31 May 1929: According to one account, actors ‘stood out in clear relief on the screen, and looked entirely lifelike’

Is the world of kinema, already shaken to its foundations by the advent of sound, to suffer now yet another disturbance? If the claims made for the “three-dimensional” film which has just had an experimental showing in New York are justified it would seem not unlikely. According to one account the actors in the excerpt from a well-known musical comedy which was shown with synchronised sound accompaniment “stood out in clear relief on the screen, and looked entirely lifelike.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cary Grant and Phyllis Brooks watching a 3D Movie. 1939.

Photograph: Bettmann Archive

There is, of course, nothing new in stereoscopic photography. The tourist of a slightly earlier and simpler age not infrequently returned from abroad with twin photographs of the Place de la Concorde or the Piazza of St. Mark’s in which, when viewed through the appropriate lenses, the very pigeons stood out from the paving-stones and even the gargoyles had thickness added to their length and breadth.



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But the application of the device in picture theatres will be no simple matter. A special projector and a special screen are needed, and a trade that is already distracted by wondering whether it must face the outlay involved in installing sound mechanism will not hail with unmixed joy the suggestion that yet another expensive plant may soon prove essential.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A queue outside the Brixton Astoria, December 1930. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Nor is there any reason to expect that progress will end there, for has not Mr. Lasky assured the trade that, after stereoscopy, colour may next be expected as a commonplace? All except the big producers who can afford to scrap a million-pound plant like a worn-out garment will perforce go cautiously in the face of these changes.

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Meantime the humbler sort who deal in kinema may well continue to rely on the claims of the silent film, which, by reason of its silence and its compulsion to work out ideas in terms of mime, lighting, and movement, had begun, before its newly found technique was disturbed, almost to become a true medium of art.

[Kinema is the old spelling for cinema.]