The Moving Image

As the contemporary film industry rapidly develops and promotes new 3-D technologies and entertainment products that use them, it is appropriate that scholars, archivists, practitioners, and enthusiasts pursue a deeper analysis of the origins, influences, and consequences of 3-D technology. The arrival of Ray Zone's Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film: 1838–1952 is timely, considering the numerous attempts by the industry in the past few years to reinvent the 3-D cinematic experience with advances in digital technology and distribution. Indeed, everything old seems new again, as George Lucas has made known his intention to remaster and rerelease his Star Wars films in digital 3-D, Journey to the Center of the Earth was recently remade in IMAX 3-D as a modern Brendan Fraser vehicle, and James Cameron has released his 3-D science fiction epic Avatar (2009), a project he [End Page 178] had been developing for a decade with hopes that technology would eventually provide the means to accomplish his goals. This interest in new 3-D technologies by major industry players coincides with the long-gestating plans to install digital cinematic projection technologies in theaters across the globe.

As new technologies provide both opportunities and consequences in terms of film production, aesthetics, and distribution, it is increasingly interesting to discover just how much contemporary developments in film and media reflect similarly complicated changes in early cinema, most notably the ongoing struggle between the need to "innovate" and the interest in creating products of significant "entertainment value" or, as Zone puts it, "the aesthetic tugof-war between the technical and the narrative demands of the medium." Zone's book opens and closes with an acknowledgment of this struggle, and the details of experimentation, collaboration, productive research, and failed attempts that fall in between are a fascinating read for both film historians and anyone with an interest in how stereoscopic technologies developed, prospered, and influenced the wider cinematic arts. Zone is primarily known for his many years of 3-D work in film, television, and comic books, but Stereoscopic Cinema shows Zone to be a thorough and engaging scholar as well, who presents here a compelling argument for a deeper consideration of "third dimension" technologies. His book considers not only industrial and creative advancements as they contribute to the refinement of the medium but also the historic discussion of these advancements and the promotional rhetoric and academic discourse that accompanied them.

Zone's book is divided into ten easily readable chapters, all containing copious illustrations directly relevant to the discussion and that help paint a picture of the innumerable technologies, applications, and apparatuses that contributed to the experimentation, refinement, and delineation of form and format in the history of stereoscopic cinema. Zone is interested in the precise movements and meetings that directly and indirectly contributed to stereoscopic development; he is also interested in how 3-D technologies physically affect the viewer or, as he puts it, "the study of the effects of this allure." Throughout the book, Zone aptly juxtaposes the investigation of numerous technological and experimental artifacts with discussions of period-specific publicity and academic research from the history of stereoscopic production, and situates them within an engaging narrative of triumphs and trials, successes and failures, all contributing to the growth and evolution of 3-D cinema. The book discusses key figures in the development of stereographic cinema, photography, the film industry, and film studies, and even lightly delves into concepts such as the stereoscopic "feeling" achieved in the 2-D animation of the Fleischer Brothers. At one point, Zone brings up Jacob Leventhal, a cameraman for Max Fleischer, who perfected "the combination of cartoon and straight photography," which helped give the Fleischer animated serials a uniqueness even today.

Citing major researchers such as Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and Malcolm Turvey, Zone produces a surprisingly scholarly text, but one that never loses the reader in academic profundity or technical analysis. He considers Eadweard Muybridge...