Sony Rita Hayworth Box

Is this a fact, RolandL?
Have you spoken with the studios about it?
They have been tragically and irritatingly remiss in not releasing 3-D films in field-sequential when the tube and the system were the standard.
I hope you're right.

Regarding the stereoscopic Miss Sadie Thompson, I disagree with Bob Cashill.
I've seen Miss Sadie Thompson projected twice in perfect double-interlock, and it's a state-of-the-art stereoscopic experience.
It is thankfully free of cheap and distracting gimmicks.
3-D is a visual language, the language of depth, and it should not be used or perceived as only a gimmick.
The stereoscopic lensing brings contour, texture and spatial relationships into play in Miss Sadie Thompson.
Depth is used with subtlety and with intelligence to tell the story.
If you haven't seen Miss Sadie Thompson in stereo, you haven't seen it.

But any lens creates depth, it converts the 3D world onto a flat piece of film that is then projected onto a flat screen, yet we recognise in the flat image the appearance of depth. Look at Citizen Kane, or The Magnificent Ambersons, or The Little Foxes, or any of Sergio Leone's Techniscope films, they all make outrageous use of depth. If we say that only 3D movies have 'true depth', then we are completely ignoring many filmmakers such as Welles, Wyler, Renoir, Leone and Mizoguchi that made deep focus and depth staging a hall mark of their styles.

I also don't think motion pictures in any way resembled a "language". It seems that such analogies are just a relic of a time that film theory was completely dominated by semiotics.

A man who trully understands the power of 3-D :)

And again, in all sincerity, I disagree.  Good stereoscopy is NOT about gimmicks.  Most photographers who shoot in stereo actually despise the "poke in your face" attitude of many 3D films.  SADIE THOMPSON is an excellent example of an adult film that actually has a mature use for 3D.  DIAL 'M' FOR MURDER, in my opinion, is unwatchable without the 3D-- it plays like a totally different film.  But that being said, I find it too conservative (and I'm not talking about the "in your face" stuff, just simple things like a conservative interocular).

Sure, there's no reason to have the 3D in the film.  But there's no reason to have color, or stereophonic sound in it, either.  3D is just an aspect of film-- no more or less important than color is to the story telling, but done right, actually takes some skill.  See how terribly any film from the '70s or '80s shot in 3D is and you'll understand it's not just pointing a camera and shooting.  The '50s films, by comparison, are well rendered because they were shot by technicians who may not have been experienced with the craft, but understood it.

I also agree with Richard.  If you haven't seen it in 3D, you haven't seen it.  The filmmakers added the element and put effort towards it.  Unfortunately, the ambivalence of this aspect of the film is simply just a prejudice notion because 3D has become the bastard child of cinema, thanks to gimmicky promotion.

Any lens creates the illusion of depth.  That's not the same thing.

There are many "Example 'A's" of how 3D can impact a film dramatically.  Anyone who has seen HOUSE OF WAX remembers the paddle-ball man as a gimmick, but what they remember stronger is Charles Bronson popping out of the corner of the screen at the end of the film during the climax.  Shown flat, there is simply no contest in this shot's dramatic impact.  Likewise, the fight in the Bradbury Building during I, THE JURY, is no where near as spectacular or perilous in the flat counterpart.  With the depth achieved by the stereoscopic photography, you really understand the danger of a 30-foot drop.

I also think your assumption that 3D somehow disregards the work of past artists is ludicrous.  What those photographers did stands on their own.  Comparing depth of field to real depth is apples and oranges.

Many of the films we are citing were lensed by the same photographers.  KISS ME KATE was photographed by Charles Rosher, a man who had been working in the studio system since the 'teens. Clearly he had no qualms about shooting stereoscopically, and in fact, had very positive things to say about it in an interview.

But I don't understand how adding a new aspect to filmmaking, or praising it, disregards the preceding technology.  As with any art form, new techniques are applied in association with old ones.  Does every sound film negate the artistry of silent film?  Does color negate black and white photography?  Does stereophonic sound negate a mono sound signal?

Edited by Jack Theakston - 9/24/09 at 11:51pm

No, it doesn't.
To create depth, you need two lenses.
If you lose sight in one eye, you lose depth perception.
You need two eyes to perceive depth just as you need two lenses to photograph depth.


You may create the appearance of depth by grouping actors and props in positions of distance from one another, but that is only the appearance of depth because the participation of the viewer in the actual depth is missing.

To create depth, you need two lenses.

Instead of watching the appearance of depth, why not watch depth?

They are not the same thing, Simon.


Sophistry.
Better to dive in the pool and swim underwater than to watch other people do it.
"We" are not ignoring anybody.
Deep focus and depth staging are as old as live theater and company on Thanksgiving, but two lenses gives a tactile presence and perspective and contouring to deep focus and depth staging that is absent from a one-lens capture.

Two lenses mimics how you see with two eyes.
With one lens, half the story is missing.


More sophistry.
Motion pictures are a visual language: I know a visual poem when I see Wagon Master / it.
Stories are told visually and also through dialog and action.
Otherwise, close your eyes the next time you put a movie on, or listen to the radio.
Otherwise, what is all your deep focus and depth staging for, if not to tell a visual story?
Cinematography is a visual language that communicates without a word being spoken.
Stereoscopic cinematography does the same thing only more and better and as naturally as having two eyes.
That's not theory, it's a practice, learned and refined in the doing.

Richard

Edited by Richard--W - 9/24/09 at 10:53pm

Sophistry! (See, I can accuse people of sophistry too!)

Sorry, this is an extroadinarily narrow definition of depth. Depth just means that we can perceive the Z axiss, i.e. objects receceding away from the camera. A single lens can record this effect perfectly, if it couldn't how could any films feature depth staging? I am not disputing that 3D films create a form of depth as well, but it is rediculous to say you need 3D to create images that have depth. Put your TV on to a random channel wait until you can see two people standing apart, the fact you can perceive that one is closer to the camera than the other demonstrates that a single lens can effectively translate the depth in the real world onto a flat screen.
Firstly, staging in depth can encourage greater audience participation, because the viewer is left more free to roam the frame.

But how on earth does putting on 3D glasses encourage greater "participation of the viewer"? 3D films are inherently unrealistic, because objects and actors seem to be separate from the rest of the image, which is not how we actually experience reality. So if deep focus cinematography only creates "the appearance of depth", then 3D movies only create a heavily unrealistic 'appearance of 3D', which I don't think makes them inherently superior to so called 'flat' films.

MORE SOPHISTRY!

I've never seen deep focus cinematography used in a theater! The shape that a camera records differs greatly from the shape of a stage. A stage is essentially a shallow box shape that encourages staging in width, a lens creates a pyramidal playing space that that emphasises depth as well as width (especially in widescreen formats). Staging practices in film and theater are very different, it doesn't make sense to me to say that cinematic staging is inspired by theater when the playing space is so differrent.

Saying that 3D films creates "tactile presence" is just sophistry. Can you actually touch the objects on the screen? If you can't, it must be only an appearance of depth, which you have been so critical of.


I will agree with you that films feature a visual language provided the word "language" means something completely different to what we usually mean when we use that word. If film is a language, what is the visual equvilent of a sentence, or a paragraph, or a plural, or a morpheme, or a phoneme, a noun, or a verb, or an adverb or adjective? I just think if we are going to use  words it may as well be used with some precision.

Saying films feature a visual language was a weak analogy created by English professors who were too lazy to figure out exactly how people make sense of films. Instead they wanted to simply say that films must communicate the same way that books communicate, because they ultimately felt that books (or rather 'literature') was a superior art form, and that films were just a weak alternative. That sort of fuzzy thinking just held back a fuller appreciation of films as an art form that shares some features the same as other arts (theater and photography) but that is ultimately unique. These academics just applied the analytical tools of one art form to another, instead of devising new analytical methods for a new art form.

I have my reasons for why I think saying films are a visual language is a weak argument, and haven't yet read a coherently argued explanation for why films are a language, except in the weakest metaphorical sense that ultimately doesn't explain much.

I disagree that it is purely a depth illusion. The lens records an actual space, some lenses, say 40mm - 60mm record a roughly accurate sense of perspective, whereas shorter and longer lenses distort depth. So I think it is wrong to say that all lenses create an illusory depth, some focal lengths capture an accurate record of depth.

Of course 3D films create an unrealistic illusion of 3D. When we perceive the actual world, objects don't seemingly separate themselves from a flat background plane and come firing into the close foreground.



I have seen the film in 3D at a cinema and on DVD, I remember the paddle-ball sequence far more clearly than Charles Bronson's appearance. Again, neither of these effects are realistic, they are 3D illusions, not actually how we perceive the world.

I think there is a difference between colour film and current 3D systems. Colour is inherently a more realistic medium, because we perceive the world in colour. I don't think current 3D formats are more realistic, because the 3D effects are extremely unrealistic, we just don't perceive the world the way 3D films create a 3D illusion.

My point was it doesn't make sense to pretend that 3D films are the first films to exploit our sense of depth. Filmmakers have been exploiting depth to various degrees since the 1920s, and during the 1940s deep focus and depth staging became a norm throughout Hollywood at least for black and white films. I would go further and say that one reason that 3D films didn't become a standard in the 1950s is because they had no real advantage over widescreen films.

There are many articles about 3-D (not the crap anaglyph) Blu-ray in 2010

http://www.techradar.com/news/video/blu-ray/blu-ray-3d-standard-coming-this-december-632478

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=3417

 "Visual language" and all of this pretension aside--and I was the one accused of not getting the joke? --MISS SADIE THOMPSON just isn't much of a movie, in 2D or 3D. But that, too, is a matter of taste. 

It is an illusion of depth.  You can't have real depth without having two views.  You're confusing depth of field with depth.  They're two separate things performed by two different actions of your eyes.

A monoscopic person may think they can see depth.  It is the illusion of depth because they can gauge what's in the first 20 feet in front of them by gauging the focus between them and that point.


Then there are a number of audience members of mine who would disagree with you.  Many people I spoke to thought that Bronson's jumping out of the corner was actually someone in front of them at first.  It is a well lit, well composed shot.


Nonsense.  What do you call grading the color down or up then?  Do you think every science-fiction or thriller film from the last 20 years has a natural color scheme?  Clearly every film doesn't use naturalistic color.  It's a stylistic effect, just as much as hyperstereo is.


And my point is that I never said any such thing, first of all, because 3D films are older than the '50s.  I'm simply defending the fact that 3D is a legitimate aspect of film, as abused as it has been in the last 30 years.

And you're simply off the mark about the end of 3D.  Like most consumers, your speculation is that the success or failure is entirely based on the reaction of the market, with no thought to industrial economics or technological setbacks.

The simple reason 3D fails time and time again on film is because most projectionists aren't careful enough to consistently put on good performances of the process.  Good 3D is much more than just threading up a projector or two and letting them roll.  You have to make adjustments where necessary, and you have to make sure everything is working the way it should.  Asking people across the country who don't work for you and to which you have no way of checking is like asking an elephant to walk through a china shop and not break anything.

Forget it, Jack, it's Chinatown.

Richard

What on earth does sophistry mean anyway? Is it a posh way of calling someone a liar or a fool or a sweet transvestite?

Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone. In Ancient Greece, the sophists were a group of teachers of philosophy and rehetoric.
 

The term sophism originated from Greek sophistēs, meaning "wise-ist", one who "does" wisdom, one who makes a business out of wisdom (sophós means "wise man").

You pick the meaning.

I see no deciet in Simon's posts, just a differing point of view. But the accuser does have an unfortunate tendency to lash out on those with differing opinions, which is a shame because he has some really interesting things to say, they're just hidden amongst the raving, false accusations and dodgy views.

'Tiger' - What you said is exactly why I enjoy this forum.  You get good news and different points of view and opinions.  Sometimes my mind is changed and sometimes it is not.  Any lashing does not bother me as long as it is kept civil, for it is just another opinion and if we all had the same opinion, this would be a very dull world.


I do agree that film is an art form and can be a visual poem.  But as with all art, it is only art in the eye of the beholder. 

In the context of this particular discussion that should be "..in the eyes of the beholder."


Cees

Agreed.

This movie looks excellent in 3-D.

You don't need things thrown at the screen for the process to be "relevant". 

 "Thrown from the screen," you mean. But MISS SADIE THOMPSON is so ho-hum in any dimension I'm sure audiences have thrown things at the screen. 

To clarify, I did mean "thrown at the screen" not in a literal meaning, but as "thrown at the camera". The distinction is with cheaply produced 3-D features, things intended to be "thrown from the screen" often fail to do so.

In either case, you've stated you don't care for Sadie in 2D or 3D, so it's all moot, isn't it?

With regard to Miss Sadie Thompson and stereoscopic cinema, those who are interested will want to read up on the short list of Top 3-D Myths:

www.3dfilmpf.org/info-top-10-3D-myths.html

Only takes a couple of minutes to read.

Talking about Hayworth, a re-release of "Angels over Broadway" would be nice.

Is there any confirmed release date for the Colombia Rita Hayworth set? I notice that Amazon is taking orders, but, without a release date, it doesn't mean anything.

I'll wait for the 3-D version of Miss Sadie Thompson to come out on Blu-ray which should be in 2010/2011.

It was mentioned somewhere - don't know where exactly - that it was pushed back till February and Valentine's Day but no idea, whether the release date has been fixed. DVDAficionado lists it with a February 23rd release date.

A Joan Crawford set would be nice, too with:

-Queen Bee
-They All Kissed the Bride
-Autumn Leaves
-Strait Jacket
-The Story of Esther Costello

I also heard rumors of Sony doing a Craig's Wife/Harriet Craig double feature, as well as releasing Mae West's The Heat's On and Ladies of the Chorus with Marilyn Monroe.

Since we got Strait Jacket in the recent William Castle Collection, how about Berserk instead.  Very camp horror at the circus film.  The opening title sequence is just great with the body of a trapeze artist swinging from an accidental noose and as he swings, the title wipes in after him.

Count me in for a possible Joan Crawford set but as ahollis pointed it out, Berserk would be an interesting addition that might not have a chance to see a release outside of a set.

I'm down for Berserk. I wasn't aware that Strait Jacket had been put in the William Castle collection.