Someonewill soon write a superb book on the long, troubled gestation of 3D and itstriumphal ascent with Avatar. That author will have many reasons for referringto Ray Zone’s 3D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema(University Press of Kentucky). The sequel to his previous work, StereoscopicCinema and the Origins of 3D Film, resumes his chronicle in the 1950s House ofWax era and uncovers a surprising number and variety of ‘50s movies made inthat format. Zone then pans slowly across the technology’s many fits and startsuntil the rise of digital photography offered solutions to many of the problemsof producing movies with a heightened illusion of depth.
Zonehas worked in the medium, and while it was not his intention to write atechnical manual, 3D Revolution will read a bit like one for the uninitiated. Avigorous editorial process mighty have alleviated his tendency to composesentences around insider terminology (the “z-axis”), excised occasionalredundancies and reconsidered the book’s structure. Zone writes a glowingdefense of the aesthetics of 3D filmmaking (it “pierces the heart ofmake-believe, the primal need for stories that all human beings possess…”) butburies it on page 40, at the end of a paragraph describing the little-known 3Dversion of Kiss Me Kate (1953).
Quotingthe Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan’s description of Avatar as “The Jazz Singer of3-D filmmaking,” Zone’s advocacy of the medium feels vindicated by that film’s groundbreaking success. Yet, there is a paradox at the heart of the 3Dexperience: the best of those films, whether Avatar or the retrofitted FindingNemo, conjure up fantasy worlds rather than more fully replicating the realone. We live in three dimensions, but the aesthetics of seeing in two has aparticular power that can never by supplanted by 3D.
