3. Digital 3D, Parallax Effects, and the Construction of Film Space In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
3. Digital 3D, Parallax Effects, and the Construction of Film Space in Tangled 3D and Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D Kristen Whissel Abstract This essay analyzes how parallax effects in Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D (2010) and Tangled 3D (2010) effectively blur the boundaries between the past and present, sight and touch, and diegetic space and the space of reception in order to give form to themes concerning the dimensionality of the moving image. I show how these films function as ideal case studies for demonstrating digital 3D’s transformation of film space by organizing seeing, knowing, and feeling along the screen’s z-axis. Keywords: Digital 3D, parallax effects, affect, haptics, uncanny Since the release of Chicken Little 3D (Mark Dindal) in 2005, digital 3D cinema has had the odd historical status of being a ‘new’ medium that has returned to us from the past as a harbinger of cinema’s future. To be sure, digital 3D has transformed our understanding of the (pre-)history of the cinema itself, which now must include Charles Wheatstone’s invention of the stereoscope (1838) and Charles Babbage’s invention of the Analytical Engine (1837) in the first half of the 19th century. However long this history, the return of stereoscopic 3D as a digital medium demands a rethinking of film history to include the changing dimensionality of the moving image and, with it, transformations in the articulation of film space. Much as digital tools provide new means for organizing the image along and around the x- (horizontal) and y- (vertical) axes, they have also provided, as Stephen Prince has argued, new means for ‘choreographing’ story, character, and action along the z-axis—a continuum that stretches from the extreme Sæther, S.Ø. and S.T. Bull (eds.), Screen Space Reconfigured. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789089649928_ch03 78 KriSTEN WHisSEL depths of the 3D image outward into the space of reception.1 In the process of expanding film space through the enhanced parallax effects afforded by computational imaging, digital 3D cinema also foregrounds (often quite literally) what Scott Richmond describes as ‘the profound interrelation between the modulation of embodied perception and the cinema’s existence as a technological system’.2 The use of negative parallax to create emergence effects in 3D cinema has long been associated with a playful and sensational assault on vision, whereby objects propelled across the threshold of the screen provoke shock or surprise—as in the famous paddle-ball sequence in House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953) or the emergent claw of the eponymous monster in Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954). While negative parallax is still used in this way (particularly in 3D comedies and horror), digital technologies make possible the use of negative parallax to gently ‘float’ computer-generated objects across the screen, allowing the emergent image to address the specta- tor in an entirely different temporal and affective register. As Ariel Rogers and Barbara Klinger argue in their respective analyses of positive parallax and the debates surrounding it, emergent, floating digital 3D images are often ephemeral ‘objects’ (snowflakes, dust motes, ashes, bubbles, tears) that appear to have the capacity to hover in, or gently glide through, the space of reception—imparting, at times, ‘a kind of lyricism and awe’.3 While negative parallax can generate the illusory sense of an object’s presence within the space of exhibition to expand the dimensionality of the moving image and film space, digitally enhanced depth effects (positive parallax) have been central to the intensification of the immersive aesthetic that has been associated with the stereoscopic 3D image since the 19th century. When accompanied by digital surround sound and projected onto IMAX screens, digital 3D depth effects can produce an enhanced sense of immersion or presence within a radically expanded pictorial space (such the vast CG orbital space of Gravity 3D or sublime CG expanses of the Pacific Ocean in Life of Pi 3D) or within a restricted, closed, ‘impossible’, or otherwise inaccessible space, which, Rogers notes, digital 3D films seem inclined to investigate and/or portray.4 As one might expect, the newly expansive spaces constructed by digital 3D have given rise to films organized formally, narratively, and thematically around the ‘problem’ of 1 Prince, Digital Visual Effects, pp. 201-202. 2 Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions, p. 6. 3 Rogers, Cinematic Appeals, p. 214; Klinger, ‘Beyond Cheap Thrills’, p. 191. 4 Rogers, Cinematic Appeals, p. 188. DiGITAL 3D, PARALLAX EFFECTS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF FILM SPACE 79 overcoming or transcending increasingly expansive (spatial, temporal, historical) distances—a problem that digital 3D cinema is particularly well suited to address. As I have argued elsewhere (2016), positive and negative parallax engage contemporary audiences with newly spatialized forms of seeing, knowing, and feeling through their promotion of epistemic and affective seeing—and I will expand this argument here to address digital 3D’s expansive film space.5 The epistemic seeing promoted by positive parallax is defined by the desire to see and know that which has been withheld from perception, and it is characterized by the imperative to move into spatial depths optically and/or physically in order to satisfy curiosity.6 And while curiosity has its affective charge (an urgency or sensation that can be satisfied or quelled by seeing and knowing—and here Tom Gunning’s [1994] formulation of the term ‘epistemania’ is helpful), it is associated with reason and the desire to investigate.7 Even as stereoscopic 3D images provoke and satisfy a (perhaps urgent) need to know, the depth effects produced by positive parallax are also used to dramatize the problem of overcoming distance and to establish the limits of perception and the knowable; as such, positive parallax is easily harnessed to the production of intellectual uncertainty or doubt and a failure to see. Through its emergence effects, negative parallax promotes affective seeing, a perceptual experience that underscores the embodied binocularity of vision (particularly when objects are propelled toward the spectator). Digital emergence effects are calculated to enchant the senses and to provoke a range of somatically and emotionally charged responses, thanks in part to the exaggerated relief and solidity that stereoscopic 3D gives to foregrounded objects. As Jonathan Crary explains, the persuasive solidity of the stereoscopic 3D image effaces the difference between vision and touch by offering up ‘immediate, apparent tangibility […] as a purely visual experience’—an effect that has been associated with the stereoscopic image since the popularization of the stereoscope in the 19th century.8 5 Whissel, ‘Parallax Effects’. 6 I borrow the wonderfully fungible term ‘epistemic seeing’ from Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 179, who associates epistemic seeing with the ability to ‘see something as something’ as opposed to ‘the mere seeing of something’. I re-purpose this term here, changing the definition of ‘epistemic seeing’ in order to make it into a useful critical tool for coming to terms with the forms of visuality and vision promoted by positive parallax. See also Seel in Elsaesser, ‘The “Return” of 3-D’, pp. 235-236. 7 Gunning, ‘The Horror of Opacity’. 8 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 124. 80 KriSTEN WHisSEL While an object propelled toward the spectator can make one flinch in shock or surprise, CG objects that float into exhibition space emerge in order to provoke tears, wonder, or hesitation as the persuasive sense of the object’s immediacy and ‘presence’ prompts us to reach out and test the boundaries between reason and the senses, knowledge and belief that the stereoscopic 3D image so playfully undermines. Floating CG objects seem to offer themselves up (however fleetingly) for our ‘ocular possession’ in a way that emphasizes the pleasurable effects of the imbrication of embodied vision with digital technologies.9 In either case, negative parallax has the effect of expanding diegetic space into the space of reception and conjures up the fleeting illusion that one might reach across material and spatio- temporal divides to forge a tangible connection to the 3D image—and vice versa. Because negative parallax blurs boundaries separating diegetic space and the space of reception, it is an ideal visual effect for elaborating and emblematizing the dissolution or violation of other boundaries (such as those that separate the past from the present, presence from absence, material and immaterial, inside and outside) at the level of form, narrative, and theme. To be sure, positive and negative parallax should not be opposed to one another as scholarly discussions of 3D cinema so often do in order to privilege depth effects over emergence effects.10 Rather, parallax effects and the epistemic and affective seeing they promote are elaborated along the continuum of the z-axis and function in tandem, whether an object is propelled back and forth from the depths of the image out into the space of exhibition (as in the paddle ball sequence from House of Wax) or when depth is transformed by shallow focus into a blurred background to enhance the illusion of emergence (as in the floating tear sequence in Gravity), thereby yielding to negative parallax. As Ariel Rogers explains in her detailed analysis of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the ‘tactile’ (or, in Miriam Ross’ words, the ‘hyperhaptic’) quality of the stereoscopic 3D image has long been a defining feature of 3D’s modes of address and aesthetics.11 Both Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 19th-century writings on the stereoscope (1864) and Laura U. Marks’ recent theorization of intercultural cinema (2000) investigate the ‘haptic’ qualities of various forms of visual culture and the embodied modes of spectatorship they 9 Ibid., p. 127.