Volumetric Dramaturgy: Staging Drama in Depth

Abstract

I focus my analysis on 3D’s capacity for enabling and enhancing dramatic staging. Contemporary filmmakers have consciously taken the advantage of 3D cinema’s spatial depth to maximise dramatic intensity and emphasise narrative relations and confrontations. Based on Branigan’s cognitive narrative theory (Narrative comprehension and film. London/New York: Routledge, 1992), and Prince's more recent aesthetic discussions on digital 3D cinema (Digital visual effects in cinema: The seduction of reality. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2012), I argue that 3D’s contributions to both dramatic staging and narrational techniques are primarily rooted in the positive parallax space while complemented by limited use of the negative parallax effect, thus exemplifying the current predominance of the Aesthetics of Recession in digital 3D cinema.