Hiroshima Mon Amour: The Paradoxes of Postmodernity

Some years ago, I was a Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at McGill University. I taught a class I deeply loved with over six hundred students in it. I loved the class because it was so challenging to engage a new generation of students in watching films, many of which they would never have seen, if they had not joined, Intro to Film. When I showed Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s masterpiece, the screening was disrupted by laughing, not only on one occasion, but many times. I wrote an open letter to the students which is reproduced below.   

I want to start with the film which you saw recently, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. During the film, at moments of great intensity within the story and among the characters, when Alain Resnais is exploring to the fullest, not only the question of desire, but the underlying question of the history of desire, many of you chose, for reasons which I can only speculate on, to laugh. 

In some senses your laughter bore witness to the fact that we live in a postmodern age, that is, a period of time in which meaning, the ways in which we value and see ourselves and the ways in which we experience our lives on a daily basis, meaning has, in a sense, been lost. Now what does it mean to say that? 

The loss of meaning implies that all meanings have somehow become relatively equal, one to the other. When our ethical cores are spread out among competing values and we have few tools to distinguish what is right from what is wrong, meaning disappears. 

Just yesterday I was privy to a conversation between some high school students. During this conversation they argued, at a hypothetical level about how much they wanted to kill Salman Rushdie. These were not Islamic students, they were Anglophone and they were white. What disturbed me about what they said was the manner in which they trivialized a very serious moment in our cultural and political history. The Rushdie affair is not only about censorship, not only about different cultures and the way in which they see each other, but it is also about the values which we should, I would say, must, hold dear. What was at stake in what those students were saying was not so much the content of their conversation, but the fact that they could not see the absence of values, which were at the root of their own rather silly speculations, about how they could go about "winning" the Ayatollah's million dollar price on Rushdie's head. 

Trivialization. Let me read a very short quote to you from one of the most acute observers of the postmodern scene, even though I consider what Arthur Krokker says here to be overly deterministic, but nevertheless worthy of consideration and thought. 

“In this dis-membered world everything appears to be equal. Thus the emotions you might feel from watching an episode of your favourite television show, become interchangeable with what you might feel watching the news, watching for example the actual dismemberment of a person, their corpse. But what are you actually watching? How can you, with anything but the most suppressed of emotions, watch the many dead bodies which parade in front of you everyday on television?”

What is at stake here is the very way in which we see ourselves and if we are simply incapable of registering any feelings anymore, then perhaps Krokker is right. The two people you watched or didn't watch as the case may be in Hiroshima Mon Amour represented both themselves as people and also the historical epochs they were reflecting on. Thus, you will notice that they were both nameless. He represented Hiroshima and she France.

What is the meaning of Hiroshima to you? Have you ever thought about it? What impact did the images of suffering which you saw have on you? Or were you able to dismiss the images as somehow not relevant because it was not your own relatives whom you saw, or because you have decided that the  Second World War is something from the distant past, not likely to have affected you and not likely to affect you in the present?

Or perhaps there is such a surfeit of images of pain and suffering on television that you have ceased to worry anymore, after all an image is just that, something you can physically turn off, a piece of plastic, a gathering of pixels. But there was more to the representation of Hiroshima than the man. There was the fundamental question of whether after the disaster and pain which befell those people and their families, and their offspring, the fundamental question of whether desire or love was possible in a world so powerfully haunted by death.

The same question was being posed for the woman. Could she ever love again in the face of the tragedy which she had lived through?

This then is also a question of identification. How do you identify with the present and with history? To what extent can you link your own personal history to the current events we experience on an everyday basis? Perhaps there are no norms left that allow us to judge the distinctions between other people’s suffering and our own lives? Perhaps we have reached the point in our history where suffering is merely a footnote to the present?

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the main female character talks about her fall from grace, the fact that she loved a German soldier. In the midst of the war, she fell in love with the wrong man. For her, he was not the enemy, which raises serious questions about the nature of enemies, how we define them, and how we explain them to ourselves and to others.

If, in simple terms the enemy is always outside of us, is an—other, then who are we? Are we good? and is the other always bad? She, in the film crossed the line. She fell in love with an individual who for her had transcended the reality of the war, who was not the war, whom she loved with the youthful exuberance of someone just realizing her desires. The film is precisely about this contradiction, about the impossibility of desire ever being outside of history and of the impossibility of falling in love outside of the historical pressures and currents of the day.

It is impossible to love without a history, whether that history be personal or public. If your personal history is at the root of your desires and if that history is always related, intertwined with the history of the time, the period in which you are living, then your desires become or should become, a marker for you of the historical period in which you are living. A moment A marker. A sign.

She loved a German soldier and somehow through that process tried to transcend time and history. But that is not possible. Just as it is not possible for Hiroshima (the man) to possess her somehow outside of time, outside of all of the constraints and difficulties and contradictions of modern-day Japan.

There is more. How could she have fallen in love with a German soldier in the first place? What point of contact was there? The Germans had occupied France and her village, by the Loire. Nevers. So she fell in love with an occupying soldier, an oppressor, whatever qualities he may have had. What allowed her to transcend the conditions of history, the history of a violent occupation, allowed her to love in the midst of such tremendous decay and destruction? The film poses this as a question which cannot be answered. Because the same question arises in the love affair that she has with the Japanese man in the film.

There is a process beyond words, a process which cannot be pictured, a process sometimes which cannot even be imagined, a process governed by innocence and by the pleasures of the body which cannot be reduced to history and the film asks, must we, to retain our humanity, accept that part of ourselves without submitting it to examination, submitting it to explanation?

In her mind love has become associated with pain, with a pain that she must suppress if she is to survive. But pain cannot be suppressed because inevitably it will come out in some form, be that violence, or hatred, or melancholy, or as seems to be the case in the postmodern period a kind of distant nihilism, where the attitude is, who cares, why care, everything is so screwed up anyway, there are no solutions, no way out.

No way out. That feeling, blockage, despair, a deep sense of loss, is the expression of a pain not dissimilar to the one she expresses in the film. For, if we have convinced ourselves that the act of viewing a dead child on the screen or on television is a mere act of fiction, is fiction, then can we also easily convince ourselves that we are to some degree fictions as well. Identity becomes fictional if all of these painful moments no longer resonate with the power they deserve. It takes storytelling to move beyond or outside of history.

This then is the beginning of an argument which we could trace out in relation to this class. For we have watched characters who are both real and fictional, and in so doing, especially with Paris, Texas, we have had to face the fictions which might be at the root of absences which seem to govern the postmodern epoch. Absence.

What if the fundamental organization of meaning at present is dependent on absence? Can you go to Iran? Can you go to the war zones of Afghanistan? Can you inhabit the places and spaces and worlds you desire? Of course you cannot and thus the world you inhabit is filled with absences, which you in turn must fill with your imagination.

Take the following example. If, on a given night you were to be a part of the news that you watch, if you were to enter into the reality being depicted, what would happen? I leave you to speculate on the answer, but think of the woman in Hiroshima coming to grips with her past by entering into that past through the transformation of her Japanese lover into the German soldier. She addresses him as if he were from the past and in some senses he is. So to fill the absence she has to construct him, and by doing that, paradoxically, she comes to grips with the present.

Absences. If we were to immerse ourselves in total absence, in total forgetting, what would we become? The only total absence we have some inkling about is death and even with respect to death we cannot imagine absolute absence.

This is why, in part, she says: "I stayed near his body all that day and then all the next night. The next morning they came to pick him up and they put him in a truck. It was the night Nevers was liberated. The bells of St. Etienne were ringing, ringing.....Little by little he grew cold beneath me. Oh! how long it took him to die! When? I'm not quite sure. I was lying on top of him....yes.....the moment of his death actually escaped me....because even at that very moment, and even afterward, yes, even afterward, I can say that I couldn't feel the slightest difference between this dead body and mine. All I could find between this dead body and mine were obvious similarities, do you understand? he was my first love.........."

They put him (the German solder) in a truck. So, she too dies and is to a degree brought back to life in the place of greatest death, Hiroshima. But she comes to understand her death through a new love and this is both a contradiction and a paradox. Since if death is absolute then how can she be reborn?

Alain Resnais, one of France’s greatest filmmakers always plays with these paradoxes in his films. He explores the contemporary desire to ‘manufacture’ reality rather than engage with its challenges. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a difficult film, but it did not deserve to be laughed at.

How Long Will It Take Before All Artists Have Their Own Television Channels?

This question was asked by Stoffel Debuysere. It could be argued that every web page developed and maintained by individuals is in fact operating within a broadcast model. The screen real estate may be different, and the time and place of broadcast may be 24/7, but the reality is that we now live in what could best be described as a world of webs, semantic clouds and visual and aural clusters.

This ecology or imagescape is multi-layered and lends itself to an endlessly proliferating messagesphere that is infinite. I would suggest that self-broadcasting (which is at the heart of the brilliance of Facebook) now determines the ways in which we recognize ourselves in the world. I am not suggesting that the material world which we inhabit and recreate on a daily basis has ceased to exist. Rather, the material world has increasingly developed into mixed messages, which in combination with human action and interaction means that words, for example, can be taken more literally than ever before (the rise of religious fundamentalism) in parallel with an increasingly powerful and rational scientific model (that is at the heart of the engineering behind the Internet). Religion and science now co-exist in an uncomfortable relationship that is strained and for the most part in conflict.

To self-broadcast means to communicate with the unknown, since for the most part readers of web pages and facebook sites are anonymous. You may have 600 friends on Facebook, but you can't know when they are viewing your pages unless they leave you a message. For the most part, broadcasting in this way is asynchronous.

It is of course the same thing with books which exist in an asynchronous relationship with readers.

How long will it take before all artists have their own television channels? Well, they always have been broadcasting whether it was through the gallery system or via picture books or in large museums. The notion of self-broadcasting is as old as most of the systems of communications that we have created over many thousands of years of creative activity within messagespheres and this includes cave paintings.

Inference and Reference

In 1981 during a public presentation in Paris at La Cinémathèque Française, Jean Rouch said the following:

“I am an ethnographer and a filmmaker. I have discovered that there is no difference between documentary films and fiction films. The cinema, which is already an art of the double, which presents us with a constant movement from reality to the imaginary, could best be characterized as a cultural configuration which balances between various conceptual universes. In all of this the last thing to worry about is whether reality as such has been lost in the process of creation.” [i]

Lest Rouch be misinterpreted by purists of the documentary genre he went on to say that as a filmmaker he creates the realities he films. He sees himself as a ‘metteur en scène’ as well as someone who has to improvise everything from camera angle to camera movement during the shooting of a film. This process is inspired by the kind of personal choices which inevitably rely upon the imagination of the filmmaker. The key to Rouch's approach here is the role which he sees artifice playing in the construction of any image or as he put it, the way the filmmaking process irrespective of genre is ultimately a sharing of dreams at the level of production and performance. Rouch's statement can be seen as a counterpoint to efforts on the part of documentary filmmakers to overinvest in the realist enterprise. It could also point the way to an examination of why images which “look” real have such a seductive appeal. Most importantly what Rouch suggested is that the image doesn't play as important a role in the production of meaning as filmmakers would like to believe. In much the same manner as Chris Marker in “Sans Soleil,” Rouch's statement questions the place of referentiality within the documentary form and to some degree looks outside of the image for an understanding not only of the message but of its relationship to performance and projection. 

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[i]From documents presented at the celebrations for the 50ieth anniversary of the National Film Board in June of 1989.

Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray and Lightening Over Water

(Author's note. This is a revised version of an original piece I wrote on Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray)

Lightning Over Water ... the narrator is Wim Wenders... he is also the film's central character with Nicholas Ray (the maker of Rebel Without a Cause) ... who is moving slowly and painfully towards death ... by cancer. Wenders is faced with the dilemma of showing death on the screen, within the image ... of course, he knows that death cannot be shown ... what can be visible are the effects of death and the aftermath ... its presence/the person’s absence…death on film balances awkwardly between reality and construction, artifice and naturalism....effect and storytelling.

Wim Wenders opens the film by entering Ray's loft in New York ... there is no pretense that this is the present tense of an unfolding narrative ... it is openly constructed ... a filmic entry ... a filmic look....Wenders the narrator, the actor, the director ... Ray, the actor, director, and somehow throughout the entire film both its object and its subject. ...

The narration is in the present tense. Wenders lies down on a couch and in the distance we see Ray lying in bed. He coughs and yells in pain. There is nothing so immediate in a film as the ambivalence of that moment, of the desire to identify with the suffering and to be distant from it, to see the pain, but to know that the sight can and must be avoided.

Wenders closes his eyes and the camera shows him asleep but only for long enough to reveal that he is sleeping for the camera just as Ray was overdoing the sound of his pain. His cries of agony were constructed because we discover that Wenders and Ray are making the film together about each other and are struggling in fact to define for us how they are doing it and why.

They are also trying to give Ray back his self-esteem and dignity and are trying not to portray his cancer-ridden body as an object for pity especially by a distant and unknown audience.

This film is intensely self-reflexive, intensely aware of its struggle to come into being and to visualize the intersections between death and images of death. To highlight this, one of the main characters in the film is another filmmaker who is holding a portable video camera. He circles around the mise-en-scene, around the characters.

Wenders intercuts the video footage, transferred to film ... grainy ... colourless ... jumpy ... the angles and the close-ups are somehow wrong ... they are like bracketed comments on the film ... the video however, also references a challenge to the cinema as a medium. Video records continuously sometimes eliminating the need for a crew and documenting events in a way that foregrounds both verbal discourse and information. Continuous recording on video is the closest we can come to discourse using images.

Video also signals the transformation of film from a discrete time-based medium into a medium that can more properly described as a continuum. It also points backwards to the possible simplicity of filmic production divorced from the trappings of the industry and its requirements.

To Wenders Hollywood's rejection of Nicholas Ray (His abrasive personality and experimental approach to narratives led to his exclusion from the mainstream.) was akin to a cancer that is ravaging mainstream filmmaking and so the story of Ray's death becomes a metaphor for the decline of the cinema, a cinema that barely recognizes its own limitations and cannot see beyond the boundaries of its own financial framework.

The pain, the profound pain of Nicholas Ray comes out to its fullest at a lecture that he gives which Wenders uses in the film. Ray reminisces to a large audience about filmmaking, about creating and telling stories and as he stands against the podium holding on for balance he is filmed by Wenders as if it is a film noir.

The camera suddenly turns to Wenders and his crew on a scaffolding constructing the shot that we have just seen. Suddenly the present tense, the apparent present tense of the filming clashes with the obvious fact that a film always comes to us from the past. And the past is further emphasized by the film that Ray has just shown to the audience, The Lusty Men. In the scene that Wenders lets us see, Robert Mitchum plays a character coming back to what was obviously his childhood home. It is a profoundly moving scene that summarizes the nostalgia of memory and the desperate need to recover one's roots, to gain an understanding of one's personal history.

Ray comments in the following way upon the film: "The closer I get to my ending, the closer I am getting to rewriting my beginning. And certainly by the end, by the last page, the climax has reconditioned the opening and the opening usually changes. However, this film is not a Western. This film is really a film about people who want to own a home of their own. That was the great American search at the time this film was made."

Mainstream film narratives are fascinated by the past and by death and dying. I once came upon an article in a popular magazine where a doctor criticized the film industry for being unrealistic in its depiction of death. To prove his point he quoted extensively from a Hollywood make-up catalogue, which listed a variety of pellets, blood bags, and human looking skins that could be used to portray either a quick or a slow death. The doctor advised filmmakers to check with the medical profession because there were easier ways to represent death. If it can't be done well, he asked, why show it at all?

If Lightning Over Water makes anything clear it is that death can never be represented in the cinema. In one scene Ray re-enacts his last moments days before his actual death. It is obviously shot in a studio. The lighting is a gentle fluorescent blue. He speaks in poetic terms about a life that has confused him. The camera, it seems, almost wants to avert its gaze. This is not an act, the image screams. But of course it is, says Ray. The visible, visibleness of his death, becomes a function of how much the audience wants to add or subtract from the picture. Our eyes cease, simply, to be a function of camera position. We roam through our minds and our imaginations and our fantasies for an explanation. The ease of being the voyeur, of being lost in the contradictory pleasure of death produced by film magic, by carefully placed bags of blood against the skins of well-known actors, that pleasure and the ease with which we experience it, is now disrupted.

Lightning Over Water ends with a celebration. Ray has died. We are now truly in the past and we have helped reconstruct it. His friends and Wim Wenders cluster together to fulfill his final wish, to have his ashes taken out to the ocean on a Chinese Sailboat, which we see moving (through the courtesy of a helicopter shot) past the skyline of New York City.

In some senses the final party for Ray seems disrespectful, almost insensitive. In the bowels of the boat people are joking and drinking. The urn bearing his ashes in a beautiful painted box is just above them. Here too, Wenders does not allow cinematic convention its place. The ritual portrayal of death and grief in the cinema with its desire for realism, is thrown aside. One of the final images that we see is a camera bolted to the top of the boat, carefully revolving in a circular fashion. Its movements are controlled by remote control. We look at a distance of six or seven feet into its viewfinder. We see what it sees, what Ray would have perhaps seen, what Wenders desires us to see. We also see the artifice of the camera and begin to understand the visible as artifice. The viewfinder of the camera becomes another screen, another frame pointing out the contradictions of believing in the truth of the image. The film ends as it began, caught in the double bind of the image, which both tells a story and destroys itself in the telling.

Wenders also examines the contradictions of the narrative cinema which is always seen as very different from the documentary. Yet documentary films also tell a story and in this case, the story of a death lived through a character who sees himself and his life through the fictions of memory and the imagination.

Wenders cannot face Ray's death, so he must imagine it. But he also cannot imagine what he has experienced. So, Ray, coughing, almost vomiting sits as the director of his last scene before death, a moment that in real time is death approaching and in film time is death to be preserved, on celluloid, to be repeated and repeated and repeated for different audiences.

All that remains for Wenders is an image, a fragment, and a structured memory that is neither fact nor fiction. Cinematic memory sits somewhere in-between history, truth and our imaginations. The boundaries that separate death from what we imagine are thin and sometimes invisible as when people imagine their ancestors alive in some other more pleasant universe. The materiality of Ray’s death stands is stark contrast to the romantic transitions that dominate traditional narratives in the cinema.

At a crucial point early in the film, Ray tries to write a scenario. It is about an artist whose name is Nick, who has cancer and whose sole aim in life is to recover his reputation. As Ray recounts his story, it is not clear anymore whether the scene has been set-up, imagined by Ray and Wenders, or spontaneously the result of Ray's search for his own history, and an attempt to defy the pain he is experiencing. Wenders asks Ray why the story is about an artist and not about Nicholas Ray, the filmmaker. "Why are you making the detour of turning into a painter because he's got your name? Why isn't he you? And why isn't he making films instead of painting? It's you, why take the step away?"

But, film always steps away, that is precisely what film is as a medium, a step away into representation. And Wenders’s problem in the film is that he is bound by the contradictions between the closeness he feels both to Ray and his demise and the reality that Ray will be preserved in medium of film.

Ray says the following: "I have one action which is to regain my self-image and my image to the rest of the world and for you, you have to cement your own action and try to find that which is closest to you and work actually from a character whose needs are his greatest needs, greatest personal needs."

And Wenders answers: "My action is going to be defined by yours. My needs are going to be defined by you facing death."

And then Ray says: "Well that would mean that you're stepping on my back, which I don't mind...."

The intersection of narration and narrator, of Wenders as filmmaker, actor and speaker cannot overcome the contraction of being involved in Nick's pain and using it for the purpose of the film. The spiral of double binds governing this film reaches their peak just after Ray says that he doesn't mind being the "object" of the narration. The crew and everyone else on the set starts to clap and this signals quite clearly that the scene had been rehearsed. The irony is that we the spectators look for a lack of control because that will make the scene appear to happen in the real time. It will give it that documentary feel of a transcription.

Ironically, that feeling of an absence of control makes the future seem possible and what throws

Wenders off is that Ray's death is imminent and therefore that the future is actually impossible.

Nick Ray: Why'd you come here, Wim?

Wim Wenders: I wanted to talk to you, Nick.

Nick Ray: About what, dying?

Wim Wenders: I didn't come to talk about dying. I didn't come to talk about dying, Nick, but we might have to.

Nick Ray: But we might have to.

Wim Wenders: I was looking forward to seeing you because I need your advice. You told me over the phone that you wanted to see me, but I was afraid to come. And I'd rather tell you right now, why? I was aware that I had seen you in weakness, and that you might be worried about being seen this way. But I feel it's okay now. There is something else that came to my mind in the plane last night, that I'm actually more afraid of. I thought that I could find myself being attracted to your weakness, your suffering and if I realized I would, I think that I would have to leave now. And I feel like I would be betraying you. That won't happen.”

Wenders does try very hard to avoid turning Ray into an object for voyeurism but it is impossible to avoid. No matter how often Wenders tries to talk about his own anxieties, Nicholas Ray is still in the throes of death and we join with Wenders in being spectators to that process.

Wenders is faced with the same problem that audiences have. He can only look at Ray through the viewfinder. The cinema transforms reality but cannot change the unfolding realities of death. 

The Future of 3D Stereoscopic Cinema

Note to reader. I mention Wim Wender’s extraordinary 3D film on Pina Bausch in this piece. I was privileged to listen to Wenders give one of the greatest speeches of his life about his film at the Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference in June of this year.

I have been thinking a lot about 3D over the last number of years not only because we at Emily Carr University have been doing some really interesting research into the craft and production of 3D films, but also because the reemergence of the medium is a function of a large number of cultural and technological variables that have come into play over the last decade.

These include, the miniaturization of screen real estate, motion capture technology that has made it far easier to integrate animation and live action, tablet computers and streaming technologies for the movies but also for independent film. Games, graphic simulations, and the Web are all to varying degrees implicated in the interest that creators and viewers are showing in 3D. This has largely to do with the fact that 2D is so omnipresent that the desire to break through 2D space has increased and with some intensity. That effort is well represented in the Wii and the Kinect.

The ways in which we manage information and the ways in which we create information within social and other media are also part of this shift. The context is then both particular and related to the present. 3D is back because we NEED it as a way of rediscovering embodiment in a world driven by data based systems.

So, let me comment on a few of these elements as a way of stimulating some discussion around the following question: Does 3D challenge the fundamental assumptions that have always existed in the production and viewing of the narrative, documentary and experimental cinema? I think that Wim Wenders has tried to answer at least part of that question with his 3D film on Pina Bausch.

A couple of observations. 3D is not significantly more interactive than 2D cinema. Greater depth produced through the many layers that make 3D possible does however affect the space for cinematic exhibition and exposition and concurrently the space for audience participation. Metaphorically, 3D expands the possible range of audience interactions, although still within the confines of the screen and conventional audience seating configurations.

I am talking here about cinema theatres and in general my comments do not reference caves and other performance spaces or installations, which use physical structures and specialized technologies to generate the illusion of participation.

However, the amplification of the visual field in 3D needs to be examined in the context of further discussions on the kinesthetic effects of viewing with glasses and without, an area that I will not touch on here. The interactions when they do occur in 3D are in the visceral reaction to movement and the exploration of the visual field. 3D is often discussed as if it creates a greater sense of tangibility as well as ‘optical’ and haptic feedback. 

I believe that we have to test these assumptions with more rigour than we have up until now. I would argue in a similar vein that console based games which supposedly allow players to maintain greater control over the game or the narrative are really a variation on the display traditions of conventional television than a truly interactive process. Tangibility and feedback come from the process of co-creation, a point to which I will return to in a moment.

The ‘presence’ of 3D images, their force also comes from a combination of increased intensity produced through a heightened sense that the illusory space of 2D has finally been cracked. This is aided by sound augmented by the use of special effects. Wenders’ Pina Bausch film is extraordinary and beautiful but was produced using a set of very sophisticated and costly technologies. This is not a criticism, but is more of a reflection on the challenges that lie ahead.

We talk about special effects as a function of screen technology and for the most part it is. But, special effects are also content at all levels. 3D paves the way I would suggest, for a shift in viewing experiences that is somewhat akin to hyperlinking in conventional uses of the web and touch screen controls on the iPad — another couple of points that I will come back to in a moment.

When I say that special effects are content, it is not so much what narratives are doing with special effects, but more importantly that special effects are an important component of the story and I would argue that is maintained in Wenders’ film.

Take the recent 3D production of Alice in Wonderland for example. Alice’s imaginary is the site for all sorts of special effects from physical size to animal intelligence. The narrative explores these transformations both from within its own assumptions and through the force applied by the use of the special effects. The depth of the effects, their strength comes from opening up a space for viewing that allows the special effects to at times overwhelm the mise-en-scène and become the story.

I would propose that 3D cinema is about exploring not only the layers that make it possible, but also the interaction of space and effects with depth and crucially the distribution of information across those layers.

Distribution across conventional screen real estate is driven by narrative (even in the documentary film) and is changed in 3D to information scattered across large spaces that requires scanning, viewing and continual adjustment to spatial and temporal shifts. In 3D the frame surrounding the image becomes leaky and that fluidity redistributes the visual field. The result is not perspective in the conventional sense, but something akin to telescopic vision.  

Special effects as data. Distribution, as James Cameron discovered requires very, very complex technologies because data needs many layers of physical and digital sculpting to move from its status as information to something resembling a body or a hybrid or a landscape (especially as Cameron is equally driven by the need to generate intensely realistic visualizations of his imaginary worlds).

There has been a great deal of discussion about the technologies needed to make 3D work but as we know some of the key technologies have been in existence for some time. The difference now is that we are all involved in manipulating distributed forms of information and have become accustomed to at least trying to penetrate the many screens we use on an everyday basis. We also struggle with information flow. Notwithstanding our efforts to try and aggregate or curate the information, there is always some more data on the horizon. This struggle is one reason why 3D technologies seem to offer a way out of the maze that our continual interaction with the 2D world has created for us. As we move closer to the time when we will not need glasses to view 3D, we must ask more questions about 2D.

I was asking myself the other day whether Robert Bresson would ever have been interested in making a 3D film? For those of you who may know his work, it is by modern standards excruciatingly slow both in the mise-en-scène and in the development of the narrative. The early films of Alain Resnais were quite similar to Bresson’s. Many of the experimental films of the early 1970’s experimented with time trying to understand its role in the viewing experience by creating static shots driven by voice more than by action on the screen.

I would suggest in reference to an earlier comment, that 3D films by virtue of their technological impulses create spaces of description and narrative that require movement, constant movement. And, ironically that is the very nature of the Web as seen in 2D on a computer or smart phone. I see hyperlinking as a metaphor for movement where no one piece of information suffices and where nothing can really stand on it own.

The relationships between screen and reality have receded with the boundaries less and less clear and crucially less visible. Metaphorically, as the screen tries to break out of its confines, the space for exhibition shifts into the wonderful yet illusory middle space between screen and viewer, like our hands that want to reach out to touch the miniaturized Bono on a stage in Buenos Aires in the amazing film made about his concert. This middle space is also a middle ground but it is not a place you can plant your feet into and the question that then arises is whether 3D is itself misnamed.

Or, has the human body been transformed into a screen and we are merely exploring its vicissitudes as our imagined and holographic selves search for some common ground? I would remind everyone that all cinema is about dematerialization.

Bono’s dematerialized self sits in my mind as an idealized version, Bono 6.4 like some sort of operating system that has moved from its status as manager to an invisible mediator of what we do with computers. But the thing about that film is not Bono, but the audience and their movements, joy and sheer sense of being, something we can only witness as viewers, but something we nevertheless want to share.

It is not an accident then that Avatar is about replacement and substitution at all levels from prosthetics to the final conversion of death from decay into life. Cameron unlike Werner Herzog intuitively understands that screens will not do and even 3D cannot replace the need for language. This is why Cameron not only invents a new world but creates a specialized language for it. And, so much of the film centres on translation not only between machines but also between hybrids and humans.  

And so, what did I mean by my comment about co-creation? Well, so much of the rhetoric around 3D and gaming is about enhanced experiences produced through technological innovation and some of that is fair and right. But, much of it is still steeped in representational strategies that don’t allow for shared control.

Co-creation implies distributed responsibilities and a sharing of the outcomes, something that Pina Bausch understood because so much of her work in its abstractness and visual metaphors opens up a space for audiences to project their needs, feelings and fears onto the performers. Her space is the stage and as with all stages we witness what happens in 3D but we also create what we see and this is fundamental to all forms of media but is often drowned out in the effort to ‘produce’ the ideal spectator.

I was overwhelmed by the images from Wender’s film which will be released in North America in the Fall of 2011. But, we need to keep in mind that his work told us a series of brilliant, poignant stories that took the viewing of the film from its normal theatrical confines into the shared relationship we developed with a dazzling and articulate artist. He is the ultimate auteur! He and not the film turned the theatre into a small coffee shop and as we sat around the table and listened to this consummate storyteller, we translated that intimacy into the images he showed us. He opened up a space where we could share his life. Could a 3D film of the speech that he gave have done the same thing?

Life in a Day

Wim Wenders in 3 Dimensions

There was a wonderful conference in Toronto that began on Saturday, June 11 and ended on the 14^th of June. Entitled 3D FLIC or Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference the conference was centred on new developments in Stereoscopic 3D Cinema. Wim Wenders kicked off the meeting and among other things gave the speech of his life about his new 3D film on Pina Bausch the great dance choreographer who died in 2009. 

The speech was filled with his profound reaction to Bausch’s dances and dancers, to her theatre as he put it. His decision to translate those feelings into 3D was monumental largely because what he has done is reinvent the medium. Stereoscopic 3D has never looked like this with depth, added volume and most importantly the primacy of the dancing body coming to life. Wender’s film marks the dawn of a new era in the cinema and the people who attended the conference from IMAX pioneer Graeme Ferguson to Peter Anderson who has worked in mainstream 3D production for decades to Emily Carr University’s Maria Lantin whose research into 3D is leading the way to new forms of expression, all contributed to an exciting discussion of this new age of image creation.

Ocean breath from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

There were many other presentations including one from Catherine Owens who was responsible for bringing U23D to the screen in 2008. This amazing film of a U2 concert in Argentina produced in both IMAX 3D and 3D Digital was path breaking. Her presentation about the making of the film revealed not only the challenges but also the kind of detail in production that is necessary to achieve a creative outcome.

3D is not easy and requires a profound rethink of conventional moviemaking methods. 3D changes not only how viewers interact with screens but also how stories are told. We are at the cusp of a transformative moment in the history of the cinema.

Artificial Worlds and the Cinema

On the set of Avatar

The cinema was dominated for a hundred years by a certain kind of theatricality, mise-en-scene, in which a set or a scene, something visible, determined the structure of shots and the actor’s role in them and most importantly the director’s creative vista. Now the actor and the director must imagine the scene they are in to a far greater degree than ever before, which is why production processes like pre-visualization and post-production have become so important.

In the literal sense there is now no scene. There is nothing scenic about a green or blue wall onto which images and events, backgrounds and foregrounds will later be digitally grafted or a motion capture studio where everything happens in complete abstraction from reality. Rather, to be in a scene in the digital cinema is to enter into an imaginary wonderland, a Narnia of the mind, a fantasy upon which and through which actors produce their roles. As in the past, they have to produce themselves as characters but within a carefully constructed space that is existentially artificial and quite bereft of physical markers. In a sense, because special effects are so important to the cinema in the 21^st century, the process of production is more akin the creation of animated films which is why the cinema is now a hybrid or mixed medium.

This is why the contemporary documentary cinema is so wildly popular. Throughout the 20^th century, documentaries were of marginal value to the film business and generally viewed by small audiences with specialized interests. This has changed completely. I attribute the shift to the need to capture events and people with some spontaneity and to produce meaning by engaging with the world — the lens as window without the interference of special effects.    

Artifice is of course foundational to all genres of cinema. There is a young character by the name of Lucy in the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Her role is central to the narrative, especially in the beginning when she discovers Narnia, a winter wonderland of snow and extraordinary creatures. In order to make sure that her reaction to the “scene” would be as innocent and as open as possible, the creators of the film kept her away from the set until they needed to film her shots. Then they blindfolded her and brought her into the studio. She still only saw a fragment of the final version of the environment that had been created for the film — heavily composited, reshaped through a variety of sophisticated tools and technologies — but the director wanted her to look as if she had never seen what the filmmakers had created. They needed her innocence to be as genuine as possible in order to bring some authenticity to the shot, as if they were afraid of the artifice of the special effects. This is the challenge generated by creative processes that move from screen to screen until they finally make it to the big (film or television) screen.   

A series of phantoms, images that barely exist outside of the computer, scenes that are not built by actors but by the agile use of technology, all of this adds up to an imaginary world, one that is generated by the use of technologies that have transformed the production process.

An imaginary scene built upon the imagination of viewers, this doubles the effects of identification and viewing and perhaps explains why the movie Avatar was such a success. The director, James Cameron realized that in order to convey the intensity of the world that he had created for his actors, he had to actually play back each scene to them. As much time as possible was spent witnessing the artificial world of Pandora as managing the complexity of acting within the confines of a studio.

Ironically, this is precisely what viewers have to grapple with while watching the film. They have to enter a world they know is artificial, believe in its geography and physicality and struggle with the knowledge that the world only exists in their imaginations. They are imitating the struggle of the actors who have to devise all sorts of ways of legitimizing their roles within non-existent spaces.

Artifice, audience and imagination have merged.