As ballet no longer registers in the consciousness of most moviegoers, will a Pina Bausch biography shot in 3-D renew public interest in ballet?
By: Ringo Bones
As one of the most beautiful fineries of Western Civilization, it is somewhat unfair that ballet had been hastily consigned to the dung-heap of contemporary Western pop culture. Despite of a brief renaissance in the 1980s – remember famed premier danseur Mikhail Baryshnikov appearing in the movie White Nights? My first-hand memories of how young women perceived the art of ballet during the 1980s was its uselessness against fending off attacking muggers and rapists. Making them more interested (or does prioritize seem more apt?) in types of martial arts that guarantee “attacker neutralization” and concealed small-arms proficiency. While the hi-fi revival of the 1990s got me going to live ballet shows for the live orchestral accompaniment, it does seem that Western interest in ballet has been slowly on the wan.
Will the biographical film of famed ballet choreographer Pina Bausch shot in 3-D by famed director Wim Wenders ever renew the public’s waning interest of the beautiful art of ballet? After all famed German modern dance choreographer Philippine “Pina” Bausch did became a leading influence of the development of the Tanztheater (Dance Theatre) style of dance and spread Classical Ballet awareness of audiophiles during the Golden Age of Stereo. But first, here’s a brief history of ballet.
Ballet comes from the Italian word ballare, meaning to dance. The word ballet is used in two ways. In one sense it means a form of theatrical presentation in which a story or mood is depicted by means of dancing – usually accompanied by music – in a production with scenery and costumes. In the second sense, ballet means a complex, highly refined technique of dancing in which the Western World calls Classical Ballet. This technique gives the dancer great physical strength and control. A style characterized by dignity, simplicity and elegance.
The history of ballet, as we know in the form today, begins in the 16th Century when the Italian Catherine de Médicis married the heir to the throne of France in 1533. In her new homeland, she was said to have introduced gelato (Italian ice cream), lettuce, artichokes and the art of ballet. At first, only men took dancing seriously; women did not appear on the stage. But in 1681, Le Triomphe de l’amour a ballet by Jean Baptiste de Lully featured the first ever professional female dancer – Mademoiselle Lafontaine. So great was her success that others soon followed. Like their male colleagues, they were trained at the Académie. Their schooling was not nearly so rigorous as it is today, but it was based on the same fundamental techniques that are now taught throughout the world.
Given that I have a few young Ukrainian ladies currently enrolled in my vacuum tube electronics class – i.e. a class mostly about electric guitar amplifier construction and maintenance – I have now first hand close up experience on the beauty of Classical Ballet. Their renditions of the five positions, the pirouette and the soubresaut are the best that I’ve seen so far live and in close up. Even though I’ve no idea what a perfectly executed pirouette and soubresaut looks like live without being limited by the 24-frame per second delivery of the medium of film.
According to my ballerina pals, the frame-rate limitations of film does put a damper on the grace and beauty of ballet in comparison to seeing one performed live. But they – like me – are also curious on how much of the dimension and beauty the upcoming 3-D film biography of Pina Bausch and her ballet choreography is captured by famed director Wim Wenders. I mean the proper location and arrangement of the dance performers that can be captured via good 3-D cinematography is an integral part of good ballet choreography, right? By the way, Wim Wenders first became famous to us who have yet to turn 40 from his work in the U2 music video “Stay (Far Away…So Close!)”.
Will Wim Wenders’ 3-D cinematography of Pina Bausch’s film biography ever renew the waning interest of Classical Ballet? Well, if you ask me, I have even doubts that this particular 3-D biography of Pina Bausch will ever be shown in the 3-D cinema of our local mall. Or if it did manage to become as popular as James Cameron’s Avatar, I’ll be very surprise. And if it does become as popular, will Avatar the Musical be not so very far behind?
Friday, April 30, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Why Alice in Wonderland Should Be Done In 3-D?
Though the rework of this Lewis Carroll classic seem like a merger between Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass, but is there a need for it to be done in 3-D?
By: Ringo Bones
Though the 21st Century incarnation of 3-D cinematography is here to stay because it manages to sell itself effortlessly, Über-director Tim Burton might had his own reasons for why should Alice in Wonderland be done in 3-D cinematography. But shouldn’t we be first try to explore what compelled the Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll to write the two adventures of Alice in the first place and why should it be done under 3-D cinematography?
When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass around the early 1860s, the stereoscope – an instrument that became an extremely popular parlor toy during the Victorian era and 3-D cinematography’s great grandfather – started to gain inroads into English households. Stereoscopes require two separate photographs of a scene – known as a “stereo pair” – taken from slightly different angles. These photographs are placed in a small viewer, which permits one to be seen by the right eye and the other by the left. The brain accepts the disparity between the pictures as normal and blends them into a three-dimensional or 3-D view.
Though the stuffiness of “polite” Victorian era society is well known – just ask Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Friedrich Nietzsche among others – the 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland didn’t forgot to point it out. It was also at this point in time when many mathematicians – like Lewis Carroll / Charles Dodgson – now see themselves as formulators of possibilities, rather than as “mere” discoverers of truth. Which lead to his development of symbolic logic – an attempt to reduce all human reasoning into a mathematical notation.
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the serious Oxford mathematics lecturer named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and famed for being the finest photographer of children in Victorian England. Most (?) readers today know that the story was invented for a little girl named Alice Liddell, and that it was told to her out loud one summer’s day before it was written down on paper. While the 2010 remake circles around a 19-year old young lady named Alice Kingsley who was doing her best to go to the hoops and conventions of the “polite” society of Victorian England. What everyone now accepts as to what Alice looks like first came from the illustrations done by Sir John Tenniel, when Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865.
Though Charles Dodgson signed his real name to only his “serious” mathematical works, mathematicians for decades have been intrigued by the rich skein of symbolic logic that is woven into fantasies like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It is very likely that Charles Dodgson – a.k.a. Lewis Carroll – influenced Albert Einstein in using familiar situations of his “thought experiments” to explain the unfamiliar ideas of higher mathematics. Thus making Dodgson’s less serious fantasy literature as a “thought experiment” set in prose form. Even contemporary science fiction like Star Trek has inspired Professor Miguel Alcubierre to formulate his now famous Alcubierre Equation.
Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice often gets entangled in many a verbal jungle in the wonderland on the other side of the looking glass, but much of that tangled verbiage can be hacked away via the sharp blade of symbolic logic. The mathematical symbolism of symbolic logic might seem incomprehensible to the layperson, but it ahs a clear and precise meaning to the logician which plain words just won’t do. In the rigmarole of logical jungles much thicker than that encountered by Alice, symbolic logic has been used successfully to blaze a trail to the heart of the meaning of vague or complex arguments in law and metaphysics.
To those in the know, symbolic logic is the most introspective of the Victorian era supermaths. It is a notation for stating and manipulating all sorts of propositions so as to bring both sequiturs and non-sequiturs into mercilessly sharp relief. Through symbolic logic, mathematicians have undertaken a Sisyphean task in which to classify and analyze the thoughts involved in every branch of mathematics. With the aim of identifying the axioms and procedures at the base of each and of reducing all possible proofs to the barest skeletons.
Symbolic logic has produced one of the most curious and influential theorems in all modern mathematics. This is Gödel’s Proof – an extremely abstract line of reasoning which shows that no useful branch of mathematics can be constructed on a consistent set of axioms without raising questions unanswerable within the framework of the axioms themselves.
Now that we know how the fantastic mind of Charles Dodgson / Lewis Carroll works at work and at play, it is now safe to assume that the “inherent weirdness” of the 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland is as predictable as several impossible things happening right before breakfast. The conflict between the Red Queen and the White Queen may appear to some to be influenced by the conflict between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. But I just can’t help myself thinking that Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of the Red Queen poke’s fun at the North Korean dear leader Kim Jong Il.
Alice in Wonderland – especially the 3-D version – is nothing less than a contemporary cinematographic extravaganza, director Tim Burton should be praised for having an eye for detail for the little things. That Martin Scorsese like eye for detain in the scene where the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Alice (Mia Wasikowska) are in the Quite Queen’s somewhat over-lit kitchen / apothecary. Where Alice’s tiny and delicately blonde arm hairs got iridescently emphasized by the overly lit atmosphere of the White Queen’s kitchen / apothecary. Not to mention Mia Wasikowska’s brilliant make-up team that allowed her delicate blonde lashes to shine through. Probably reminding everyone that there is a G-Rated way to tell if the carpet matches the drapes – or is it making us movie geeks with Y-chromosomes nostalgic about our middle-school era Swedish exchange student crushes.
By: Ringo Bones
Though the 21st Century incarnation of 3-D cinematography is here to stay because it manages to sell itself effortlessly, Über-director Tim Burton might had his own reasons for why should Alice in Wonderland be done in 3-D cinematography. But shouldn’t we be first try to explore what compelled the Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll to write the two adventures of Alice in the first place and why should it be done under 3-D cinematography?
When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass around the early 1860s, the stereoscope – an instrument that became an extremely popular parlor toy during the Victorian era and 3-D cinematography’s great grandfather – started to gain inroads into English households. Stereoscopes require two separate photographs of a scene – known as a “stereo pair” – taken from slightly different angles. These photographs are placed in a small viewer, which permits one to be seen by the right eye and the other by the left. The brain accepts the disparity between the pictures as normal and blends them into a three-dimensional or 3-D view.
Though the stuffiness of “polite” Victorian era society is well known – just ask Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Friedrich Nietzsche among others – the 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland didn’t forgot to point it out. It was also at this point in time when many mathematicians – like Lewis Carroll / Charles Dodgson – now see themselves as formulators of possibilities, rather than as “mere” discoverers of truth. Which lead to his development of symbolic logic – an attempt to reduce all human reasoning into a mathematical notation.
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the serious Oxford mathematics lecturer named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and famed for being the finest photographer of children in Victorian England. Most (?) readers today know that the story was invented for a little girl named Alice Liddell, and that it was told to her out loud one summer’s day before it was written down on paper. While the 2010 remake circles around a 19-year old young lady named Alice Kingsley who was doing her best to go to the hoops and conventions of the “polite” society of Victorian England. What everyone now accepts as to what Alice looks like first came from the illustrations done by Sir John Tenniel, when Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865.
Though Charles Dodgson signed his real name to only his “serious” mathematical works, mathematicians for decades have been intrigued by the rich skein of symbolic logic that is woven into fantasies like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It is very likely that Charles Dodgson – a.k.a. Lewis Carroll – influenced Albert Einstein in using familiar situations of his “thought experiments” to explain the unfamiliar ideas of higher mathematics. Thus making Dodgson’s less serious fantasy literature as a “thought experiment” set in prose form. Even contemporary science fiction like Star Trek has inspired Professor Miguel Alcubierre to formulate his now famous Alcubierre Equation.
Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice often gets entangled in many a verbal jungle in the wonderland on the other side of the looking glass, but much of that tangled verbiage can be hacked away via the sharp blade of symbolic logic. The mathematical symbolism of symbolic logic might seem incomprehensible to the layperson, but it ahs a clear and precise meaning to the logician which plain words just won’t do. In the rigmarole of logical jungles much thicker than that encountered by Alice, symbolic logic has been used successfully to blaze a trail to the heart of the meaning of vague or complex arguments in law and metaphysics.
To those in the know, symbolic logic is the most introspective of the Victorian era supermaths. It is a notation for stating and manipulating all sorts of propositions so as to bring both sequiturs and non-sequiturs into mercilessly sharp relief. Through symbolic logic, mathematicians have undertaken a Sisyphean task in which to classify and analyze the thoughts involved in every branch of mathematics. With the aim of identifying the axioms and procedures at the base of each and of reducing all possible proofs to the barest skeletons.
Symbolic logic has produced one of the most curious and influential theorems in all modern mathematics. This is Gödel’s Proof – an extremely abstract line of reasoning which shows that no useful branch of mathematics can be constructed on a consistent set of axioms without raising questions unanswerable within the framework of the axioms themselves.
Now that we know how the fantastic mind of Charles Dodgson / Lewis Carroll works at work and at play, it is now safe to assume that the “inherent weirdness” of the 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland is as predictable as several impossible things happening right before breakfast. The conflict between the Red Queen and the White Queen may appear to some to be influenced by the conflict between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. But I just can’t help myself thinking that Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of the Red Queen poke’s fun at the North Korean dear leader Kim Jong Il.
Alice in Wonderland – especially the 3-D version – is nothing less than a contemporary cinematographic extravaganza, director Tim Burton should be praised for having an eye for detail for the little things. That Martin Scorsese like eye for detain in the scene where the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Alice (Mia Wasikowska) are in the Quite Queen’s somewhat over-lit kitchen / apothecary. Where Alice’s tiny and delicately blonde arm hairs got iridescently emphasized by the overly lit atmosphere of the White Queen’s kitchen / apothecary. Not to mention Mia Wasikowska’s brilliant make-up team that allowed her delicate blonde lashes to shine through. Probably reminding everyone that there is a G-Rated way to tell if the carpet matches the drapes – or is it making us movie geeks with Y-chromosomes nostalgic about our middle-school era Swedish exchange student crushes.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Revolutionary Idealism Sells: But Who’s Buying?
Used to be freely and spontaneously expressed by pioneering filmmakers for whom it has profound meaning, but has revolutionary idealism recently became nothing more that Madison Avenue’s Latest marketing ploy?
By: Ringo Bones
Maybe its just I got just a little fed up back in the 1990s about those clueless-about-Marxist-Leninist-socialism souls who thought those cute Che Guevara T-shirts were very snazzy just because they were promoted by Rage Against the Machine. But is this phenomenon returning in a much more insidious form, especially of the recent blockbuster success of the anti-imperialism and revolutionary idealism sentiment of James Cameron’s Avatar being used to peddle 3-D capable wide-screen TVs for the home?
Maybe the big four TV makers, namely LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony, simply resorted to the next logical step in marketing when they decided to use the runaway 3-D success of Avatar. Let’s just hope that these “new generation” of 3-D capable wide-screen TVs to be launched by June 2010 are budget friendly enough for those who want to bring the Avatar experience into a domestic setting. But I also have reservations when it comes to a medium’s predictability – whether film or other mass media outlet – utilized as a moneymaking scheme by major entertainment corporations.
When George Lucas toned down the jingoism of Star Wars via the now famous line: “ A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in order to tailor it to a post Vietnam War weary America, it did insure financial success for his masterful trilogy - Cold War-era cynicism notwithstanding. But mediums can be unpredictable too despite of how much an artist’s creativity attempts to manipulate it. When Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch lambasted the Internet in their satire titled Rude Hieroglyphics back in 1995 as a waste of both time and money. Little did they know that the Internet is probably the only media outlet where Rude Hieroglyphics and the rest of their music exists without being molested by US government censorship.
Some say bestowing the Oscar Best Director to Kathryn Bigelow for the sheer brilliance of The Hurt Locker is probably the best way to mark the 2010 International Women’s Day because no woman has ever received the accolade since. And a growing number even suggested that there should be a 3-D remake of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Potemkin, though this remains to be seen. But to me bestowing the Best Director accolade to Kathryn Bigelow is probably this year’s most interesting way to mark International Women’s Day by breaking the “Glass Ceiling” that’s been haunting this accolade for far too long. I just hope that LG, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony doesn’t forget to preach about revolutionary idealism when they sell those 3-D capable wide-screen TVs. Or subject us lowly consumers into another BETAMAX versus VHS battle when it comes to domestic 3-D capable widescreen displays.
By: Ringo Bones
Maybe its just I got just a little fed up back in the 1990s about those clueless-about-Marxist-Leninist-socialism souls who thought those cute Che Guevara T-shirts were very snazzy just because they were promoted by Rage Against the Machine. But is this phenomenon returning in a much more insidious form, especially of the recent blockbuster success of the anti-imperialism and revolutionary idealism sentiment of James Cameron’s Avatar being used to peddle 3-D capable wide-screen TVs for the home?
Maybe the big four TV makers, namely LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony, simply resorted to the next logical step in marketing when they decided to use the runaway 3-D success of Avatar. Let’s just hope that these “new generation” of 3-D capable wide-screen TVs to be launched by June 2010 are budget friendly enough for those who want to bring the Avatar experience into a domestic setting. But I also have reservations when it comes to a medium’s predictability – whether film or other mass media outlet – utilized as a moneymaking scheme by major entertainment corporations.
When George Lucas toned down the jingoism of Star Wars via the now famous line: “ A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in order to tailor it to a post Vietnam War weary America, it did insure financial success for his masterful trilogy - Cold War-era cynicism notwithstanding. But mediums can be unpredictable too despite of how much an artist’s creativity attempts to manipulate it. When Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch lambasted the Internet in their satire titled Rude Hieroglyphics back in 1995 as a waste of both time and money. Little did they know that the Internet is probably the only media outlet where Rude Hieroglyphics and the rest of their music exists without being molested by US government censorship.
Some say bestowing the Oscar Best Director to Kathryn Bigelow for the sheer brilliance of The Hurt Locker is probably the best way to mark the 2010 International Women’s Day because no woman has ever received the accolade since. And a growing number even suggested that there should be a 3-D remake of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Potemkin, though this remains to be seen. But to me bestowing the Best Director accolade to Kathryn Bigelow is probably this year’s most interesting way to mark International Women’s Day by breaking the “Glass Ceiling” that’s been haunting this accolade for far too long. I just hope that LG, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony doesn’t forget to preach about revolutionary idealism when they sell those 3-D capable wide-screen TVs. Or subject us lowly consumers into another BETAMAX versus VHS battle when it comes to domestic 3-D capable widescreen displays.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A 3-D Movie Remake of Potemkin
Given that James Cameron managed to achieve both commercial and critical success of his Avatar, will a remake of Eisenstein’s Potemkin manage to achieve the same results?
By: Ringo Bones
With the recent failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference held last December 2009, it seems that the prevailing policies governing on how the finite resources of our planet now mirror that of the prevailing social conditions that led into the looming shipboard mutiny in Odessa. Given that the White Anglo-Saxon Christian elite seems to have the final say on how our planet’s finite resource extraction should be appropriated, will a planet-wide Potemkin-like mutiny be not so farfetched?
To the uninitiated – especially those who are the White-bred children of avid Tea Party 21st Century version advocates – Potemkin is a silent movie classic directed by the great Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein back in 1925. The movie is an account of a shipyard mutiny in Odessa. Potemkin wasn’t only one of the great “montage” films of Soviet-era Russia but also is considered as one of the masterpieces of the silent screen.
During the Golden Age of the Russian silent film era of 1924 to 1930, leading directors of the time – such as Vesevolod I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Lev Kurleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko and of course Sergei M. Eisenstein – started a movement in cinematography that would forever change it. Revolutionary idealism – freely and spontaneously expressed by artists for whom it had profound meaning – produced such outstanding works as Potemkin (1925), Mother (1925), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), Ten Days That shook the World (1928) and Earth (1930).
Despite of Cold War era censorship – remember the Red Menace tirade of Senator McCarthy of commies hiding in Hollywood? A fortunate few Americans still manage to see these films because Sergei M. Eisenstein has a reverence for the Hollywood film industry. Eisenstein visited Hollywood in 1930 and under the sponsorship of Upton Sinclair, later went on to Mexico to shoot a panoramic study of Mexican history and culture.
In the here and now, it seems that real life is almost imitating art. With the recent runaway success of James Cameron’s Avatar, the anti-imperialism theme of the movie seems to have been forcibly dragged kicking and screaming to become the fashionable ideology of the moment due to the recent failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Add to that the way multinational corporations managed to swindle indigenous communities from their sustainably utilized natural resources while polluting their environment over the years that it is now save to assume that planet Earth is now set up to become one big Battleship Potemkin. Where you don’t even need those 3-D glasses to get engaged for the fight of you’re very own survival.
Given that the politics behind James Cameron’s Avatar mimic that of the revolutionary idealism of Sergei Eisenstein and his compatriots to create silent film classics, a remake of Potemkin – especially an up to date 3-D version – would probably be accepted by today’s moviegoers with open arms. More urgently so, especially when global warming skepticism and a renewed White Anglo-Saxon Protestant apologetic embrace of neo-NAZI ideology in order to counter Islamic extremism has become intellectually fashionable at the moment. And it should be in 3-D format given that Sergei Eisenstein – after seeing his first ever 3-D movie in the late 1920s – said that the future of cinematography was the 3-D motion picture. And given his newly earned clout in the Hollywood film industry due to the Oscar-worthiness of Avatar, maybe James Cameron should direct it.
By: Ringo Bones
With the recent failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference held last December 2009, it seems that the prevailing policies governing on how the finite resources of our planet now mirror that of the prevailing social conditions that led into the looming shipboard mutiny in Odessa. Given that the White Anglo-Saxon Christian elite seems to have the final say on how our planet’s finite resource extraction should be appropriated, will a planet-wide Potemkin-like mutiny be not so farfetched?
To the uninitiated – especially those who are the White-bred children of avid Tea Party 21st Century version advocates – Potemkin is a silent movie classic directed by the great Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein back in 1925. The movie is an account of a shipyard mutiny in Odessa. Potemkin wasn’t only one of the great “montage” films of Soviet-era Russia but also is considered as one of the masterpieces of the silent screen.
During the Golden Age of the Russian silent film era of 1924 to 1930, leading directors of the time – such as Vesevolod I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Lev Kurleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko and of course Sergei M. Eisenstein – started a movement in cinematography that would forever change it. Revolutionary idealism – freely and spontaneously expressed by artists for whom it had profound meaning – produced such outstanding works as Potemkin (1925), Mother (1925), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), Ten Days That shook the World (1928) and Earth (1930).
Despite of Cold War era censorship – remember the Red Menace tirade of Senator McCarthy of commies hiding in Hollywood? A fortunate few Americans still manage to see these films because Sergei M. Eisenstein has a reverence for the Hollywood film industry. Eisenstein visited Hollywood in 1930 and under the sponsorship of Upton Sinclair, later went on to Mexico to shoot a panoramic study of Mexican history and culture.
In the here and now, it seems that real life is almost imitating art. With the recent runaway success of James Cameron’s Avatar, the anti-imperialism theme of the movie seems to have been forcibly dragged kicking and screaming to become the fashionable ideology of the moment due to the recent failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Add to that the way multinational corporations managed to swindle indigenous communities from their sustainably utilized natural resources while polluting their environment over the years that it is now save to assume that planet Earth is now set up to become one big Battleship Potemkin. Where you don’t even need those 3-D glasses to get engaged for the fight of you’re very own survival.
Given that the politics behind James Cameron’s Avatar mimic that of the revolutionary idealism of Sergei Eisenstein and his compatriots to create silent film classics, a remake of Potemkin – especially an up to date 3-D version – would probably be accepted by today’s moviegoers with open arms. More urgently so, especially when global warming skepticism and a renewed White Anglo-Saxon Protestant apologetic embrace of neo-NAZI ideology in order to counter Islamic extremism has become intellectually fashionable at the moment. And it should be in 3-D format given that Sergei Eisenstein – after seeing his first ever 3-D movie in the late 1920s – said that the future of cinematography was the 3-D motion picture. And given his newly earned clout in the Hollywood film industry due to the Oscar-worthiness of Avatar, maybe James Cameron should direct it.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Can Optical Refinements Be Used To Improve 3-D Movie Cinematography?
First used by the ancient Greeks to make the architectural layout of the Parthenon appear “visually perfect”, can optical refinements be used to minimize the exaggerated depth disparity in 3-D movies?
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since the first school-kid began to obsess about the correctness of the aspect ratio of their first perfectly crafted school project diorama, cinematographers also noticed that they too need an artistically refined way to present their newly discovered craft in order to achieve some form of legitimacy. Thus the filmmakers’ attempt at presenting the world as a stage as if they are shooting an actual stage play – which believe it or not – is still a proven formula of cinematography till this day. But with the advent of supposedly pixel perfect 3-D movie cameras, will cinematographers need to upgrade their art in order to make 3-D movies that look “natural” to our eyes?
Since their invention, 3-D movie cameras are based on the way our two eyes look in the same direction at once. And also the way they are laid out at roughly two and a half inches apart from center to center and therefore are not aimed in exactly the same line. While different technologies are used throughout the years to coordinate and harmonize those two distinct left and right field pictures – and we are getting better at it. A problem still exists – often referred to as the diorama effect – where an exaggerated depth disparity in the 3-D camera’s visual field plagues 3-D movie cinematographers for some time now in their quest for a natural looking 3-D movie. But can optical refinements be used to solve this somewhat intransigent cinematographical dilemma?
When referring to reliable historical documentation, optical refinements were first introduced by the ancient Greek architects of the Parthenon supposedly to “loosen up the mathematical strictness” of the “shapely thinking” of the ancient Greeks. Though it was probably done more to counteract our eyes’ inherent propensity for optical illusions. For without the introduction of optical refinements in the form of slight curves to the whole structure that is hardly visible to the unaided eye. The architects of the Parthenon could have created a building that looks “crooked” – i.e. a visual impression of the building’s visual field sagging towards the center - even though the long horizontal lines and perfectly perpendicular vertical intersections are plumb-bob perfect straight.
Optical illusions are commonly defined as physiologically perceived visual images that don’t correspond to objective reality. Does the diorama-effect or exaggerated depth disparity between objects or subjects in a 3-D movie’s visual field nothing more than an optical illusion? Toeing-in the two lenses would probably rectify this problem. Or digital video software that automatically compensates for the aspect ratio of the scene being shot could be a solution.
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since the first school-kid began to obsess about the correctness of the aspect ratio of their first perfectly crafted school project diorama, cinematographers also noticed that they too need an artistically refined way to present their newly discovered craft in order to achieve some form of legitimacy. Thus the filmmakers’ attempt at presenting the world as a stage as if they are shooting an actual stage play – which believe it or not – is still a proven formula of cinematography till this day. But with the advent of supposedly pixel perfect 3-D movie cameras, will cinematographers need to upgrade their art in order to make 3-D movies that look “natural” to our eyes?
Since their invention, 3-D movie cameras are based on the way our two eyes look in the same direction at once. And also the way they are laid out at roughly two and a half inches apart from center to center and therefore are not aimed in exactly the same line. While different technologies are used throughout the years to coordinate and harmonize those two distinct left and right field pictures – and we are getting better at it. A problem still exists – often referred to as the diorama effect – where an exaggerated depth disparity in the 3-D camera’s visual field plagues 3-D movie cinematographers for some time now in their quest for a natural looking 3-D movie. But can optical refinements be used to solve this somewhat intransigent cinematographical dilemma?
When referring to reliable historical documentation, optical refinements were first introduced by the ancient Greek architects of the Parthenon supposedly to “loosen up the mathematical strictness” of the “shapely thinking” of the ancient Greeks. Though it was probably done more to counteract our eyes’ inherent propensity for optical illusions. For without the introduction of optical refinements in the form of slight curves to the whole structure that is hardly visible to the unaided eye. The architects of the Parthenon could have created a building that looks “crooked” – i.e. a visual impression of the building’s visual field sagging towards the center - even though the long horizontal lines and perfectly perpendicular vertical intersections are plumb-bob perfect straight.
Optical illusions are commonly defined as physiologically perceived visual images that don’t correspond to objective reality. Does the diorama-effect or exaggerated depth disparity between objects or subjects in a 3-D movie’s visual field nothing more than an optical illusion? Toeing-in the two lenses would probably rectify this problem. Or digital video software that automatically compensates for the aspect ratio of the scene being shot could be a solution.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Avatar: First Oscar Worthy 3-D Movie?
The inherent technical difficulties in the production and distribution of 3-D movies notwithstanding, will James Cameron’s Avatar be the first ever Oscar-worthy 3-D movie?
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got started back in 1927 with 2,075 members. This cultural organization composed of producers, actors, technicians and others associated with the film industry had never considered 3-D movies to be Oscar-worthy enough to receive one of their prestigious annually dispensed awards. But will it be eventually changed when the first ever Oscar-worthy 3-D movie called Avatar could win this year’s Oscars?
As a whole, 3-D movies are not known historically to be big box office draws or Academy Award-worthy. When one looks into the 1950s – were most movie buffs believe to be the Golden Age of 3-D movies – its very hard to miss that 3-D cinema usually means B-Movie science fiction and creature feature horror flicks. Even the 3-D version of Jaws – probably the highest grossing 3-D movie before Avatar came along – fall into this category.
Sometimes I wonder if James Cameron’s high statistical probability of box office success was down to his flirtations with Marxist-Leninist socialism. I mean the salient feature of his 1998 remake of Titanic was about class struggle, right? If it worked for Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s Potemkin – you know, that 1925 silent film classic about a shipboard mutiny in Odessa – surely, something like it would be a success in today’s capitalism weary post credit crunch world.
Thus came Avatar, a 400 million-dollar anti-imperialism Marxist-Leninist socialism leaning science fiction epic that has been touted as this year’s main Oscar Best Picture contender. Not only because of the technically brilliant use of contemporary state-of-the-art visual effects, but also a story line reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of revolutionary idealism set in the backdrop of everyone’s contemporary weariness of capitalism by the masses disenfranchised by the empty promises of the Protestant Work Ethic.
Though the movie Avatar leans more in reminding us on the environmentalist leaning ideals of Friedrich Engels, the salient feature of the movie has always been the critique on where our current “Imperialistic Organized Christianity” is heading. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is just a foreshadowing of the up and coming excesses of the good old days of the Inquisition. The movie – as a morality tale for the supposed present day arbiters of morality – may not be perfect. Nonetheless, it might just prove on what the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing used to day about science fiction – that they are more social, rather than science, driven stories.
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got started back in 1927 with 2,075 members. This cultural organization composed of producers, actors, technicians and others associated with the film industry had never considered 3-D movies to be Oscar-worthy enough to receive one of their prestigious annually dispensed awards. But will it be eventually changed when the first ever Oscar-worthy 3-D movie called Avatar could win this year’s Oscars?
As a whole, 3-D movies are not known historically to be big box office draws or Academy Award-worthy. When one looks into the 1950s – were most movie buffs believe to be the Golden Age of 3-D movies – its very hard to miss that 3-D cinema usually means B-Movie science fiction and creature feature horror flicks. Even the 3-D version of Jaws – probably the highest grossing 3-D movie before Avatar came along – fall into this category.
Sometimes I wonder if James Cameron’s high statistical probability of box office success was down to his flirtations with Marxist-Leninist socialism. I mean the salient feature of his 1998 remake of Titanic was about class struggle, right? If it worked for Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s Potemkin – you know, that 1925 silent film classic about a shipboard mutiny in Odessa – surely, something like it would be a success in today’s capitalism weary post credit crunch world.
Thus came Avatar, a 400 million-dollar anti-imperialism Marxist-Leninist socialism leaning science fiction epic that has been touted as this year’s main Oscar Best Picture contender. Not only because of the technically brilliant use of contemporary state-of-the-art visual effects, but also a story line reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of revolutionary idealism set in the backdrop of everyone’s contemporary weariness of capitalism by the masses disenfranchised by the empty promises of the Protestant Work Ethic.
Though the movie Avatar leans more in reminding us on the environmentalist leaning ideals of Friedrich Engels, the salient feature of the movie has always been the critique on where our current “Imperialistic Organized Christianity” is heading. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is just a foreshadowing of the up and coming excesses of the good old days of the Inquisition. The movie – as a morality tale for the supposed present day arbiters of morality – may not be perfect. Nonetheless, it might just prove on what the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing used to day about science fiction – that they are more social, rather than science, driven stories.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
3-D Movies: Future Prolix?
Given that our current cinematic knowledge is now over a century old, will 3-D ever become a cinematic standard due to the recently renewed interest?
By: Ringo Bones
Did academia’s early foray into experimental psychology – especially on how the visual aspect of our mind works - was probably more influential to the art and science of movie making than once previously thought? A hundred years ago, a young psychologist named Max Wertheimer took a train bound for the Rhineland for a summer holiday back in 1910. Unexpectedly, he was suddenly struck with an inspiration that led him to get off the train at Frankfurt. While there, he went to a local toy-shop and bought a stroboscope, which later made him borrow a little space at the University of Frankfurt for his experiments – which lasted for six years. By the way, a toy stroboscope is a device that shows a series of still pictures in rapid succession, thus giving the illusion of movement to the observer.
The decision for Wertheimer to buy that toy stroboscope came about due to his speculations about the phenomena that had puzzled psychologists for some time back then. That humans thought they saw motion when two similar objects appeared in quick succession. The most obvious example, of course, is the appearance of motion given by a succession of discrete photographs that make up motion picture frames, which we see as “moving pictures”. A similar effect can be achieved by placing two lights side by side in a dark room, switching them on and off alternately. To the observer, one light seems to dance to and fro. To Max Wertheimer these phenomena, and the effects produced by the toy stroboscope, were convincing proof that sensation alone could not account for our perception of motion; Wertheimer was sure that something more than the five senses was involved in perception.
For the next 30 years, Max Wertheimer and two colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, became the principal spokesmen for what became known as the Gestalt School of Psychology. Gestalt – which mean “shape” or “form” – has come in psychological terminology to mean “whole”. The “gestalt experiments” – i.e. those experiments done by Wertheimer and colleagues as they are now known – were designed to prove that perception is a more extraordinary phenomenon than the combination of the separate elements of sensation. Wertheimer and team argued, rather, that perception operates, so to speak, in reverse by concluding that we tend to perceive a whole configuration first and then the separate elements. The “Gestalt School” believed that immediate, meaningful perception is arrived at by our mental ability to create relationships.
If the preceding topic is deemed too pedantic and too clinical for your average film school graduate, be reminded that the “gestalt school” probably influenced the pioneers of “movie making” the now familiar aspects of cinematography and film scene editing. Not to mention pointing to the proper direction on how film / motion picture medium can be used to tell a meaningful story, while still retaining a broad scope of cinematic artistic license. Thanks to the insights gained by the founders of the Gestalt School of Psychology when it comes to our own visual perception.
This is why if our current renewed interest in 3-D movies ever becomes economically viable enough to become an industry standard – rather than a mere gimmicky fad during the previous decades of the 20th Century. The new generation of cinematographers interested in 3-D movie making should reexamine the Gestalt School for inspiration. This 100-year-old or so “old school” thinking will probably inspire a generation of young cinematographers to create a 3-D movie that’s even better than James Cameron’s 400 million dollar anti-imperialist epic called Avatar.
By: Ringo Bones
Did academia’s early foray into experimental psychology – especially on how the visual aspect of our mind works - was probably more influential to the art and science of movie making than once previously thought? A hundred years ago, a young psychologist named Max Wertheimer took a train bound for the Rhineland for a summer holiday back in 1910. Unexpectedly, he was suddenly struck with an inspiration that led him to get off the train at Frankfurt. While there, he went to a local toy-shop and bought a stroboscope, which later made him borrow a little space at the University of Frankfurt for his experiments – which lasted for six years. By the way, a toy stroboscope is a device that shows a series of still pictures in rapid succession, thus giving the illusion of movement to the observer.
The decision for Wertheimer to buy that toy stroboscope came about due to his speculations about the phenomena that had puzzled psychologists for some time back then. That humans thought they saw motion when two similar objects appeared in quick succession. The most obvious example, of course, is the appearance of motion given by a succession of discrete photographs that make up motion picture frames, which we see as “moving pictures”. A similar effect can be achieved by placing two lights side by side in a dark room, switching them on and off alternately. To the observer, one light seems to dance to and fro. To Max Wertheimer these phenomena, and the effects produced by the toy stroboscope, were convincing proof that sensation alone could not account for our perception of motion; Wertheimer was sure that something more than the five senses was involved in perception.
For the next 30 years, Max Wertheimer and two colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, became the principal spokesmen for what became known as the Gestalt School of Psychology. Gestalt – which mean “shape” or “form” – has come in psychological terminology to mean “whole”. The “gestalt experiments” – i.e. those experiments done by Wertheimer and colleagues as they are now known – were designed to prove that perception is a more extraordinary phenomenon than the combination of the separate elements of sensation. Wertheimer and team argued, rather, that perception operates, so to speak, in reverse by concluding that we tend to perceive a whole configuration first and then the separate elements. The “Gestalt School” believed that immediate, meaningful perception is arrived at by our mental ability to create relationships.
If the preceding topic is deemed too pedantic and too clinical for your average film school graduate, be reminded that the “gestalt school” probably influenced the pioneers of “movie making” the now familiar aspects of cinematography and film scene editing. Not to mention pointing to the proper direction on how film / motion picture medium can be used to tell a meaningful story, while still retaining a broad scope of cinematic artistic license. Thanks to the insights gained by the founders of the Gestalt School of Psychology when it comes to our own visual perception.
This is why if our current renewed interest in 3-D movies ever becomes economically viable enough to become an industry standard – rather than a mere gimmicky fad during the previous decades of the 20th Century. The new generation of cinematographers interested in 3-D movie making should reexamine the Gestalt School for inspiration. This 100-year-old or so “old school” thinking will probably inspire a generation of young cinematographers to create a 3-D movie that’s even better than James Cameron’s 400 million dollar anti-imperialist epic called Avatar.
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