‘Crows’ vs. ‘Avatar,’ or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion

Abstract

Abstract 3D film’s explicit new space depth arguably provides both an enhanced realistic quality to the image and a wealth of more acute visual and haptic sensations (a ‘montage of attractions’) to the increasingly involved spectator. But David Cronenberg’s related ironic remark that “cinema as such is from the outset a ‘special effect’” should warn us against the geometrical naiveté of such assumptions, within a Cartesian ocularcentric tradition for long overcome by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment of perception and Deleuze’s notion of the self-consistency of the artistic sensation and space. Indeed, ‘2D’ traditional cinema already provides the accomplished “fourth wall effect,” enclosing the beholder behind his back within a space that no longer belongs to the screen (nor to ‘reality’) as such, and therefore is no longer ‘illusorily’ two-dimensional. This kind of totally absorbing, ‘dream-like’ space, metaphorical for both painting and cinema, is illustrated by the episode Crows in Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). Such a space requires the actual effacement of the empirical status of spectator, screen, and film as separate dimensions, and it is precisely the 3D characteristic unfolding of merely frontal space layers (and film events) out of the screen towards us (and sometimes above the heads of the spectators before us) that reinstalls at the core of the film-viewing phenomenon a regressive struggle with reality and with different degrees of realism, originally overcome by film since the Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat, 1896) seminal demonstration. Through an analysis of crucial aspects in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and the recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010), both dealing with historical and ontological deepening processes of ‘going inside,’ we shall try to show how the formal and technically advanced component of those 3D-depth films impairs, on the contrary, their apparent conceptual purpose on the level of contents, and we will assume, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, that this technological mistake is due to a lack of recognition of the nature of perception and sensation in relation to space and human experience.