting of the cave done before the 3-D cameras were ever involved), could have and should have been left alone and played flat. Much of the converted 3-D featuring humans in the cave is done with very loose matte lines creating a cut-out collage quality to it. In one dizzying scene, as the crew climb to the mouth of the caves, the camera man lets the run as he climbs the steep path. The resulting shot is sky and treetops. The resulting stereoscopic image is a tunnel built in flat layers, with as little dimensional realism to it as a magic eye image. (This section is so abstract and artificial that I chalk it up to Herzog having some optical fun with 3-D).

An often used painting of horses within the film.

However, when the true 3-D is used it’s a thing of beauty. After seeing the Paleolithic paintings on the curves and folds of the cave rock in 3 dimensions one can hardly imagine the images in flat.  Nor would a 2 dimensional image of the cave art represent it in anyway as powerful as presented in 3 dimensions. Herzog’s vision to shoot these images in 3-D was definately the right decision.

This is a rare flat image that represents the depth of the cave paintings in Chauvet.

There are indeed other moments that showcase the 3-D process. A scientist who demonstrates spear throwing feels like it may have been included in the film for it’s 3-D imagery (with a backdrop of vineyards) and one wishes Herzog had been more whimsical with the staging, encouraging the man to point the arrow point further into the camera.

I hoped for something stronger in the 3-D imagery of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, however Herzog is no real fan of 3-D films so it’s not that surprising that his one time venture into the process would come up a little short. It’s film-makers like Arch Obler or (shutter) James Cameron who had a lifetime investment in stereoscopic cinema who are the filmmakers to look to expanding the techniques of stereoscopic filmmaking.

Postscript.  
Nuclear albino alligator offspring.  
Herzog: “perhaps they are splitting off into their own doppelgangers”.
The 3-d cinematography as well as Herzog’s narration gets a little trippy here, shooting swimming albino alligators so that we can see them simultaneously under and above the water.  The water’s refraction creates a M.C. Esher type of optical illusion in 3-d, reflecting (so to speak) the doppelganger nature of the alligators. In real life our brain simply doesn’t interpret the hyperstereo image the way it is presented in this scene and we are presented with a visual puzzle that is close to the heart of Herzog’s work.