The kicker, though, lies at the foot of the poster. For thirty-five cents, you got a double bill: squeezed below Plastigrams was a small announcement for the second half of the program, D. W. Griffith’s “Way Down East.” And so the scene was set. 3-D had the bells and whistles, but maybe that was all it had; it was a Wonder Novelty, but a novelty nonetheless. Meanwhile, real movies, less showy but more substantial, could get on with business as usual. And that is where the matter rested. In 1936, for instance, audiences for M-G-M’s “A Tale of Two Cities” were treated, beforehand, to a short 3-D film called “Audioscopiks,” for which the company made three million pairs of red-and-green lorgnette spectacles. You held them up to your eyes to watch a guy pitch a baseball (“Don’t Forget to Duck!” the tagline ran), then lowered them for the Dickens, which remained a tale of two dimensions. Not until the end of last year were the two halves of that entertainment fused into one, as Robert Zemeckis’s “A Christmas Carol” saw Jim Carrey, in the role of Scrooge, rocket past us into the night sky clutching a chimney pot. This was not because the same thing occurs in the original story but because 3-D loves a human projectile even more than it does a baseball. That’s the rule: wonders must never cease.

To survey the filmography of 3-D, from the days of “Bwana Devil” to a movie like “Jaws 3-D,” which, in 1983, earned eighty-eight million dollars worldwide, is to trespass upon a mythical land that is both laughed at and lost. It’s like hearing from survivors of Atlantis that the place was a bit of a dump. And yet the myth is untouchable, because we cannot return to inspect it for ourselves. Were I to nourish a fixation with the films of 1954, I could easily buy a DVD of “Rear Window” or “On the Waterfront,” but I can no more grasp what it was truly like to put on my 3-D spectacles and watch “The French Line,” with Jane Russell, than I can spirit myself back among the congregation of St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, two hundred and twenty years earlier, to hear a Bach cantata. There was a chance to see “The French Line” four years ago, when it screened as part of a magnificent-sounding roster of films at the World 3-D Film Expo II, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, alongside such gems as “Those Redheads from Seattle” (1953) and “Taza, Son of Cochise” (1954). If you missed the show, however, all that remains of “The French Line” is the poster, with its portrait of Russell, arching her back in a bustier, and supported by the delicate slogan “J.R. in 3D: It’ll Knock Both Your Eyes Out!” There’s no proof that Howard Hughes wrote that line, but it has his paw marks all over it.

“Taza, Son of Cochise” is a special case, because it starred Rock Hudson and was directed by Douglas Sirk. Those for whom 3-D is, by definition, doomed to frippery tend to claim that no one of any distinction or sensibility would touch the stuff; yet a trawl through the record reveals any number of first-rate stars and directors who reached into the third dimension. There was “Dial M for Murder,” which Hitchcock shot in 3-D, although he was annoyed by the bulk of the camera. There was Curtis Bernhardt’s “Miss Sadie Thompson,” with Rita Hayworth, which proffered, among other delights, “special clip-ons for those who already wear glasses.” John Farrow directed John Wayne in “Hondo,” and Rudolph Maté, who, as a cinematographer, had shot masterpieces such as “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and “Gilda,” directed Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance in “Second Chance.” You could watch the Three Stooges, perhaps confusingly, in 3-D, in “Pardon My Backfire,” and you could watch Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in 3-D in “Money from Home.” I still wonder how the première went. Martin, living as he did in a bifurcated fuzz, was presumably the only man in history who could watch a 3-D movie without needing the special glasses.

Yet, to be brutal, one has to ask: how many of these movies have endured, in any format, in the course of the fourth dimension? We still cling to “Dial M for Murder,” but mainly for Grace Kelly, and for Hitchcock’s masterly handling of her trial scene. To be fair, “Kiss Me Kate,” the M-G-M musical with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, was a 3-D hit, though mainly for the Cole Porter songs, like “Always True to You in My Fashion” and “Too Darn Hot,” which existed long before the movie did and will resound after it has crumbled into dust. “Taza, Son of Cochise” now feels like a hiatus in Sirk’s career between “All I Desire” and “Magnificent Obsession.” 3-D, he said, “was just an experiment,” and one is tugged toward the mean suspicion that, though often a boost to a film’s immediate prospects, it soon became something that we could take or leave. Worse still, it may have hardened into a hindrance. When David Thomson, in “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” describes “Inferno,” a Robert Ryan picture of 1953, as “a modest venture, handicapped by 3D,” is he revealing an unjust prejudice, or a bitter truth of the time?

Certainly, Oliver Wendell Holmes could not have conceived of a more ironic fate for his beloved stereoscopy; namely, that the very quest for depth should dwindle into a grim guarantee of superficiality. Was it the blandishment of the quick shock which insured that, for seventy years or more, almost every adventure in 3-D would wind up as little more than an extended Plastigram? As late as last year, in “My Bloody Valentine,” a naked blonde hurled a pistol across a parking lot at a no-good truck driver’s head—or, apparently, through the screen and straight at our heads, for the sake of a passing “Ooh,” with no thought as to the rupture of dramatic flow. That is why so many 3-D films have taken refuge at the cheesier end of the market, in horror and pornography, where the slash of a knife or the swell of a bosom can allow the technique to strut its stuff. This is fatal for the maturing of any medium, as the fundamental need to tell a story, or to conjure a subtlety of mood, is trounced and swept aside by the sudden opportunity to show off. I clearly recall sitting through “Amityville 3-D” and “Friday the 13th, Part III” and feeling the last traces of genuine atmosphere drain away, to be replaced by a litany of giggles. As for “Jaws 3-D,” I was mildly surprised that the offending shark should feel so much less frightening than it had in Spielberg’s original, given that we were now being introduced, as it were, on a snout-to-snout basis.

The comedy of such encounters became inescapable, nowhere more so than when fish were replaced by the even wetter business of sex. Laughter is never far from the conjoining of bodies onscreen; it is, in its way, a hangover of our Puritan pudeur, but, with the approach of 3-D, it drowned out any hope of a softer cry. The heart, along with every other organ, sinks as one follows R. M. Hayes in his steady, alphabetical assessment of the boom in 3-D erotica. How relieved are you that you didn’t bruise your libido with a trip to “Scoring” or “Campus Panty Raids” or “The Starlets”? The last of these arrived in 1976, in QuadraVision, of which Hayes remarks, with some severity, “The fourth dimension was supposed to be the explicitness of the hardcore sex scenes.” The level of realism delivered by “Secrets of Ecstasy ’72,” according to one advertisement, meant that “you can almost feel the pulsing warmth,” but the faint regret in that “almost” is fleshed out by an interview that Ray Zone conducted with Arnold Herr, who shot 3-D porno films, mostly in the nineteen-seventies, for a company called Deep Vision. His memories of “The Playmates” are fondly exact: “She’s grinding and moaning. The camera moves up to her right breast. Then you see this enormous tongue from the lower part of the frame move up and start to lick her breast.” The tongue in question, it transpires, came from a cow, though any fears that the rest of the cow was still attached to it are quickly laid to rest: “We had it on a broom handle and we had something under it to animate it. We also spritzed it to make it look moist.”

Clearly, something had to give. This on-the-hoof inventiveness, though enterprising enough, offered almost nothing to serious filmmakers, and still less to cattle breeders. If 3-D was to stay alive, it had to break new ground. By good fortune, the ground ahead was digital.

We should not be taken aback by the pace with which digital production has invaded our moviegoing and colonized our eyes. Nonetheless, it is still bracing to take one’s seat for Tim Burton’s new “Alice in Wonderland” and realize how snugly the whole experience has accommodated itself to the shape of modern film. For a start, there are the glasses. Most early viewers knew only the anaglyph—a red lens over one eye, a blue or green one over the other, complementing the dual projection of the film itself. The nineteen-thirties saw increased competition from polarizing glasses, each lens of which blocked out part of the light from the screen. These two technologies have duked it out ever since. Anaglyph, which was ideal for black-and-white, and seemed bound for the scrap heap, has enjoyed an odd resurgence among computer users, for 3-D games. But moviegoers no longer want to be fobbed off with a piece of torn-out cardboard and plastic, which begs to be bent and scratched; they want to look like downhill skiers, their wraparound mirrored lenses flashing on the slopes. Polarization, therefore—preferably circular rather than linear, which means that you can tilt your head without getting a bad case of color-bleed—has carried the day.

Then, there are the coming attractions. When I saw “Alice,” all of them were in 3-D; a child being taken to the cinema for the first time would presume that no other options were available. People sighed with comfortable anticipation at the imminence of “Toy Story 3,” and rustled with bewilderment at “Tron Legacy,” which is apparently designed to trap us like rabbits inside a digital world. Indeed, until Alice made her entrance, in the main feature, no real people had passed before our gaze. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said, having stepped through the tiny door into Wonderland, yet what followed grew less and less curious, as we realized how tightly Burton had stuck to the blueprint of twenty-first-century extravaganza. Lewis Carroll’s tale is as brisk and bright as the Victorian child at its heart, more anecdotal than plotted, and Burton, spotting this, overcompensates by trading the domestic for the apocalyptic. Humans galumphing bareback on outsized beasts, and blasted war zones, where ignorant armies clash by night: we could be back in Narnia, or in the set pieces of “The Golden Compass”—leagues away from the spiky language games that enliven Carroll’s pages. The most troubling aspect is that, while 3-D lends an undoubted texture to these duels and pursuits, it also makes them strangely obvious; we now demand nothing less than constant, localized amazement, and we therefore get nothing more. No one should play down the hard, ingenious labor that such a project entails, yet something about it, as Alice sprang through the darkened air and slew the Jabberwocky, felt too easy.

There is also the “Avatar” problem. “Alice in Wonderland” was shot in two dimensions and then converted, during postproduction, into three, and, to a theatre full of pedants—which is what we have become—there are holes to pick in the screen. The flora through which our heroine passes is every bit as luxuriant as we expected, but not once do we sense ourselves yearning to catch and stroke it as we did those glowing woodland floaters—half jellyfish, half thistledown—that bloomed from the digital mulch of “Avatar.” The bar, in short, is being raised at a vertiginous rate, and today’s 3-D viewers deride the effects that felt so special in “The Polar Express,” all of six years ago. Those smooth, not quite real faces in which the director, Robert Zemeckis, likes to deal (and continues to deal, to judge by “A Christmas Carol”) now verge on the embarrassing, such is our craving for an alternative world in which we can place our trust. Before our eyes, the idea of 3-D vision has gone from hobby to heavy industry, from a treat to an essential, and from a creed to a need. For devotees, it had to happen:

For today’s 3D, riding on all-digital production pipelines, the benefits extend far beyond principal photography into postproduction and distribution. Considering that 1950’s 3D is said to have been crippled by image-quality issues that couldn’t be tackled in the analog age, this distinction is crucial. Basically, a digital 3D movie should not give you a headache.

That is Bernard Mendiburu, writing in “3D Movie Making: Stereoscopic Digital Cinema from Script to Screen” (2009). As a technical manual, it bristles with good advice, but, as a book of prophecy, it will scare the pixellated daylights out of anyone over forty. Once the newfangled 3-D is up and running, Mendiburu proposes,

it will be unavoidable and ubiquitous, to the point that the very mention of “3D” will disappear from posters. At some point in the near future, you will go to see a “flattie” for nostalgia’s sake, just as you sometimes watch black-and-white movies on TV today.

I hate to break it to Mendiburu, but there are film lovers who still go to the cinema to watch flatties that are not merely in black-and-white but are sometimes silent, too. And we do so not out of nostalgia but precisely because those films are anything but period pieces. Not long ago, I saw a new print of “Gun Crazy,” Joseph H. Lewis’s bad-couple thriller of 1950, and it felt considerably more dangerous and less dated than most of the new releases. Not that such danger will deter the acolytes of 3-D, who, far from scorning our preferences, will kindly offer to help. According to recent reports, Reliance Big Entertainment, the Mumbai-based company that last year invested three hundred and twenty-five million dollars in DreamWorks Studios, has entered into partnership with In-Three, a California firm that converts 2-D movies to 3-D. And not just new 2-D, but old 2-D as well. If all goes according to plan, “Twelve Angry Men” could be coming back. And they’ll be angrier than ever.

There is more in this announcement to startle the movie nut than in any rumor of “Avatar 2: Blue Crush.” Faced with the thought of a 3-D “Casablanca,” one is torn between outrage at such blind desecration and a sneaking wish to know—well, what the hell would it look like? The mind runs riot, in search of screenings past. Imagine the older couple dancing, with slow grace, in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” with the younger pair behind them, watching in admiration from the stairs; imagine the gentle ascent of the camera, at the end of “Ugetsu Monogatari,” as the child lays an offering on his mother’s grave, and we gaze beyond him to the workers, with griefs and rituals of their own, toiling in the distant fields; imagine the arrival of the train at the start of “Once Upon a Time in the West,” with those seamed, all-knowing faces so close to us and the railroad stretching so far; imagine the flirtatious darting between trees, in “Smiles of a Summer Night,” as the maid half seeks to flee the randy groom in the background, both of them blessed and maddened by the midnight sun. All these scenes depend on figures held in separate planes, and on the unspoken feelings that brim in the spaces between them; would it weaken or intensify those feelings if the spaces were given solid form? Try asking Patrick von Sychowski, the chief operating officer at Reliance MediaWorks, quoted in the London Times: “You can’t just press a button and have a computer do it. You have to take artistic decisions, such as what’s going to appear in the foreground.” Ah.

It is no slur on the skills of Reliance and In-Three to suggest that, statistically, they are unlikely to have a Welles, a Mizoguchi, a Leone, and a Bergman all sharing the same water cooler in Mumbai. Maybe the past should be left in peace. On the other hand, a name as distinguished as any of those was behind the most messianic tribute ever paid to 3-D. Sergei Eisenstein, in his last article, published in 1949, wrote that “mankind has for centuries been moving towards stereoscopic cinema.” Hostility to such progress told of a reactionary stubbornness: “Does not the musty conservatism with which news of work on the stereoscopic front is met in the West sound absurd and, in its way, insulting to the eternally developing tendencies of a genuinely vital art?” Even if you’re not convinced that “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” did that much to overthrow, or even lightly radicalize, a snoozing bourgeoisie, you have to be stirred by Eisenstein’s call to arms, not least when he summons, as a witness, a passage from his own film “Ivan the Terrible, Part I”: