The craze for 3D Cinema seems to be waning down these days after James Cameron’s Avatar kikcstarted it back to life back in 2009, even if the biggest blockbusters each year get a 3D release. Regardless, the public’s perception of this as innovation has gone down, it has become more of an extra thrill rather than something revolutionary. Still there were those that at some point claimed that 3D meant the future of cinema, while others viewed it just as a gimmick by the studios to cash in more money at the box office. While I stand on the latter group, the fact that celebrated filmmakers like Martin Scorsese or Jean-Luc Godard (heck, even Alfred Hitchcock back in the day) have experimented with 3D should tell us that perhaps there is more to this technology than we might initially think. This discussion may not seem as relevant nor lively today as it was a couple of years ago, but it is still worth looking into the history of 3D and seeing how it has evolved throughout the years.

The first thing that has to be noted when talking about 3D is that, even though this may appear as relatively new technology, it is actually not the case. 3D is actually older than sound in film! Experiments with 3D technology go as far back as the late 19th century, first patented in the early 1890s by William Friese Greene. At the time it was known as Stereoscopic 3D, by which two equal stripes of film would be projected one besides the other, the audience then viewed the screen through a stereoscope, what merged the two images into one, thus creating the illusion of 3D (see picture below). The first 3D movie to be released commercially was The Power of Love in 1922; today there are no surviving copies of the film. This was also the first time that anaglyph glasses were used, by which two lenses of opposing colours (traditionally red and cyan) are combined with corresponding film strips and thus achieving the 3D effect. Decades of experimentation followed, but during the Great Depression the technology started to decline, since it was rather costly to implement.

A revival of 3D film came in the early 1950s with the release of Bwana Devil (1952), the first ever colour film to use the technology. This movie started a trend that’s known as the “Golden Age of 3D”: postwar economy was at its peak and many movie studios invested in this technology; the world saw releases such as the original House of Wax, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Hitchcock’s own Dial M for Murder. It is noticeable that the studios had a particular interest in 3D horror films. This trend kind of died off as the 60s kicked in, since the technology was becoming too expensive for theaters and they started to see it as a bad investment.

In the 70s a number of companies tried to reduce the number of reels needed from two to one, such as Stereovision and Space-Vision-3D. This saw a revival of interest by the studios, and continuing in the horror tradition, there were a couple of film franchises that got on the 3D boat (Jaws, Friday the 13th, Amityville, among others). The technological innovations, however, did not prove to be enough for saving 3D from the same troubles that had plagued its whole existence: high costs for theaters and filmmakers and an audience that reported discomfort with the viewing experience altogether. And thus fell 3D once again out of grace with the film world. That was until IMAX came along in the mid 80s and changed the game once again: with a precise, mathematical approach to projections, they sought to eliminate the unconfortable experience for audiences by making sure the reels were perfectly synchronized; they also aimed for higher production values than the ones of the earlier 3D films.

The first 3D film to use polarized glasses instead of the anaglyph ones was Transitions, first shown at the Expo ’86 in Canada. This had the positive result that through theses glasses a member of the audience could watch the movie from any angle of the room without noticing any distortion on the screen (a big problem that the early 3D films had to face). Not much time later, many studios had revived their interest in 3D filmmaking and many theme parks were starting to add new attractions that employed the technology.

The early 2000s saw a genre shift in studio 3D filmmaking: instead of low budget horror films they focused on rather fantastical, family-friendly adventure films, such as Spy Kids 3D, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2003 and 2005) and The Polar Express (2004). The box office performance of such films made the studios realize 3D’s financial potential. They started converting originally 2D into 3D films, something that on the analogous days of before was considered impossible, but with the rise of digital technologies it was far easier to achieve. The first film to successfully undergo this process was 2006’s Superman Returns. By the time, many other companies were getting into the band waggon, such as Dolby 3D and Masterimage 3D, and most of them had already ditched the old anaglyph glasses for the more modern polarized ones. And then, James Cameron’s Avatar happened.

If one film defined the current 3D landscape that was Avatar. Regardless of what one might think of the movie, there is no denying the film’s success: it is until this day the highest grossing film of all time, it was the first one to reach 2 billion dollars at the box office and it is, without a doubt, the biggest 3D film ever made. This translated of course into the studios putting more of their money in 3D in order to make even more money. This sparked the re-release of the pre-Disney complete Star Wars saga and that basically every major blockbuster nowadays be released in 3D. But now the question is: will it suffer another downfall, like it did in the 50s and 70s? Truth be told, it is hard to imagine that being the case, for those major blockbusters are proving at the box office that audiences are still willing to pay the inflated price of a 3D ticket, and that won’t change for a while. Still, there are signs that there’s a loss of interest, declines in sales, and that translates perhaps on a loss of interest from audiences. Studios, however, will keep producing 3D pictures and converting 2D ones into the format for a good while.

3D has a rich history that goes as back as the origins of cinema. In a sense, they’ve been together since the beginning and have gone through many ups and down together, but it seems that they’ve finally figured it out how they’ll be able co-exist. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t like watching films in 3D (I still see it as a rather cosmetic addition with the purpose of charging more at the entrance), but I’ll admit sometimes we have to let ourselves be awed with the technological achievements. I don’t think that the future of filmmaking lies in 3D, like many have claimed in the past, but it does offer an interesting “side-chapter” in cinema history that is worth looking at.

Sources and Further Reading:

-http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/04/23/the-history-of-3d-movie-tech

-https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/aug/20/3d-film-history

-https://www.thoughtco.com/the-history-of-3d-movies-4154595

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