Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity

Abstract

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity Chang-Min Yu (bio) Nick Jones. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 304 pages. $140 hardback. $35 paperback. About twenty years ago, David Bordwell proposed the "modernity thesis" to characterize an emerging trend of scholarship that drew upon the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.1 In this "culturalist" school of thought—originating from New York and then prospering at Chicago—cinema originates from and, more importantly, reflects modernity.2 The first claim is widely accepted; the second is, to say the least, fraught and contested. While most scholars can agree that cinema is a modern technologized art, it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between what is onscreen—fast editing, intensified momentum, kaleidoscopic spectacle, you name it—and what circulates in culture. The reason is simple: if whatever case of modernity is that dominating, why are we not seeing its manifestation everywhere rather than in only a few selected tokens of its forestalled realization? Isomorphic reflection aside, it also seems strenuous to clarify modernity's history since the nineteenth century—its rise, fall, upsurge, and submergence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—with regard to any particular screen technique or characteristic at stake. Though largely left [End Page 386] as an unstated assumption, this issue of modernity hermeneutics is the daunting task Nick Jones sets for himself in Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: to convincingly articulate the modernity of 3D cinema and the relation to its cultural counterpart, "digital 3D."3 The book begins with a long history of 3D cinema and its attendant research (chapter 1) and subsequently moves into a broader historiographical framework stretching to include the Renaissance perspective (chapter 2). For Jones, 3D cinema and media have not supplanted art historian Erwin Panofsky's perspective as humanity's symbolic form, but they do "encapsulate many of the dominant and emerging logics that structure media, technology, and spatial knowledge at the present digital moment" (60). This is Jones's (weak) modernity thesis. For Jones, 3D cinema (re)surfaces because it "engender[s], document[s], and highlight[s] this situation" that is built upon the contemporary rendition of the "stereoscopic imaginary" (3). And I want to highlight "digital 3D" as a term because it is a modifier nominalized. It is untethered from "filmmaking" (1) and becomes a free-floating, abstract, expansive noun—like the so-called "stereoscopic imaginary"—a paragraph after. That supple abstraction is subsequently deployed to encapsulate all the chapter key words that Jones discusses: simulation, immersion, surveillance (chapters 3–5) and defamiliarization, distortion, and intimacy (chapters 6–8), the first three spatialized governance practices and the rest haptic subversive tactics. One is the smoothly engrossing commercial cinema that thematizes the datafied exploitation of the planet. The other reveals the operating logic of such calculations by either the slight instability inherent in stereoscopy, transitional failures in digital filmmaking, or auteurist interventions within the sphere of art cinema. The dichotomy is totalizing infrastructure versus localized resistance, abstraction and embodiment ontologically imbricated with each other in this calculated and yet tantalizing tactility. Thus understood, the term "digital 3D" has two purposes. The first is to draw a line—"the malleability of digital images detaches them from the connection to the past that seemed to define analog media" (53)—between analog and computerized 3D visuality. The distinction reaffirms the already-aged newness of stereoscopic images, whose history the book meticulously traces through existent scholarship. The second is to rearticulate 3D films, such as Avatar (2009) and Goodbye to Language (2014), in terms of culture at large. "Visual culture" in the book's subtitle is enlisted to spice up and make expansive the subject, which is to say that 3D is significant because it is cultural (and less cinematic). Hence the abstraction, [End Page 387] because the nominalized term enables a shift from "3D cinema" to "3D culture." This expansion produces a curious effect. The films discussed do not have to be 3D films as long as they furnish a holographic presentation in a technologically mediated environment. Similarly, Jones can point to virtual reality and other embodied visual praxis as part...