Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838–1952 (review)

In Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film—an ambitious and meticulous study of the emergence and significance of stereoscopic technologies —Ray Zone traces the development of stereography (commonly known as 3-D) in an effort to “provide a critical framework for a stereoscopic grammar of moving pictures” (p. 4). Zone contends that these technologies, while often mentioned only briefly in studies of the rise of cinema, in fact played an important role in the development of motion pictures, and that they were informed by the same desires to capture and reproduce motion. His study focuses on what he calls the “novelty” period of stereoscopic cinema, from1838 (and the discovery of 3-D by Charles Wheatstone) to 1952 (and the release of Arch Oboler’s 3-D film Bwana Devil). While other scholarship on early cinema—notably by Charles Musser and Tom Gunning—addresses the emergence and impact of stereoptical technologies, Zone’s digs deeper into the historical archive and thus offers the most comprehensive study of this topic to date.

Copiously illustrated—the patents with their diagrams of various stereoscopic technologies are especially helpful—Zone’s book makes extensive use of primary source materials to suggest the rich complexity of trial and error that characterized efforts to immerse viewers in the third dimension. His discussion of the various methods used to create 3-D images is, at the same time, a brief history of the science of perception and suggests how early cinema emerged not in a vacuum, but rather through a process of rich cross-fertilization with other disciplines. In a section on the polarization of light, for instance, Zone examines how, in the 1890s, British physicist John Anderton used work that had been done with prisms earlier in the century to develop and patent a method of stereoscopic projection.

This strength is also a weakness, however, as the book occasionally reads like a dry compendium of facts. The most tantalizing moments come when Zone addresses larger cultural questions and anxieties that inform the technologies he is describing, as when he suggests that stereoscopic cinema was marginalized as mere novelty. In a fascinating section on the “lost 3-D” of Abel Gance’s film Napoleon (1927), Zone relates how Gance had shot a stereoscopic version of the film, but decided against releasing it because he was afraid the audience would be transfixed by its spectacle at the expense of content. As Zone notes, the “utopian dream of stereoscopic images in cinema, then, was a double-edged sword. The heightened realism it presented was alluring, but it had to be justified in the context of narrative” (p. 140). This insight into the complex relationship between realism and cinema and the fact that, paradoxically, it was the promise of 3-D’s hyperrealism that in part accounted for its reputation as being merely spectacle, is too important to be left behind so quickly. The experimental possibilities of stereography were not lost on avant-garde filmmakers and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Oskar Fischinger, whose experiments with 3-D influenced later filmmakers such as Norman McLaren. And as the names above suggest, efforts to create more realistic 3-D images were international in scope, as inventors and filmmakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Russia all contributed to the emergence of stereographic technologies.

One comes away from Stereoscopic Cinema with a greater appreciation for the rich, largely neglected history of 3-D film, in particular the technologies that made possible the illusion of depth on the screen. It is a small measure of the humanity of this book, and its focus on the forgotten inventors and artists who contributed to stereoscopic cinema, that it comes with its own set of 3-D glasses.