Well, I was vaguely aware of this and only vaguely interested until I read a piece on it over at
The House Next Door. In particular, though, consider what Matt Seitz himself adds in the comments section, specifically this:
Matt Zoller Seitz wrote:This is an extraordinary movie, well worth seeing -- one that not only suggests new artistic potential for 3D, but new expressive possibilities for cinema generally. When "Beowulf" came out, I read some criticism of the 3-D version suggesting that cinema was of necessity 2-D medium, a pictorial language, and that adding a third dimension turned it into something else -- pure spectacle. I can see the logic behind that, but I'd suggest that anyone inclined to agree with it wholeheartedly reserve judgment until they've seen "U2 3D." Owens and Pellington have really thought through the visual properties of 3D, figuring out, for example, that it's not truly 3-dimensional in the sense that life is 3-dimensional; that the effect when you watch it more akin to those multiplane camera effects that Disney's animated movies pioneered (zooming out through multiple layers of 2-D panoramas), except that in this case, there is a sense of depth, of indeterminate but palpable space, between each plane.
Certain sections of this movie reminded me of the hall of mirrors sequence in "The Lady From Shanghai," only instead of a lateral series of 2-D reflections of a single person, you're looking at six, ten, or a dozen translucent screens layered on top of each other, each one fully comprehensible in all its details, and in some sense "separate" from all the others, yet also merged into a single image. The graphics on the big screen, the musicians moving onstage, the various perspectives on the audience (closeups of individuals, group shots, shots of whole sections of thousands of onlookers) all merge into a single unified whole. It's just dazzling -- and the fact that it dovetails so perfectly with U2's message (erasing national and cultural borders -- the utopian hippie fantasy of bringing the world together with music) is the aesthetic cherry on top of this multi-tiered wedding cake of a movie.
It's not so much the technology itself that made this movie possible (though I'm sure the relative portability of the digital cameras compared to IMAX film cameras, or even 35mm film cameras, helped make it possible; ditto the much greater control that could be exercised during postproduction compared to manipulating film). I suspect the adventurous spirit of the filmmakers -- and the band that encouraged them to try new things -- deserves much of the credit for what ended up onscreen.
Imagine what Stan Brakhage could have done with this technology, or Stanley Kubrick, or Jordan Belson. Imagine what Peter Greenaway could do with this. Or Errol Morris.
I can picture "Ulysses" and other novels that have long been considered unfilmable (without oversimplifying their essence) being credibly adapted using this format, which, much more so than 2D cinema, or any other form of 3D cinema, finds a visual equivalent for the crowded human imagination, a place where past events, present experience, a speculative future and mad flights of fancy all coexist simultaneously in real time.
I know that sounds like some Walt Whitman craziness, but don't rule it out.
I won't go so far as to say that what we're seeing here is the future of cinema -- but it does suggest to me that the 2-dimensional, narrative driven model that has persisted for over a century represents motion pictures in its infancy; that perhaps future generations will look back, after another few centuries of cinematic evolution, and think of the 20th and early 21st century as the cave painting years.
and this:
I think the refinement of 3 D aesthetics showcased in this concert film could be applied to certain works of literature, particularly works by authors (like Joyce, Borges and Proust) that slip in and out of present and past tense, memory and fantasy, description and feeling. As far as most viewers are concerned, commercial narrative cinema is the only viable, comprehensible kind of moviemaking, and while filmmakers have bent it to all sorts of uncharacteristic, uncommercial ends, ultimately they rarely depart too far from the template established by Griffith, which clearly sections off past tense from present, closeup from wide shot, via hard cuts or quick dissolves. There have been quite a few movies that attempt to infuse past with present, memory with experience -- "The Limey" and "Point Blank" and much of Wong Kar-Wai's and Stan Brakhage's filmographies spring immediately to mind -- but what Owens does in the U2 movie suggests that there's a whole largely unexplored country out there. The pristine sharpness of this new digital 3 D allows for the construction of scrims or screens that exist simultaneously within the frame without turning the entire image into kaleidoscopic , psychedelic mush (which is what many films that attempt to suggest multiple, simultaneous thoughts ultimate turn into). Eisensteinian montage allows one image to be juxtaposed with another image via a cut to suggest a new idea (synthesis), but the synthesis occurs only in the viewer's mind, not on the screen. This different approach to 3D suggests that it's possible to create true synthesis on the screen, in real time, and keep that synthesis going, while still maintaining the essential separateness of the ideas which create that synthesis. (Wow, it's 10:38 AM New York time, yet somehow in this comments thread it's become 3 AM in the dorm room.)
Here's a section of "Ulysses" that could be visualized, in all its wild juxtaposition and continuous flow of time/space, via the multi-plane 3D filmmaking that the U2 film showcases so vividly. Read this and try to imagine the different images being presented in translucent yet solid scrims on a 3D screen, so that you can see one image while another one comes up, and another, each image fading slowly, only when the filmmaker decides that its potency has ebbed from the mind of the narrator (i.e., the audience member):
"frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweet synnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo bits leaving things like that lying around hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C Ill get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the place hotter than it is the rain was lovely just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the mosquito nets and the smell of the rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche Paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on what she was very nice whats this her other name was just a P C to tell you I sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing in old Madrid or Waiting Concone is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word Icouldn't make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing still theyre lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also Captain Grove with love yrs affly x x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderillos with the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all through a mist makes you feel so old..."
It's hard to imagine a passage like this one being visualized on a big screen without losing the sense of emotional/descriptive continuity Joyce conjures. Part of the problem is that we're so accustomed to seeing memory or fantasy represented as something that exists apart from our present-tense reality. But the fact is, this way of seeing is an artificial construct that does not reflect how we actually experience life. When you're walking down the street, you're not just experiencing the street -- you're thinking about your destination, and why you're going there, and how the street has changed over the years, and how that guy standing by the lamppost vaguely reminds you of your grandfather, and how your grandfather used to wear a particular hat and coat every day, and how he sipped his coffee, and the expression on his face as he sipped coffee in the hospital waiting room on the night your grandmother died, and your grandmother's funeral, and the flowers on the grave, and how the flowers were nothing like the flowers in the window of the shop you're just now passing on your way home.
Visualize the above as a sequence of shots and cuts, and it might take ten or fifteen minutes to convey that series of sensations and impressions while doing all of them justice -- and you wouldn't do all of them justice because whether you moved from one image via a cut or dissolve, you would still be leaving certain images behind in order to show new ones, resulting in a visual/emotional shorthand that doesn't reflect how multiple feelings and sensations linger in the mind, solidly or as a kind of psychic residue. Do the same passage onscreen in 3D, with long match dissolves that keep the different elements onscreen simultaneously, and you might actually get closer to approximating what it's like to see those images and feel those feelings.
What I'm getting at is this: cinema's potential to simulate the actual process of thinking -- to allow us to actually experience someone else's thoughts, to go inside their heads for a while -- has come a long, long way, but it's still in its expressive infancy. New tools could push it along -- that and bold artists with equally bold investors backing their bravery.
I'll be seeing this this weekend.
