Learning on Screen(Not) Comin’ At Ya! The Lost History of 3D
Sixty years ago Hollywood had its first serious engagement with exhibiting feature films in three dimensions. Dr Simon Brown looks at one of the first films released on the then new film format, Inferno, recently released on Blu-ray in the UK, and considers these kinds of films might be heading in the future.
About the Author: Dr Simon Brown is Principal Lecturer in Film, TV and Media at Kingston University. He has written widely on early cinema, colour cinematography, 3DTV and contemporary American television. His book Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899-1911 is scheduled to be published by Exeter University Press in the Spring of 2016. He is currently working on a new book on horror author Stephen King. Previous publications include: Colour Cinema in Britain: Theories and Practices, co-edited with Sarah Street and Liz Watkins ( BFI Palgrave, 2013); Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics: Archive co-edited with Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (Routledge, 2012); Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies, co-edited with Stacey Abbott (I.B. Tauris, 2007).
Released for the first time for home viewing in the UK, and also in its original 3D format, Inferno stars Robert Ryan as businessman Donald Whitley Carson III, who is stranded in the Mojave Desert with a broken leg, having been abandoned by his wife and her lover, played by Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan. Cutting between Ryan’s attempts to find safety and the search for him by local law enforcement, rather ingeniously the film requires the audience to spend much of its snappy 83 minutes alone with the unpleasant Carson with only his voice-over for company. Sometimes a rather clunky device, here the narration offers access to Carson’s thoughts and a way to sympathise with this selfish, drunken man as he bullies and improvises himself towards survival. Ryan’s central performance is mesmerising and reminds us what an outstanding actor he was.
Inferno was directed by the late, great Roy Ward Baker, produced by 20th Century Fox and released in 3D in August 1953. Updated here for contemporary 3D formatting, what is immediately striking is the quality of the three-dimensional framing, which sees Baker avoiding unnecessary gimmicks and using 3D primarily to offer a stimulating visual backdrop to the action. Favouring deep focus, out in the desert Baker frames Ryan in medium and long shots before a series of exquisite distant landscapes, while interiors are carefully crafted in planes of depth to demonstrate the maximum potential of 3D. Clearly the work of a master, it is interesting to consider that not only with A Night to Remember (1958) did Baker manage to make a film about the sinking of the Titanic that, depending on your opinion, either rivals or utterly eclipses James Cameron’s telling of the story in 1997, with Inferno Baker used 3D as a background to a story in a way that clearly prefigures that of Avatar.
