History of Cinema Part 2 reviews
Review by on 24 Sep 2010
To kick off Part Two of his History, Bill Lawrence took an excursion from his chronology to look at the customer-service side of cinema exhibition. 'Guests in our House' was an in-house staff-training film from the 1950s, produced by the Australian Hoyts cinema circuit, which showed the ways in which usherettes and commissionaires should and should not perform their duties - any parallels between the effects of staff attitudes on the customer experience then and now was entirely intentional....
Back in the mainstream History, Bill's theme for Part Two was to consider ways in which impressions of depth have been brought to the moving image, starting with the innovative multi-plane camera system used by Walt Disney for some of their best-loved animations. An extract from 1937's 'Snow White' demonstrated the effect of this (although you had to love saccharin to really appreciate it...).
To round things off and bring his History of exhibition technology right up to date, Bill finally looked at 3D - has its time finally arrived, or is the current resurgence just another passing fad? IMAX 3D is undeniably impressive, but, like Cinerama, requires massively expensive specialist cinemas to house it, and so is probably destined to remain a cul-de-sac off the highway that is the history of cinema. But what of the 3D technologies that are now appearing in conventional cinemas?
It's an individual thing, but to judge by the three short extracts Bill presented, there seems to be something still not right about it. It seems to me that IMAX 3D, filmed with a large-format 3D camera, works brilliantly and is aided by the image filling your entire field of view, not being constrained by the edge of the frame. Maybe it is a result of the digital post-production technique used to convert a conventional 2D image into 3D that the 3D extracts Bill presented retained an artificiality and a strangely disconnected multi-layering effect - perhaps other techniques used to achieve the 3D effect work better (that was certainly my impression when I saw James Cameron's 'Avatar' in 3D a few months ago). For Bill Lawrence at least, the mainstream future is not 3D...
And that concluded Bill's evening exploring the history of the exhibition of the moving image. For me, this event showed exactly what the Film Festival is so brilliant at doing - not just bringing us the best, most intriguing, fascinating and enjoyable of world cinema, but also giving us the opportunity to hear industry insiders talk on the subjects about which they are so knowledgeable and entertaining. Let us really, really hope that funding cuts do not deprive us of this in the future...
Back in the mainstream History, Bill's theme for Part Two was to consider ways in which impressions of depth have been brought to the moving image, starting with the innovative multi-plane camera system used by Walt Disney for some of their best-loved animations. An extract from 1937's 'Snow White' demonstrated the effect of this (although you had to love saccharin to really appreciate it...).
To round things off and bring his History of exhibition technology right up to date, Bill finally looked at 3D - has its time finally arrived, or is the current resurgence just another passing fad? IMAX 3D is undeniably impressive, but, like Cinerama, requires massively expensive specialist cinemas to house it, and so is probably destined to remain a cul-de-sac off the highway that is the history of cinema. But what of the 3D technologies that are now appearing in conventional cinemas?
It's an individual thing, but to judge by the three short extracts Bill presented, there seems to be something still not right about it. It seems to me that IMAX 3D, filmed with a large-format 3D camera, works brilliantly and is aided by the image filling your entire field of view, not being constrained by the edge of the frame. Maybe it is a result of the digital post-production technique used to convert a conventional 2D image into 3D that the 3D extracts Bill presented retained an artificiality and a strangely disconnected multi-layering effect - perhaps other techniques used to achieve the 3D effect work better (that was certainly my impression when I saw James Cameron's 'Avatar' in 3D a few months ago). For Bill Lawrence at least, the mainstream future is not 3D...
And that concluded Bill's evening exploring the history of the exhibition of the moving image. For me, this event showed exactly what the Film Festival is so brilliant at doing - not just bringing us the best, most intriguing, fascinating and enjoyable of world cinema, but also giving us the opportunity to hear industry insiders talk on the subjects about which they are so knowledgeable and entertaining. Let us really, really hope that funding cuts do not deprive us of this in the future...
