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9 Stereoscopic Cinema Proves Itself Lumiere's 3-D Train UArrivée du train was not the first film the Lumière brothers shot in 1895 with their Cinématographe camera, but it was among the first. This powerful short film of a locomotive approaching the camera while entering a station created a sensation at its first exhibition and is one of early cinemas foundational films. It was initially photographed with a single camera and exhibited "flat" at the Grand Cafe at 14 Boulevard Les Capucines in Paris on December 28, 1895, along with other Lumière films. Its not surprising that the Lumière brothers later remade L'Arrivée du train in a stereoscopic version, but the exact date of the remake has been a subject of some confusion. Hayes dates the stereoscopic version of LArrivée du train from 1903, stating that it was "filmed in Stereoscopic Lumière (dual 35mm printed single strip anaglyphic)" and that it "was released in France in 1903 but never shown theatrically in the U.S."1 Limbacher provides two different dates on which the Lumière brothers exhibited stereoscopic films, 1903 and 1935. "In 1903," Limbacher writes, "stereoscopic movies were shown at the Paris Exposition under the guidance of French movie pioneers, Auguste and Louis Lumière."2 However, in the book Auguste and Louis Lumière: Letters, Inventing the Cinema, a footnote states that "Louis Lumière had a persistent interest in 3-D images. On November 3, 1900, he took out a patent for stereoscopic moving images but it was not until 1936 that he organized public screenings of 3-D films." A chronology of the Lumière brothers' work in this book gives 1935 as the date in which "Louis remakes Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat' in three dimensions."3 142 Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film Gosser also addresses the work of the Lumière brothers with stereoscopy . He reproduces a figure from the French Lumière patent (no. 305,092) of 1900 with a drawing of an Octagonal Disc Stereo Device. This drawing depicts an octagonal plate mounting on a circular frame with intermittent notches, as well as a hand crank to the side. The patent states that "the images of very reduced dimensions (9mm size), are arranged in double rows on a glass plate. . . . of polygonal shape."4 This device appears to be a form of stereoscopic kinetoscope rather than a projection apparatus. Gosser 's book only covers the period 1852-1903, but he writes that "it is conceivable that they [Lumière brothers] might have given a demonstration of their glass plate system, but so far as this author knows, the Lumières did not achieve stereo 'film' until the 1930s, when Louis Lumière built a horizontal run anaglyphic system."5 Louis Lumière himself provided the definitive answer with an article titled "Stereoscopy on the Screen" in a 1936 issue of the Society of Motion Picture EngineersJournal. Lumière illustrated with a schematic drawing and discussed an experimental device in which "the stereoscopic pair are printed upon the same film, which runs horizontally so as to produce an image practically similar to the one used in monocular vision, losing as little as possible of the sensitized surface." The device consists of an apparatus with prisms and lenses that places the left- and right-eye frames on top of each other on horizontally traveling 35-mm film. The film itself, when projected, "runs in front of two lenses, whose axes are parallel and are cut by a plane parallel to the axis, in order to allow homologous centers of the projected images to register in height."6 The colored filters are placed in front of the projection lenses, and members of the audience are supplied with glasses of the same hues. Lumière conducted extensive tests to arrive at the most efficient bandwidth for the colored filters to be used in the projector and the viewers' spectacles. To obtain optimally efficient hues, Lumière consulted the Gibson andTyndall response curve and established the use of two filters, one a light yellow and the other a pure blue. "The difficulty in selecting the dyes," Lumière wrote, "rested on the fact that the dyes had to show the least possible non-selective absorption and as sharp as possible limits on the edges of absorption."7 Lumière felt that the hues he selected would allow a viewer to...

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