Miriam Ross

When Avatar (2009) became the highest grossing movie of all time, it marked a high point in 3D cinema's turbulent history. Although 3D cinema draws in box-office takings that surpass 2D cinema, it continuously emerges and disappears as a passing fad. Experiments with 3D moving-images have been with us since the birth of cinema, and it is a form of visual expression already seen by billions of twenty-first century viewers, yet there is little understanding of how 3D cinema operates as an art form. We know that it simultaneously uses depth modes to approximate our visual reality and spectacular effects that go beyond traditional perception, but we do not have an appropriate grasp of its creative function. This book examines 3D cinema's unique visual regime in order to understand the optical illusions and tactile experiences that it presents.

This study of South American cinema offers a new way of approaching the variety of films available in the region. It brings to light the interconnectivity between state-run institutions (film councils, cinemateques, archives), altruistic bodies (film festival funds, NGOs) and commercial organisations (production companies, exhibitors and distributors). Examples of filmmakers, policy initiatives, funding sources and alternative film networks combine to produce a rich overview of one of the most significant sites for non-Western filmmaking in the twenty-first century. There is an awareness of the place South American cinema has on the international stage and, for this reason, the study involves an in depth look at the way film products are circulated within national boundaries and through external global circuits. Drawing on scholarship from studies on Latin American culture, cultural policy, indigeneity, digital technology, globalisation, transculturation and the public sphere, new links are traced between the various fields.

Although “vertical videos” have been derided as inelegant, amateur and to be avoided, a number of corporate organisations such as Snapchat and Periscope have been using vertical framing to create marketing content for mobile phones. Blurring the boundaries between amateur and professional media, these companies often encourage the production of user-generated vertical content alongside in-house and commissioned videos. This chapter argues that a shifting mobile media landscape (both technological and social) allows vertical framing to flourish and, in turn, problematises distinction between user-generated and corporate mobile media in the era of the smartphone.

The gradual shift towards digital screening technology in movie theatres during the early twenty-first century led to mainly invisible changes that standardised image quality and introduced cheaper distribution systems. Unlike digital filming and post-production technologies that were remarked upon for providing a variety of spectacular (as well as mundane) effects, digital screening technologies were normally only apparent when they failed to replicate the quality of 35mm projection. John Belton remarked on this in 2002 when he stated that ‘one obvious problem with digital cinema is that it has no novelty value, at least not for film audiences’. At the time he did not foresee the upsurge in 3D cinema, nor the more recent introduction of high frame rate (HFR) technology, both of which utilise digital screening systems to present significant changes to cinema’s visual field. Both technologies have been sold to audiences as part of the ongoing trend for innovation, novelty and constant updates to screen technology. Both have been said to offer more realistic and immersive viewing experiences, particularly with regards to the way HFR technology can provide updates to 3D viewing modes. However, more so than 3D cinema, HFR cinema has been critiqued for offering vistas that are ‘too real’. When digital HFR debuted in movie theatres with the first two of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug (2013), critical responses varied widely between excitement at the new technology and disappointment that it offered an ‘uncinematic’ visual field.
In turn, HFR’s uneven reception led to a paradoxical situation in which the new technology was both promoted and un-promoted. This chapter will discuss the way marketing and publicity material for these films has upheld HFR’s ability to provide ‘an illusion of real life,’ coupled with a ‘truly immersive experience’, at the same time as endorsing the films’ non-HFR versions. In this way a complex narrative around the adoption of HFR emerges; one that does not merely see the technology’s introduction as a failed attempt to produce new levels of realism, but rather an intricate interplay between new and existent technologies. Throughout this narrative a number of agents are at work: Peter Jackson and his film-making team; the publicity team at the films’ studio, Warner Bros.; movie theatre chains and independent exhibitors; and a variety of bloggers and professional film journalists, each vying to come to terms with films that had been eagerly anticipated as a continuation of the visual world created in Jackson’s critically acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3).

A reoccurring object of study in stereoscopic media is the human body, particularly the way its contours and volumetric depth are manifested in different ways from its depiction in 2D media. The history of stereoscopic illusions is littered with portraits of the human body and, now that stereoscopy is renewed in the digital era, they are frequently combined with computer generated imagery (CGI), most often in Hollywood blockbusters, in ways that allow entirely new depictions of the human form. Whereas analogue stereoscopy attempted to closely replicate the physical characteristics of a performing body that was placed in front of two cameras, digital stereoscopy is able to create hybrid bodies that belong in part to the performer and in part to digital code, in this instance building upon and reconfiguring the depth relations and visual characteristics of the body. This chapter discusses 3D films that demonstrate the transformative capacity of human bodies in digital stereoscopy with an emphasis on the way presence and proximity, as well as tactile and sensory visual fields, are maintained and reconfigured across these transformations.

473 Screen 50: 4 Winter 2009. Reviews reviews question of why we need to return to this theme in a text on Argentina's 'Dirty War'cinema. We might also question the return to a particularly national context when transnationalism and border-crossing have become the more popular trends in recent scholarship. What is immediately apparent is that this book-length study on just one decade in Argentina's cinematic history allows for an attention to detail that is often overlooked in other approaches to Latin American cinema.

In its current, popular manifestation, Virtual Reality (VR) represents the culmination of more than two centuries of screen practice aimed at creating greater immersion. VR’s optical illusions produce an expanded multisensory immersive experience that enhances the viewer’s interior position within new space. This article questions where embodiment and disembodiment lie in VR’s multisensory optical illusion and whether there is a difference produced by the digital environment versus the photographic, live-action environment? It takes into account our present moment in the history of VR during which the fantasy of total bodily engagement and transference into the “machine” has not yet occurred. In doing so, this article considers the way VR uses synesthetic modes rather than direct sensory stimuli to engage more of the senses.

This article considers how screenwriting might operate in the newly established medium of cinematic virtual reality (CVR). In Part One, we take a wide view of ways to consider screenwriting and development for CVR. Our approach theorizes CVR in the tradition of picture-making (or image-making) practices that can be traced within a broader history of the visual arts – from painting, to photography and contemporary art. In this way, we lay open the possibility for CVR to find diverse paths as it responds to narrative concerns rather than suggest it should merely repeat the consolidation of narrative that occurred with the transition of exploratory early cinema to the dominant Classical Hollywood system. In Part Two, our case study approach considers co-author, Miriam Ross’, CVR practice-based research to allow a discussion of the format that can be used for delivery of the CVR screenplay. Our aims are to connect a historically based spatialization of the image with the question of the spatialization of the screenplay for CVR 360-degrees media. The agenda is to expand the conversation around CVR to reflect upon, and inspire, new ways of thinking (and seeing) the potential for the development of screen ideas in this medium.

The proliferation of VR travel documentaries in the new era of head-mounted-displays connects to desires for temporal and spatial mobility that have previously been realized in photography, stereoscopy and cinema. Continuing trends begun in Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture,’ these documentaries promise to fulfil utopian aspirations to conceive and grasp the world as a picture with an emphasis on exotic views and pleasurable spectacle. They also attempt to realize André Bazin’s prophecies regarding the emergence of a Total Cinema which would allow viewers to move beyond this ocular emphasis and into a fully immersive, multisensorial engagement with representation. In this context, VR offers the possibility of creating virtual experiences that the tourist-viewer accepts as substitute for physical visitation to inaccessible sites. At the same time, VR has also been used as a marketing tool to promote traditional tourism to certain destinations. In each case, VR experiences operates as both replacement for the viewer’s embodied reality and augmentation of the reality that they engage with. This article examines how VR has been employed in travel documentaries with emphasis on the way they exploit the novelty of VR to offer new iterations of the tourist gaze in expansive visual technologies.

Contemporary Virtual Reality production often relies on increasing visual fidelity in order to enhance the creation of deep-space 360-degree worlds. In turn, performance is situated as one component of realist space that needs high-resolution images in order to support it. This paper considers what happens when this visual fidelity is foregone in favour of the production of a haptic, tactile visuality that draws attention to the material qualities of the 360-degree visual sphere and the performances that are a part of it. Using my autobiographical short 360-degree film PND as an example, I advocate that low-fi visual artefacts such as digital noise, over and under exposure, and glitch movement can provide a productive way to create new, embodied, relationships between performer and viewer in VR’s 360-degree space. In this way, new artistic paths for working with VR and performance are explored.

Latin American cinema has commonly been looked at within a radical framework. From the middle of the twentieth century, filmmakers, journalists and scholars have celebrated a type of filmmaking that contains revolutionary ideals, anti-neocolonial stances and attempts at social reform (Chanan, 1997; Fusco, 1987; Pick, 1993). The peak of this radical filmmaking came about with the emergence of the New Latin American Cinema movement and the concurrent, but more globally orientated, Third Cinema movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Towards the end of the twentieth century these movements began to disperse and there is no longer the sense of a continent-wide radical cinema project. Nevertheless, there are still Latin American filmmaking groups and practitioners, such as CineMujer in Colombia and TV dos Trabalhadores in Brazil, that work towards the same fundamental aims, mainly to empower local communities and work against exploitation and discrimination (Aufderheide, 2002). The focus of this paper is on one such group, the Peruvian based Grupo Chaski; in particular it will focus on the way that Grupo Chaski is currently working to develop a solid infrastructure for cinema exhibition as a means to implement their aims of social reform. This study is the result of personal research undertaken in South America during 2004, 2005 and 2007 and much of the knowledge of Grupo Chaski presented within this paper draws on personal interviews and observations of this group. This paper will also draw on the critical tendencies that emerged through the New Latin American Cinema movement and Third Cinema to frame the way in which Grupo Chaski continues a type of radical cinema practice.

In South America, various state organizations have an investment in producing some kind of ‘national’ cinema. Although different countries around the world have varied levels of government involvement, the four countries I would like to examine – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru – can be drawn upon for their
similarities and the shared regional context in which their policies operate. Particularly important is the fact that an increase in government involvement and support has been taking place in the twenty-first century against predictions that enhanced global capital would weaken the function of the state. Furthermore, it is
frequently the case that policy, in the form of government regulation and funding, provides the only means for cinema’s continued existence, visibility and access to the public and thus cannot be underestimated. Complicating these factors is the
fact that while legislation is in place, government bodies often struggle to implement the policies in a practical manner. This article examines these issues and suggests the effect they are having on the cinematic culture of the region.

Founded in 1988, the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), based at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Netherlands, is the longest running of a number of international film funds. 1 Between 1998 and 2010 the fund has supported close to nine hundred cinema projects through a number of programmes such as script development, low-budget digital production, postproduction and the distribution of finished films. The fund's remit is to provide assistance to films from developing countries and it has awarded money and resources to a number of critically acclaimed Latin American works such as Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/UK, 2006), Japón/Japan (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/Germany/Netherlands/Spain, 2002), Mundo grúa/Crane World (Pablo Trapero, Argentina, 1999) and El custodio/The Custodian (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina/France/Germany/Uruguay, 2006). It states that ‘although the Fund looks closely at the financial aspects of a project, the decisive factors remain its content and artistic value’. 2 While determinants such as artistic value are hard to measure empirically, HBF has attracted a global reputation and is well known to the filmmakers and producers who interact with the international film festival circuit. The prestige attached to the fund means that HBF is a name that not only generates publicity but can also be used by filmmakers to attract further financial support. It is also increasingly used as a brand in marketing material for completed films and its distinct logo appears next to film festival awards on posters and DVD cases as a marker of the film's significance. It is worth noting the way in which the fund moves beyond the role of financial benefactor or marketing tool and influences the filmmaking process to the extent that it can be understood to take up the position of film ‘producer’. As an example of this process, a number of Latin American films list the fund …

In 2011, Wim Wenders’ 3D dance film Pina received international acclaim and was presented as a maturation of the 3D format which had grown in popularity over the last decade.  Kate Muir at The Times declared that Pina’s premier marked a time when “3-D grew up and became a sophisticated medium” and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian suggested Wenders “has created a tremendous film that sets out to make the new 3D technology an integral part of what is being created – a film with clarity and passion.” Two teen-dance films from the previous year, Streetdance 3D (Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini, 2010) and Step Up 3D (Jon M. Chu, 2010) were given less favourable reviews and critical attention often focused on acting ability, plot or dialogue with only slight deference to the spectacular aesthetics that their stereoscopic (three-dimensional) imagery introduced. Of Streetdance, “It’s pure poppycock […] yet, thanks to its general exuberance and a knack for making London look young and glamorous, it put a smile on my face.” And Step Up: “While the 3D dance scenes pop off the screen, the lines – and clichéd plot – are delivered with a resounding clunk.” These reviews suggest that 3D moving images enhance the physical proficiency that is already apparent in the teen-dance film genre but stereoscopic filming does little to reinvent contemporary cinema in the way that many supporters of 3D films hoped for. Nevertheless, there is value in looking closely at their stereoscopic moving images to examine the extent to which they, along with Pina, rework screen aesthetics. In particular, each film introduces a new way of looking at the performer’s body that, in turn, places a new focus on the audience’s embodied position in relation to that body.

By the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, 3-D films were opening on a greater numbers of screens across the globe than in any previous 3-D era. Much of the discourse surrounding their arrival was engaged in hyperbolic statements such as James Cameron’s comment on the release of his 3-D blockbuster Avatar (2009): ‘We are born seeing in three dimensions. Most animals have two eyes, not one. There is a reason.’ Hollywood studios were reporting to trade magazines such as Variety, Screen Daily and The Hollywood Reporter that all future films would be made in the stereoscopic format, a not unlikely claim considering the hugely inflated revenue that 3-D films were earning at the
box office. Countering this optimism was a critical backlash which
considered 3-D a gimmick-laden experience that would dissipate once its sensational novelty had passed. Many critics believed that 3-D’s popularity was a fad not dissimilar to the earlier 3-D booms that came and went in the twentieth century...

Peruvian film-maker Ricardo de Montreuil’s first two feature films, La mujer de mi hermano/My Brother’s Wife (2005) and Máncora (2008), incorporate transnational film practice at the level of financing, content and distribution in order to explore the
production of globally and locally located identities in fundamentally divergent ways. While La mujer draws on the aesthetic and plot concerns of the telenovela, Máncora’s
arthouse modes provide a distinct counterpoint. Taken together, these two films introduce an array of questions about how national and transnational identity can be performed or not performed within twenty-first century screen space. Much of their
potency lies in their ability to act as an exploration of the possibility and impossibility of post-national identity, via their examination of Latin American characters and locations
that are simultaneously contained within national borders and situated within wider global frameworks. They also ask us to recognize the meta-textual discourses that audiences are aware of when watching these films and which play their own part
in contributing to the perceived origin or cultural identity of each production.

In the twenty-first century, we live in an era in which the film object (more often than not the traditionally formatted 1.5–2-hour-long feature film) enters the digital space of the computer screen to be viewed, paused, re-edited and mashed-up while, at the same time, large audiences continue to attend standardized movie theatres, where their only control over film exhibition is in the decision to look or not look at what the projector offers. Community film exhibition has long acted as an interstitial viewing practice located between public movie theatre and private home-viewing contexts. This article examines case studies from Latin America and New Zealand to determine the way in which community exhibition operates in the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis on the alternatives it offers to commercial exhibition circuits, the engagement it fosters with local audiences and its use of new digital technology.

Stereoscopic cinema and new media ask us to consider the screen; not just the screen in the movie theatre auditorium but also the hard-bodied screens of computer monitors, television sets and hand-held devices that can produce three-dimensional (3D) images. While stereoscopy’s multiple optical illusions suggest that objects are within reach of our fingertips or that we are situated in 3D landscapes that stretch back to infinity, these embodied moments are fleeting, ephemeral and tran- sitory. In each case, there is no longer a viewing body opposite, and at a distance from, the screen but constant reconfigurations of a shared screen space. Through particular attention to moments of negative parallax (wherein the content of the moving image appears to come towards the audience), this article addresses the implications that these points have for a fundamental ontology of the 3D film.

In 2012, a short film called "Vertical Video Syndrome – A PSA" [1] quickly gained high exposure through placement on YouTube and circulation through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Its premise was that a new generation of clumsy amateur filmmakers were shooting from their mobile phones without concern for the traditional horizontal format, resulting in a number of films shot in vertical format, "looking like crap" (Glove and Boots 2012b). Although playful, the film explicitly called for an end to the vertical filmmaking practice and was permeated with the assumption that there are correct, aesthetically grounded reasons for shooting and displaying content in a horizontal mode. This article will question these assumptions in a two-fold manner: firstly, by providing a historical context for the development of horizontal and vertical filmmaking; secondly, by describing our own video response that incorporates mobile media technology. In doing so, we ask why traditional regimes of taste are favored and what implications they have for mobile media's "own aesthetic quality" (Baker, Schleser, and Molga 2009).

In recent years there has been much focus on the opportunities that mobile media devices (phones, tablets) offer for user-generated audio-video production. Most often this focus has concentrated on content with emphasis on new citizen journalism and YouTube home videos. Less attention has been given to the negotiations of aesthetic parameters that mark a departure from traditional filmmaking modes. In particular, the tendency for a new generation of filmmakers to shoot on mobile phones has led to a number of works produced in a vertical (portrait format). Initially dismissed as content “shot the wrong way”, vertical videos have proliferated in the exhibition platforms provided by YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. This article examines the trend for shooting in a vertical mode, the material markers of ‘authenticity’ this mode appears to lend to its audio-visual content, and the effect of circulating this material in a context where other users can ‘police’ videos for bad practice. It will focus, in particular on how these aspects interact with the different mediations of authenticity that emerge from new screen technologies amongst the ongoing contingency of media forms.

Text essay available here: http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/08/06/ross/

A video version of this essay is available at this link: https://vimeo.com/99499627

Although there has been a long history of scholarship on stereoscopic photography and a significant expansion of investigations of 3D cinema in recent years, they are often seen as separate fields of study.[1] We are interested in the way that the stereoscopic view – a depth rich, unique phenomenological expression that generates but does not quite complete the reality effect of feeling present at a scene – repeats visual themes across stereoscopic photography and cinema.[2] The little work that has considered the recurrence of motifs across stereoscopic media has noted the ethnographic gaze prevalent in the depiction of rural landscapes (particularly the ezoticization and othering of distant lands and their peoples)[3] and the way twentieth century IMAX films were able to draw upon stereocards in their presentation of urban views.[4] Stereotowns updates this scholarship by dealing with the continuities between nineteenth century stereoscopic urban landscapes and more recent Hollywood blockbusters to make suggestions about how we are encouraged to engage with urban settings. While it might be argued that the nineteenth century stereocards documented a pre-existent reality and are thus at odds with the fantastical narratives and characters posed in many Hollywood blockbusters, both modes offer highly constructed and carefully framed views of the urban at the same time that they try to convince us we are viewing a reliable representation of streets, buildings and monuments in well-known cities. In this context, Stereotowns is particularly concerned with a point made by New Zealand film critic Dan Slevin in various reviews of contemporary action blockbusters: that Hollywood is obsessed with destroying landmarks and locations that are familiar to us in increasingly bombastic ways. We wanted to question what happens when stereoscopy uses its extra depth cues to bring us closer to and make us feel in touching distance of urban locations before destroying them in front of us. How do we feel this process differently compared to our experience of engaging with these urban settings in traditional 2D media? And equally importantly, is there precedence for this in the long history of stereoscopic works?[5]

A woman and a man engage in a discussion on a bench and then they separate. We separate with them. One camera pans to the right where Ivitch is now engaged in a heated discussion with another man. One camera stays on Davidson to the left. One of our eyes moves to watch Ivitch. One of our eyes remains with Davidson near the bench. Our binocular perception, engaged with 3D glasses, attempts to fuse the two images, creating a physical pain that can only be resolved if we close one eye, leading David Bordwell to suggest that by closing one eye, then the other, we can create our own shot/reverse-shot editing between the shots. [1] Regardless of whether we engage in Bordwell’s task or simply look away, our eyes have to do something due to the impossibility of processing these two very different parts of a supposedly united moving image. This is one of many moments in the stereoscopic version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language, 2014) that challenge our ocular perception, asking us to consider how we can rely on the veracity of visual images when their seemingly ontological truth is so fragile.