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4-D and the Ride Film 11 Motion in Space 3-D attraction films in theme parks and special venues have been perennially popular with the public. The timeless appeal of the ride film and the stereoscopic experience were highly visible in 2003. Shrek 4-D, a digitally projected stereoscopic show, elaborating the narrative of the feature-length movie that preceded it, was playing to audiences in kinetic seats at the Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood. The 4-D elements included water sprayed on the faces of the audience, seats that raised up and then dropped at the conclusion of the show, and air blown onto the audience’s feet, giving an impression of scurrying mice. R. L. Stine’s Haunted Lighthouse was a 3-D filmed attraction (replacing Pirates in 4-D) at Sea World in San Diego that same year, and AnimalVision 3-D, a segment from nWave’s 15/70mm version of SOS Planet, was being projected digitally at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. Other stereoscopic delights were being served up with James Cameron’s Ghosts of the Abyss finishing its run at large-format theaters and Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 3-D, with anaglyphic sequences, opening on 3,500 screens on July 25, 2003. It seemed like cinema itself was being reinvented all over again. The cinematic experience has undergone periodic reinvention over its century-long life. “There is a clear analogy between early cinema and the current state of large format cinema,” wrote Scott McQuire.1 “The current interest in new screen experiences reflects a social preoccupation with the way in which technology such as the Internet is changing contemporary experiences of time and space, in much the same way that technologies 144 3-D Revolution such as radio, telephones, trains, cars and planes changed spatio-temporal relations a century ago.” Underlying the attraction for all of these stereoscopic shows is an elementary principle: that of motion through space, the fundamental dynamic of the movies. Film, with intermittent motion, moves through the camera. Objects in front of the lens move toward or away from the camera. The camera itself moves through space, which makes the third dimension of the visual field apparent, even in 2-D films. And, perhaps most importantly , the human gaze moves through visual space. In a stereoscopic film, the two eyes move through a surreal replication of real visual space, which is itself generally in motion. The primal appeal of motion in space, delivered by film projection, launched cinema. On December 28, 1895, the presence of the Lumière cinematographe converted the Grand Café in Paris into a special venue for motion pictures. A year later, the fifty-second film L’Arrivée d’un Train astonished audiences with its moving image of a locomotive heading straight toward them. It’s not surprising that the Lumière brothers reshot their train film for anaglyphic 3-D projection in 1935. The ultrarealism of the ride film, playing at special venues, is as old as cinema itself. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, audiences stood on top of a raised circular platform to view Raoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cineorama, a 360-degree movie projected on a circular screen 330 feet in circumference and thirty feet high. The hand-tinted 70mm films had been shot from a hot-air balloon as it was borne aloft. At the same exposition, the Lumière brothers exhibited a film attraction, Mareorama, simulating the view from the bridge of a ship sailing the ocean. Around 1901 the Phantom Ride films had become enormously popular . “These were panoramic pictures taken from the front of a railway engine traveling at speed,”2 wrote British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth. “I think it was the American Biograph Company, during their long run at the Palace Theatre, London, who started this fashion of phantom rides, but it was rather strange that the public should have liked it for so long. Before the craze finished, however, it was given a new lease of life by the introduction of an ingenious scheme called Hale’s Tours.” It’s likely that Kansas City fire chief George Hale was inspired by the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the phantom ride films to create Hale’s Tours, a popular attraction of 1904 at the St. Louis Exposition in which audiences boarded a railcar to view movies that had been shot from the rear of [18.189.180.76] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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