Film

3-D films are of course not an invention of the 21st century, but maybe the 21st century is going to see their big breakthrough. Now that Hollywood’s 3-D films like “Avatar” and “Ice Age 3” have proved to be a hit at the box office, German film producers and studio hot-shots also want a piece of the stereoscopic cake.

3-D films enjoyed their first major heyday back in the 1950s with such pertinent titles as House of Wax and It Came From Outer Space. They were shown in Germany with the aid of dual projection systems and special glasses. The first stereoscopic films in fact go even further back to the period before the Second World War. For example, in Germany in May 1937 the first coloured experimental film with dual-channel projection (polarisation method) was introduced and went by the name Gartenschau in Dresden (The Dresden Horticultural Show). On 5th December 1937 an insurance company released a three-dimensional corporate film called Zum Greifen nah (You Can Nearly Touch It) – the film’s name, which seems to say it all, is still used even today as a slogan for the genre of 3-D.

Although stereoscopy was already being enjoyed back in the early 19th century in the form of zograscopes and “Magic Lantern” shows, there is also evidence that flickering, spatially projected images lasting only a few seconds were also to be seen as early as in the 1890s. As Stefan Drößler, the director of the Munich Film Museum, explains in an enlightening essay – the 3-D film can be traced back to an unintentional “invention” by France’s father of cinematography, George Méliès. Around 1900 he was accustomed to shooting his films with two cameras mounted parallel, in order to be able to produce double the number of copies from the two (almost) identical negatives.

The Berlin filmmaker, Max Skladanowsky, claimed a few years later that his Bioskop projector was also capable of producing “three-dimensional” film images. “If Skladanowsky had modified his ever so precise double projector to make it project synchronously instead of alternately, and had he combined that with the films Méliès had made with his double camera in 1903, a form of 3-D cinema would have been possible back then in the very early phase of filmmaking history,” concludes Drössler, the film historian.

“Avatar” set the standard

After the introduction of the talkies at the end of the 1920s and colour films in the middle of the 1930s the way has now been paved for the third cinematographic revolution - the digital cinema of the 21st century. This means that the three-dimensional screen experience is no longer limited to those specially built IMAX mega-cinemas. A regular cinema that has already been converted for digital films can be equipped with the special lens systems and viewing glasses for a relatively reasonable price. (In June 2010 there were more than 270 movie theatres in Germany with at least one cinema screen capable of showing 3-D films.) We all remember James Cameron’s stereoscopic science-fiction drama Avatar (released in Germany on 17th/18th December 2009). This lavish Hollywood blockbuster, probably the most expensive production of all time at a cost of 300 million dollars, was for the most part created by computers. Avatar has now heralded in an incredible demand for films of that kind. And Germany is all set to produce some of them.

This is where Germany’s largest independent studio has decided to set the standard. The Constantin Film company has scheduled two much-vaunted, stereoscopic 3-D feature films for production this year and next year: a computer-generated re-make of “The Animals’ Conference” by Holger Tappe and Reinhard Klooss (to be released 7th October 2010), as well as the live-action follow-up film “Vicky and the Treasure of the Gods” that is to be screened on 11th November 2010 and is being realised by Ratpack, an associate-production company of Constantin.

The Animals’ Conference, inspired not only by Erich Kästner’s book from 1949 but also by Curt Linda’s charming animated film from 1969, is being touted by Constantin as the “first German animated film in 3-D”. For 2011 Ratpack is planning a new 3-D version of the time-traveller thriller “The Hunt for the Hidden Relic” with a budget of over 15 million euros, based on the novel of the same name by Andreas Eschenbach. An elaborate three-dimensional live-action version of Michael Ende’s classic teenager story Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver) is also in the pipeline.

Wenders’ “Pina” is to be the litmus test

In Bremen Irish, Icelandic and German computer experts are working at the moment on the 800-million-euro international animated film “Thor - The Edda Chronicles” that is expected to hit the screens in the spring of 2011. A Munich company called Caligari Film- und Fernsehproduktions GmbH on the other hand is producing an animated 3-D version of the Ritter Rost (Rusty The Knight) children’s books by Jörg Hilbert and Felix Janosa and is being funded by the states of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and the Berlin Federal Film Board to the tune of 1.55 million euros.

The Berlinale Film Festival in February 2011 is to be the venue for Wim Wenders’ documentary dance-film project – Pina. It is a German-French co-production and sees itself on the one hand as a posthumous portrait of the choreographer Pina Bausch from Wuppertal who died in 2009; on the other hand however Pina is to serve as a litmus test to see whether 3-D cinema – and a documentary at that – will also find approval in the indulgent realm of art-house cinema.

3-D for your living room

Television technology has also jumped on the bandwagon and is developing what is called the “Full-3D-TV-Standard”. On the occasion of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa the Sony Group recorded a total of 25 games in 3-D. Although the preliminary round game between Germany and Ghana was only shown in a few selected 3-D cinemas, they are going to do all in their power get this new technology into people’s living rooms as quickly as possible. The very latest trend is viewing moving 3-D images without having to put on those irksome glasses. On a small-format level this is where Nintendo’s mini games computer, 3DS, has quite definitely raised the bar. It remains to be seen however just how firmly Germany and its (film) producers will be able to establish themselves in the field of stereoscopy.