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.



First of all it is needed to clarify what is the problem with the current vision. One of the main problem about the vision of the cinematic frame is the problem known as Gournerie’s paradox (p. 68)which shows that, there is a limit that can be reached by standard moving image vision in cinema. The paradox is simply, the image appears to change, gets distorted from any view rather than the position of the camera. This is the paradox that is observed when we consider the renaissance paintings. There exist a certain point which we should look at the frame, which is the point that considered as the position of the viewer by the painter. There is only one point in which there exist no deformation in the image. Objects tend to appear bigger near the vanishing point. Another problem occurs because of the spatial frequency difference that is defined as “The high spatial frequency range represent the fine details of the image, whereas the low spatial frequencies are associated to the coarse information” Mamassian gives an example from M.S. Livingstone who had argued that “the ambiguity of the facial emotion resulted from the superposition of two conflicting information in two different spatial frequency bands.”In mona Lisa, the smile is clearly visible when only the low spatial frequencies are considered but a more neutral emotion is seen when all spatial frequencies are considered. The ambiguity of Mona Lisa’s smile will be most striking when an observer makes an eye movement looking first at the mouth and then at the eyes.

Till now I have tries to show the problems of 2D vision. An now my claim is that 3D technologies like the one that is used in the movie Avatar, aims to overcome these restrictions.

The last point I would like to focus is the sound in movies whics perceived throught auditory system Auditory system defined as “[i]s the sensory system for the sense of hearing”. Different parts of ear and central auditory system in brain are the organs of auditory system. It takes part not only in distinguishing different sources of the sound, but also, to map the surrounding. Anderson states that “vision tells us where things are in space; hearing tells us when they move.”(p. 27) Movies tries to use both of these systems but visual systems are always more important than the audatory systems. Anderson explains that “if the auditory and visual events occur at the same time, the sound and image are perceived as one event. Such a conclusion is supported in the work cited here” This is the reason why where the sound is coming is not as important as where the image.

In final words I would like to speculate that, in future all movies will get the form 3D because of the technological developments that can enrich our perception of the movies.

Anderson, Joseph; The Reality of Illusions, Southern Illinois University, 1996

Mamassian, Pascal; Ambiguities and conventions in the perception of visual art, Volume 48, Issue 20, September 2008, Pages 2143-2153,Vision Research Reviews

Dominic W Massaro, Speech, Perception by Eye and Ear, 1987, 236-37

Ozan Kamiloğlu