Ebert Wades Back Into 3-D Debate Pool, Gets Soaked

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 26, 2011 8:20PM

In a post titled "3-D doesn't work and never will. Case Closed." a couple of days ago, Roger Ebert got the Internet buzzing about the the latest wave of Hollywood 3-D spectacles. Citing as evidence a letter on the topic from one of the most esteemed cinematic artisans alive, Ebert may have intended to end the debate on the merits of the technology at the megaplex; he succeeded only in inflaming it. So was he right?

The basis for the brouhaha was a letter to Ebert from Walter Murch, winner of Academy Awards for editing Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, inventor the modern 5.1 sound format, author one of the definitive books on film editing, and perpetrator of all kinds of legendary things. The heart of his case against 3-D movies rests on a physiological argument concerning how our eyes adjust in two different ways to track motion and perceive depth: they focus at a distance and converge (i.e. rotate in the eye socket) to look directly at an them. When watching a 3-D movie using the systems in theaters these days, our eyes focus at a fixed distance to resolve the image on the screen, but the illusion of depth forces our eyes want to re-converge to different points in front of or behind the screen. (Here's a more in-depth and informed explanation of this phenomenon). This is taxing on our eyes and Murch insists that forcing our eyes to converge and focus at different depths is not something that we ever do outside of a 3-D movie.

The result, as Bill Nye will tell you, is eye strain and, for a non-trivial portion of the audience, some likelihood of nausea and discomfort. Ebert was delighted to enlist an authoritative voice to validate his long-held (as in, since 1952) contention that 3-D is not realistic:

"There is a mistaken belief that 3-D is 'realistic.' Not at all. In real life we perceive in three dimensions, yes, but we do not perceive parts of our vision dislodging themselves from the rest and leaping at us. Nor do such things, such as arrows, cannonballs or fists, move so slowly that we can perceive them actually in motion. If a cannonball approached that slowly, it would be rolling on the ground."

Murch and Ebert also maintain that the images in 3-D projections are darker and narrowed in scope.

So far, so good. Ebert is right about the discomfort and about the impoverishment of the image quality. The problem is that he made his diagnosis into a categorical pronouncement that 3-D will never work. Much may indeed be right about the technology forcing us to do something unnatural with our brains and eyes, but the history of cinema is filled with overcoming just such obstacles. The very illusion of continuity of projected film is owed to overcoming the flicker fusion threshold: if you project a film at a low frame rate, you get a distracting and disorienting "flickering" effect which would make viewing a film uncomfortable, especially for long periods of time. If you speed the film up past a certain threshold, using more frames per second or an episcotister, suddenly the problem vanishes. That solution wasn't found overnight, and who's to say that a similarly elegant solution might not be found for the focus/divergence problem?

Underlying much distrust of 3-D technology is skepticism about the motivations for its employment. Many see it primarily as a hedge against piracy, a costly scheme cooked up by the studios to stanch the bleeding at the box office. While the technology is for now still sellable as a spectacle in and of itself, other now-mundane technologies started the same way. Widescreen, color, sound, etc. were once premium features, and cinema itself started on the fairgrounds and at the amusement park. Beyond the limitations of the technology, 3-D will only have longevity if someone figures out how to use it to better tell a story, which brings us to Murch's final point, that 3-D aspect of a film, ironically perhaps, inhibits our immersion the world it tires to create. Much of the enjoyment of watching a film comes from "losing yourself" in the film, a phenomenon that arises from its dreamlike unfolding before us as we watch it. The intrusions of 3-D puncture that dreamlike state and "remind the audience that they are in a certain 'perspective" relationship to the image." This may be the greatest hurdle of all, but not even Roger Ebert can say we can't one day get over it.

As evidenced by the passionate commentary Ebert has riled up, some people love 3-D. If the Razzies just introduced a new category for "worst use of 3-D," that implies that there is a "best use," right? This is a debate that's not going way soon.