All Movies Become 3D! But ask why?

Through out my previous reviews I have tried to discuss the what a movie want. Now, I would like to discuss the means of increasing perception of movies. First question is about the problems of 2D vision. I have worked on this topic for the essay I wrote for the course Time, Image and Motion. I believe that this discussion is important to understand the very nature of cinema.

The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which enables organisms to see. “It interprets the information from visible light to build a representation of the world surrounding the body”. Visual system consists of eye and related parts in brain. J.J. Gibson in his book, The Echological Approach to to Visual Perception (1979) shows that we learn where one object ends and another starts by walking around them and looking at it or by observing the object as it moves. If an object is in front of the other, we put this information in the mapping system in our brain. What he calls direct perception is, the information in the light taken by visual system directly and processed directly in logical system.(p. 29) With the illusion of the cinema spectator easily gets into movies. The world in a movie understood as real like with the illusion of cinema. First of all as stated before we know where we are by means of vision and audition. Anderson adds that all the physical mechanism in our body(movement of our eyes, our head, our body) feed back through “proprioception to facilitate ongoing composition of our position”(p. 112). He states that vision is the dominant system for human beings to orient themselves in space. And he conclude that because vision dominates proprioception system, it is possible to see the motion picture as real. Therefore one can say that visual similarity with reality in a move is more important part of the body of a movie than the auditory part.

What a movie wants?

In this response I will try to answer the question why cinema tries to imitate reality. In the previous response I have argued that cinema is an art of modernity, and modernity always searched for complete picture of reality. Now, my claim is cinema tries to be real like because of the cognitive reasons. It tries to create stimulations in order to find a place to live.

Susan Sontag asks the question “What does a film want?” and her answer is, the film wants to become an object in the world. They want to exist for themselves. Two questions arises after this answer, that are, where is exactly is this space that the film wants to exist in? And what is the relation of the film with the spectator? The answer of the Sontag seems like a declaration of the wish of the film to simulate the world.

Film assumes a spectator to create stimulus while becoming the film, and the spectator gives response to different stimulus that created by body of the film. The same notion in Deluze(most probably in Bergson as well) come into scene like, “Of course Bergson … introduced a profound element of transformation: the brain was now only an interval, a void , nothing but a void, between stimulation and a response.”(p. 211) The very nature of the body of the film helps it to echo in the brain of the spectator. Visual and auditory systems of human perception gets movies into the human brain.

3D technologies and Bazin

In the “What is Cinema?”, Andre Bazin comes up with a claim: “The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in imaginations of a few man of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented”i(p.36). Bazin approaches cinema as its is aiming the complete imitation of the nature, which can be understood as complete simulation of the real world. With developing technologies of imitating image, sound, editing techniques, camera and its movements, different kinds of filmgoing experiences etc.

I would like to ask the question if the movie Avatar(Cameron,2009) is a new step towards the idea of total cinema that Bazin is talking about or not.

What is new about the movie Avatar is its new 3D technology, which gives a feeling of reality more efficient than earlier and commonly used technologies. Therefore, it gives a feeling of imitation of real life more than the projection of an image to a 2D screen in before technologies. In this new technology the image has a depth not only through the back of the screen but also to the front of it. Therefore it is much more like our vision of real life.

A Comment on Film-Philosophy Issue

Having bachelor of philosophy degree, I think that the concept of philosophy is easily vulgarized in any topic that “thinkers” talk. This is same when “philosophy” integrates/engages in the film. Thus, as regards to film-philosophy issues, philosophy can be seen as if it is a medium to analyze a film or it is seen that some films are illustrations of philosophical themes and also film can be seen as philosophy, namely, “philosophy in action”. Although this topic requires further analysis, I’ll give you some key points in order to make you be familiar with the issue of film-philosophy.

I think that, especially after new path of Deleuze, film and philosophy penetrate each other but how this intimacy should be considered becomes argumentative issue. Thus, in my last response, I’d like to briefly re-speculate the issue or the argument “film as philosophy”, which Falzon and Mulhall, who has adapted and extended opinions of Cavell (influenced by Bazin’s conception of film as an imprint of the world itself), have argued, in terms of Wartenberg’s opposition to them.

On Bazin & The Ontology of the Photographic Image

In order to find non-practical aims or ends beyond human enterprises or activities, one needs a considerable amount of research, because at the end of day, it is very difficult to find aims or ends which cannot be reduced to pragmatic concerns. In this respect, art as a human enterprise or activity can its own set of practical ends such as finding a way to cope with earth that seems hostile or at least indifferent to human beings, or standing against the death which is in fact inevitable end for the human beings etc. Religion can be another human enterprise seeking for similar ends like art and this condition might be one of the factors that take place in their intersection. So although at first sight it seems to be a bit simplistic, I agree with Bazin concerning his argument that embalming the dead might be taken as a fundamental factor in the creation of plastic arts. In other words, human beings’ struggle against death which is in fact inevitable for them might be the source of their artistic creations.

When Bazin talks about the aims beyond the mummification process, the part that I found interesting is the part in which he tells about the terra cotta statuettes as substitutions for mummies. I take this as an illustration of how representation of something is used for this something itself, i.e. terra cotta statuettes for mummies. Although this act has a religious background in itself, through this substitution of representation for the thing it represents, use of representation as a possible way of coping with earth or standing against the death finds its echoes in the substitution of image for model.