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.




The movie started to shown in cinemas with two different technologies; RealD and IMAX. All this kind of technologies known as 3D goggle stereoscopy. In cinema, most common method which has already used is the usage of special polarized goggles which enables to see different views with two eyes and creates a perception similar to the real world. The movie Avatar (Cameron, 2009) have been shoot with such kind of a technology, and distributed for both IMAX and RealD technologies. It seems that we will see more movies in this kind of a technology, especially if it become cheaper. Sony and FIFA announce the world’s first 3D FIFA World Cupii which will be available for public viewing in 7 cities around the world (Berlin, London, Mexico City, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Rome, and Sydney). Future of this technology might be a autostereoscopy which “use eye tracking systems to automatically adjust the two displayed images to follow viewers’ eyes as they move their heads.”iii

I am sure the ones who has seen the movie in cinema easily noticed the crucial difference with the movies shot before. I believe that Cinema, which is still using 2D screens, is not able to create the effect of real, but instead using different methods which can be generalized as body of the filmmaker. Filmmaker uses different methods to create a illusion of reality to overcome the deficiencies of the 2D vision. On the other hand as shown before 3D vision technologies are developed in order to overcome the deficiencies of 2D vision and to give the effect of a real depth of field. And the movie Avatar seems an important step through this idea.

On the other hand the question that is disturbing me about the reason why movies are trying to imitate the real life has various different answer. I will discuss some other in other review, but now I want to give a more philosophical answer. A quotation from Heidegger says, “The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age … The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture”iv (p. 276) Now, maybe the reason for looking for more real like image might be the aim of modernism: a complete picture of the world. Modernism with its science and art tried to mirror the real world, in a sense. Therefore, the idea behind why technology in cinema always developed to enrich the likeness with reality might be due to the aim of modern world. But then the simulation theory of Baudrillard come into scene. In the first pages of his essay, he quotes from a story of Borges, whose aim is the complete map of the world, in the exact size. Cinema defined by Ranciere as an art of modernism. He states that it shows the aesthetic properties of modernism. Than on one hand cinema is trying to imitate the reality, however on the other hand this aim of simulation reality is makes it to get into the era of post modernism, which simulates reality and erase what is real.

New technologies like the ones used in the movie Avatar will be more commonly used, as much as they got cheaper. Therefore it might be possible that reality will be imitated by cinema, which is an art of modernity.

Bazin, Andre; What is Cinema?, University of California Press, 1967, London

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200912/09-137E/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy

Heidegger, Martin; The Age of World Picture, in Paul Dure, The Rhetoric of the Frame, Cambridge, 1996

Ozan Kamiloğlu