Techno
A terrifying experience
Alasdair Palmer looks at the rocky business of film technology
See women's heads sawn off in 3-D!' was the delightful promise of the techno- logical breakthrough which was going to change the nature of cinema. Today, you can see women's heads sawn off on film in many hundreds of different ways — but not in 3-D . The 'ultimate in viewing pleasure' went the same way as Cinerama, Sensur- round, and the unfortunately but accurately entitled Smellyvision: into oblivion. They didn't all fail because they were obviously stupid ideas like Smellyvision. Though I've never seen a woman's head sawn off in 3-D, I'm told it is significantly more life-like than seeing it in a normal movie. Though it was good, 3-D film failed for the same reason countless other ideas for improving the technical quality of films have failed: it wasn't good enough to justify the huge cost of converting cinemas throughout the world to the entirely new system it required. And if cinemas and film studios won't use it, any new movie technology is dead.
The difficulty of persuading the film industry to junk all of its existing equip- ment and replace it with something new and untried is why pioneers in this area usually lose their shirts. Even synchronised sound, the invention which made it possi- ble for film stars to talk on screen, was around for 25 years before Al Johnson made The Jazz Singer. The men behind the technology which was eventually universal- ly adopted made more money than they could imagine. However, the investors who sunk money into the various devices which did roughly the same thing before the first world war lost the lot.
Showscan is the latest technical break- through which promises to make or lose its backers a fortune. Currently on display at London's Trocadero in a show called The Emaginator, it's a new kind of cinema: the film is shot at twice the normal speed, and is more than twice the size, which means it gives out more information than the eye can possibly absorb. But it also costs twice as much. You need a special camera, twice as much film, special processing labs, and a special projector. The extra costs attract studio executives and cinema chain managers about as much as an afternoon watching Smellyvision. But if cost were not a factor, everyone would be shooting on Showscan. It produces an image which is far more life-like than any- thing I've ever seen projected onto a screen. 'Nothing touches the imagination like Showscan,' says the publicity hand-out, but it is a compliment to the effectiveness of the technology to report that this is the exact opposite of the truth; nothing elimi- nates the imagination like Showscan. Its whole point is to diminish the contribution of the imagination to as close to zero as possible. And in that it succeeds. You don't need to imagine anything. It's all there in perfect focus before you.
In The Emaginator the imagination is rendered even more superfluous by the fact that you sit in a seat which rocks, plunges, rolls and judders in perfect harmony with the images. The effect — achieved by a method developed for the flight-simulators used in training pilots — is to make you think you are not just seeing the explosions on screen, but feeling them too. And it is terrifying. In one of the two short films being shown in the Trocadero, you are dropped down a mineshaft and then thrownaround a series of underground tun- nels in a vertigo-inducing spectacle of swerves and plunges. In the other, you are in a space ship which is catapulted into a black hole — which turns out to involve a similarly dizzying selection of collisions, crashes, collapsing ceilings, and so on.
If you like being scared, The Emaginator is for you. All the children in the audience loved it. The adults came out ashen-faced, shaken, glad to be able to walk on firm ground again. And that included me. But for some strange reason, I wanted another go. Like the best fairground rides, The Emaginator is just frightening enough to be fun.
But will Showscan be adopted by studios and cinemas? Or will it, like so many bold new ideas before it, sink without trace? The auguries are not good. Like Smellyvi- sion, but unlike sound, Showscan is not a technique which opens up a vast new area for creative film-making. There is only one emotion that Showscan can create more effectively in people than present film tech- nology, and that is fear. Fear is of course a critical element in most films, but it would be an awful diminution if that was all there was to go to the cinema for. The great temptation for film makers is to believe that technology can be a substitute for art. Spend enough on buying technical perfec- tion, digitalised enhancement, and comput- er-driven effects, and it will make up for any other shortcomings your movie may have — such as a total inability to construct believable human drama. But the truth is, a flabby script, ham acting and botched direction inevitably result in a pig of a film.
From a purely commercial point of view, there are some grounds for thinking that the correct thing to do is pile on technology and forget about art. The most successful movies in recent years have been the ones that have replaced people with robots of one kind or another: for example Jurassic Park. Showscan may be at its best only in a movie meant to simulate a fair-ground, but these days that counts as an advantage. To create an effective imitation of a roller coaster ride currently seems to be the high- est aspiration of most big-budget Holly- wood films.
It is depressing that so much ingenuity and effort is going into technical innova- tions which only have a deleterious effect on film's ability to communicate something more than the most primitive of human responses. Fun though it is, the latest tech- nological development to hit cinema only confirms how misguided is our age's faith that technical progress can provide a solu- tion to every problem.
The Emaginator is at The Trocadero, Piccadilly Circus, price #3 per ride.
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