Wim Wenders' 3D film is ill conceived

Pina is arguably an important film, less for what it’s about and more for what it represents. Pina is a part of the new wave of digital Stereoscopic 3D films which is the latest attempt in a long history of efforts to extend the theatrical cinema experience. Yet unlike all other current 3D efforts, Pina is not a Hollywood action blockbuster nor a CGI-stuffed adventure film. So with 3D glasses on and the opening titles hovering extruded from the screen into the space of the theatre auditorium, celebrated auteur Wim Wenders presents us a vision of dance and movement. Can 3D be used for Art as well as Action…? Does 3D deliver a deeper experience of space and movement?

Ostensibly the subject of the film is renowned dance choreographer Pina Bausch and yet the film is not in any real way a character documentary or a study of Pina herself. If you expect an insight into the life of Pina Bausch - her history, motivations, personal and artistic triumphs and challenges - then you will be disappointed. There is no character insight to be found in this film, nor is there any dramatic tension or story-telling. Instead the film presents and focuses exclusively on Pinas work, extracts from four of her more famous dance productions. The closest the film comes to character documentary is in the brief, poetic, expressions of the dancers in her company reflecting upon working with her which are interludes between set-piece dance scenes. But these voice-overs are brief and stand only as tribute and loving praise rather than insight, critique or observation. The dance productions themselves may hold their own narrative arcs and meanings but as they are presented only as edited extracts rather than complete works, only those familiar with Pina’s work will be likely to make sense of them beyond their physicality and spectacle.

In this regard Pina seems a confusing film. Carried without documentary rigour or narrative dramatics, the film is really a collection of theatrical stage performance extracts punctuated by connecting voices and interludes of dance in real-world settings. Yet there is doubtless beauty in the orchestration and execution of the film. The 3D image is used with a great deal more subtlety than standard Hollywood 3D fare. The focus is on depth not protrusion. Rarely do the subjects extend out from the screen, instead the space of the performance stage, and the performers themselves, stretch back - drawing the viewer into the space rather than pushing the space into the theatre. 

In some scenes the effect is mesmerising - a single dancer on ballet point, in front an industrial complex whose spires and steel pipes enclose a deep sense of perspective and scale - raining water seeming to fall in the auditorium as dancers splash and exalt. However in many other, much longer, scenes depicting bland theatrical stages, the 3D experience seems negligible at best. Visually the film is at its most engaging when it moves outside into real-world urban and rural landscapes. Here the 3D image is able to bring fresh scale and imagery to the performers movements - to engage with making the dancer cinematic. However these moments of visual delight represent but a small fraction of the screen time. Much more of the film is devoted to performances on rather static and largely bare stages where the intimacy of the camera and the magnification of experience 3D offers, seems lost and out of place. 

If 3D cinema is the great white hope many in the theatrical feature film business believe it to be, a way to keep us coming to a cinema when there are so many other screens to watch, then Pina is an important film. It shows 3D beyond the Blockbuster, 3D as a tool for Art in the hands of an art-house filmmaker. But despite the deftness of Wim Wender’s execution in Pina, I’m not confident the film succeeds in what it sets out to do and moreover, does not succeed in being what the filmmakers think it is. By making a dance-film in 3D Wim Wenders is posing that 3D is the best way to show movement and space - the two essential elements of dance performance. And it’s in this hypothesis that I cant help but feel that Wenders is misguided.

There is little doubt that stereoscopic 3D imagery is a good technical means to visually depict space and depth but where 3D fails rather tragically is in the depiction of movement. The 3D image, the way its binocular lenses capture light, causes movement to jitter and shudder. Movements across the screen are not smooth or carried in motion-blur as they would in typical 24 and 25 frame per second 2D cinema, but have a distinct strobbing effect that is not pleasant to the eye, especially in long doses. Whilst space and depth may be important elements to dance, I would suggest that they are not, rather obviously, more important than movement - and indeed may be secondary to movement. To make a dance film using a technical apparatus which - despite its other advantages - is decidedly flawed in the way is captures motion seems entirely ill-considered. 

In probing this hypothesis around 3D and dance further we are compelled also to consider the long history of dance on film - Busby Berkley, Fred Astair, the great legacy of MGM musicals and so on. Where these films somehow lacking in their ability to depict space and movement? Did they have a legitimate flaw that Wim Wenders is trying to solve with 3D? I’m afraid I just don’t see it. In many ways Busby Berkley and Fred Astair made better use of space and depth than Wenders does in Pina. And with smooth motion blur movement rather than the juddering, strobbing of 3D in Pina, they arguably delivered a better sense of motion as well. In the end I cant help but fail in finding a tangible benefit for Pina being in 3D. 

Lets consider alternatives. If we acknowledge that dance on screen demands an aesthetic focus and emphasis on movement then we must look to which technology or apparatus delivers a heightened level of motion fidelity. 3D is clearly not the answer but, rather obviously, high frame-rates are. In this I wonder why Wenders wasn’t drawn to double frame rate shooting. 1080 HD at 50p is very common for high-end sports cinematography (NTSC based 60p in North America) and an increasingly common broadcast standard in both 720 and 1080 varieties (even most DSLR’s can shoot 720p50). Similarly, Peter Jackson is currently shooting The Hobbit in double film rate of 48fps looking for high-fidelity motion in capturing a heightened imaginary world. Surely such temporal resolution would lend itself perfectly to the capturing of dynamic dance motion. I think there is a connection to be found here in computer game graphics where frame-rates are very often well in excess of 50fps, even up to 100fps. Arguably many visually dynamic computer games are essentially digital choreography; a player immersed in, and a part of, a dance of pixels. And the high frame rates of game graphics are integral to the experience of that ‘dance’. When frame-rates drop, when images lag or jitter, gamers get very irate and PC-gamers in particular will spend hours tinkering with their graphics card drivers to juice every last frame-per-second they can. Indeed such gamers will happily trade off some spatial resolution (pixel dimensions) for higher frame rates.

Might I suggest that if Wim Wenders were a gamer, the likely hood of him choosing 3D as tool for dance might never have occcured - he would have known implicitly the power of temporal over spatial resolution for the rendering of dynamic motion. 

Outside of its 3D-ness and technology, Wender’s loyalty to the integrity of Pina’s stage productions is ultimately what holds the film back for appeal to wider audiences and makes it mind numbingly dull. If Wenders had let his movie be a dance-film, rather than a filmed-dance, he might have made something with a broad appeal and great artistic hope for 3D cinema. Instead, ultimately the only people who will appreciate or enjoy Pina are those who are already fans of dance theatre and who are already familiar with Pina Bausch’s work. For everyone else, even with the enticement of 3D, Pina offers not much. As a film it is little more than a glorified show-reel lacking in story, emotion, ideas and cheated by a poor and misguided choice in technology.

For some other perspectives on Pina check out Hopscotch Films 

History of 3D Stereoscopic imagery

The Australian Film Tv and Radio school (AFTRS) presented a four day Masterclass on 3D stereo filmmaking 12-14 October 2010. Hosted by leading Australian cinematographer Peter James, the class explored the parameters and the world of shooting in 3D. Below is the slide presentation from the lecture I gave looking at a history of 3D and the historical aesthetic implications of 3D space for the art of cinematography. I am most certainly a 3D skeptic - largely seeing it as a desperate attempt to salvage a failing business model (see earlier post here) but the history of Stereoscopic imagery as a phenomenological experience is downright fascinating.

A potted history of the 3D experience on Prezi

Stereo3D - creative boon or desperate financial ploy?

Can/Will Stereoscopic 3D reinvigorate interest in deep-focus staging and a greater utilization of the spatiality of cinema? And Is Stereoscopic 3D ‘all that and a bag of chips?’ Or is it doomed to die?

These were the questions recently posed on my blog by a reader posed in response to a lengthy discussion on deep-focus vs rack-focus cinema techniques and my perspective of the later being vastly over-used. The reader, Dani, speculated that Stereo3D may prompt a revisiting of less common deep-focus techniques.

My response to that first question would be a fairly resounding yes. I think the very nature of Stereoscopic 3D forces directors and DoP’s to think immediately of Staging and Spatial arrangement first and foremost rather than Framing. The nature of what Stereo3D can do puts onus on arrangement in Space rather than arrangement in Frame. Stereo3D innately demands deep-focus as going ultra shallow with blur is effectively composing in 2-dimensional planes rather than deep spaces. So a DoP shooting Stereo3D with ultrafast primes with wide open apertures is totally defeating the purpose of having Stereo3D in the first place.

Now, as for the second question. It would be too easy for me to say that i generally think Stereo3D is a crock of shit that no one is really interested in and which the mass general public is, at best, ambivalent about. But I’ll avoid such provocation and instead entertain a perspective on WHY parts of the film industry are so gung-ho on 3D….?

Lets face it, Hollywood studios are Terrified.

Movie theatre ticket sales are slumping. It’s getting harder for the studios to convince people to leave their homes to go to the movies. The reason..? Well aside from cultural phenomenon factors I think there two more tangible elements.  Home theatre systems are getting cheaper and better and so the enticement of the ‘big screen’ experience is just not as alluring as once was. When our home TV’s were small, 4:3 with convex glass and limited colour and resolution, there was a great ‘viewing quality’ attractor with going to the cinema - an experience you couldnt get at home. But when you’ve got a 40-50” flat-screen LCD on the wall (let alone a home projector) with a multi channel surround sound system playing from BluRay in HD and a VERY COMFY couch; the movie theatre just doesn’t have the pull it once did. Frankly I for one would generally  rather watch a movie on my home  than the  theatre. I can stop whenever i like for a piss-break. I can rewind if I miss a line of dialogue and I can have my friends over and have a better communal experience.

Then we add on top of this the dreaded DownLoad culture…! Shock Horror!

Legalities aside, the much bigger problem for the studios is that they are trying to convince viewers to conform their watching to When and Where the studios say they can in a culture where the viewer otherwise has complete control over how and when they watch just about anything. 4000 years of human history and warfare has told us that people dont like being told what to do and being dictated to.

There was a shift a decade ago when studios started treating Theatrical Releases at the Movie Theatre as simply a ‘marketing exercise’ to drive DVD sales post theatre run. That trend still stands and indeed some big mainstream films actually draw the money to pay for theatrical release prints directly out of the marketing budget for the film. This alone tells you the brave new world we live in. A world the studios are terrified of…

And this brings us to Stereo3D. Why are the studios pushing Stereo3D so hard? Why are they talking it up? Why are they giving huge financial incentives to hardware and software companies to develop Stereo3d technologies…? Because You HAVE to go to the Movie Theatre to see it. I cant download a Stereo3D version to watch at home. I have to go to the movie theatre and buy a traditional ticket to see Stereo3D.

So the major studios are pushing hard on Stereo3D because it is a way to preserve the traditional hierarchical financial structure of the film industry. In maintains the old-school distribution pyramid that trickles down from Theatrical release, through DVD and onto Broadcast in a strict linear privilege. Rather than change the way they operate they are pushing a technology simply to reinforce the status quo they are most comfortable with.

So… I could argue that Stereo3D is a viewing experience the bulk of the world’s movie goers simply dont give a flying rats arse about. Or I could argue that my experience is, as with many others, that Stereo3D is hard to watch, makes my eyes tired and sore and so will be avoided by many on physiological grounds. But, i wont argue either of these because I dont have to. 

My predication is not that Stereo3D will disappear (quite the contrary, i think it will persist in various forms for some time to come) but that it will fundamentally FAIL to do what the Hollywood studios desire so desperately for it to achieve - Get people back into the movie theatres en-masse again. It will fail this overt objective through a) audience apathy and b) because it is simply a matter of time before technology advances and I can watch Stereo3D movie in my home theatre from a file I illegally downloaded (not that i would ever do that ;) Even 2 years ago i tested a prototype laptop computer that could make a Stereo3D image WITHOUT glasses; you just had to sit dead-square in front of it. It wont be long before that becomes mainstream (if people want it)

Thus I draw the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how good Stereo3D is, or how great it looks, it will Fail to do what the studios desperately want it to do. And when it does, they will give up on it and desperately scurry for soemthign else to plug their sinking boat. And because I think audience desire for Stereo3D will always be fringe and marginal rather than mainstream, development of hardware and software for Stereo3D will subsequently cease or slow once the studios let it go.

As a case in point of the culture of apathy I believe exists around Stereo3D (from those outside of the big studio set at least) I can say that I teach a hundred rabidly enthusiastic, drenched in movies, gung-ho film school  brats who eat breath and sleep cinema technology. Are they milling over the internet reading about Avatar and Stereo3D? Are they endlessly talking about Stereo3D between classes? Are they excitedly musing on how they would use Stereo3D when they should be working on their HDV short films? NOPE..! They just dont care…. They really dont. They talk endlessly of video games, 3D animation, CGI, RED camera, 4k, Steadicams but Stereo3D is just NOT on their mind. Some might argue that this will change once they see Avatar…. But im not so sure. This is the next generation of filmmakers, all in their 20’s, and right now  they just dont care about Stereo3D. And if they dont care do we really think the general public is going to care enough to leave their comfy couches…?