The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  One of the most rewarding moments of my career came when my skiffle band, The Dodge Brothers, teamed up with Neil Brand to present a live accompaniment to the long-forgotten Louise Brooks movie Beggars of Life at a uniquely ‘carbon-neutral’ screening, as part of the inaugural New Forest Film Festival in September 2010. The movie itself is a surprisingly gritty gem: a 1928 tale of a hobo who goes on the run with a young waif after she kills her stepfather, by whom she has been repeatedly molested. In order to disguise his new companion, our hero (handsomely played by Richard Arlen) advises her to dress ‘like a boy’, at which point Brooks dons an old hat and battered trouser suit and somehow becomes even more stunningly beautiful than she was before. (People talk about movie stars having the ability to ‘draw the camera’s eye’, but few have ever managed this trick as well as Brooks. The camera doesn’t just look at her – it falls in love with her, brings her flowers, recites poetry outside her balcony, and finally offers to cut off its own ear in service to her radiant charms.) Conjoined in their outsider status, our star-crossed couple hit the rails, their paths intermingling with those of a bunch of drunken renegades led by the top-billed Wallace Beery (perhaps best known to younger audiences through a passing reference in the Coen brothers’ best film Barton Fink, where the titular scribe is told by his cigar-chomping boss, ‘It’s a Wallace Beery wrestling picture, ferrcrissakes! You know the drill – big men in tights!’). Everything becomes spectacularly twisted and it ends up with kangaroo courts, love and death struggles, and an almighty train wreck featuring a real train really falling down a really large ravine. For real. Apparently the wreckage is still out there, a twisted heap in the Carrizo Gorge, somewhere in the desert of Southern California. Brooks (who performed her own stunts, including running along the boards of the moving train) was rightly told to be afraid of director William Wellman because ‘he’s a maniac’. As it turned out, she was more than a match for his much-vaunted madness.

  Anyway, back to the New Forest Film Festival. Because the festival had a mandate to be ‘sustainable’, someone came up with the bright idea of powering the projector by bicycle. A few months earlier, Linda and I had seen someone furiously pedalling away on a single bike mounted upon a car alternator, which in turn powered a small projector throwing an ‘experimental’ silent short film on to a tiny screen at the Larmer Tree Festival in Dorset. If you could do that with one bike, what could you do with ten? With the help of a company called Magnificent Revolutions, we managed to rig up a powerful projector to an entire bank of bikes, all of which chugged away at full power for the length of time it took Beggars of Life to play to 350 people, while The Dodge Brothers provided acoustic skiffle accompaniment throughout. The bikes were far from silent, but somehow the whirring, clunking sound of the wheels seemed to replicate the sound of an old projector, providing an authentically wheezing back-drop to a live musical score that involved all manner of banging, crashing, bluegrass banjo and gob-iron wailing. At the end of the screening, a gaunt-faced gentleman with piercing eyes and strangely distinctive teeth (and apparently wearing a tea-cosy on his head) came up and shook our hands and told us that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed himself so much at the cinema.

  It was Richard O’Brien, creator of The Rocky Horror Show – a hero of mine.

  For a moment my life felt strangely complete.

  So yes, I do have a powerful hankering for the days when films were performed rather than just screened, and directors understood that film (unlike theatre) is first and foremost a visual medium in which dialogue is not the driving force. Another of my personal heroes, Mike Figgis, once spoke passionately to me about how the advent of sound and the introduction of recorded speech had, ironically, brought to an end the universal language that once had been a defining factor of pure cinema. Figgis recalled how immigrants arriving in America from Europe were first processed at Ellis Island, where a silent film screening (with live musical accompaniment – ‘silent’ film was never silent) would be used to explain to them the wonders of the New World that awaited. The film would have had neither recorded sound (obviously) nor intertitles (illiteracy and language barriers would have rendered them useless), but somehow the images conveyed enough information to orientate the newcomers and prepare them for what might otherwise have been an intolerable culture shock. For Figgis, the moment film became a verbal, rather than a visual and musical, experience it also became a slave to the boundaries of language – its scope no longer universal, but national, perhaps even regional. To be sure, the director was not decrying the use of recorded sound, with which he has experimented throughout his career, most notably on the bizarre Lynchian rumblings that accompany his best and most underrated movie Liebestraum. But he understood that whatever else may have been gained, something had also been lost when dialogue became the primary ingredient of cinematic exposition. Australian director Peter Weir said something similar when I interviewed him onstage at BAFTA in 2010, on behalf of the David Lean foundation. Recounting the difficulties he had experienced dealing with certain Hollywood executives, Weir remarked in an offhand way that ‘their problem is that they don’t read the script. Oh, they read the dialogue, but that’s all they read.’ Weir went on to explain that when signing on to direct Witness he had made a point of making the executives listen to him tell the story of the film, going on to describe in detail the opening shots, which depict an apparently ancient community living amidst the modern world. There wasn’t a single word of dialogue in his description, but the essence of the film was encapsulated in the verbal pictures he drew for them. By the time he signed the contract, he was confident that they were all seeing the same film, as distinct from simply hearing the same words.

  All of which is a very roundabout way of saying that I not only accept, but actively embrace, accusations that I have an accentuated fondness for the early forms of cinema for which many of my most shrill opponents have neither the time nor the patience (nor indeed the intelligence, wit and integrity). Screw ’em, I say – it’s their loss. But as to my aversion to 3-D being comparable with a desire to wipe sound and colour from the film-maker’s palette – that is sheer corporate ass-licking balderdash. 3-D is nothing like sound or colour; you know it, I know it, everybody knows it. And for proof, one need look no further than the public’s willingness to embrace sound and colour, in stark comparison to their long-standing resistance to 3-D.

  Look at the evidence. Experiments with sound cinema were being carried out at the turn of the century, with picture synchronisation being the greatest hurdle. By the 1920s, Warner Bros. was using the ‘Vitaphone’ system to provide aural accompaniment to a string of short features, and in 1927 The Jazz Singer put sound features on the map. By 1929, silent cinema was as good as dead in Hollywood, although in some territories such as China and Japan, silent and sound cinema coexisted throughout the thirties. But by the forties, even the films produced in the world’s poorest economies were being made with sound, without which they were deemed internationally unsaleable. Nowadays, we have surround sound in our homes and wouldn’t settle for anything less at the pictures (although the all but silent French film The Artist has just become a huge hit in Cannes). As for colour, Thomas Edison was hand-painting prints of Annabelle Moore dancing for his Kinetoscope attractions as early as 1894, while Georges Méliès reportedly employed 20 or so women in Montreuil to hand-paint frames from A Trip to the Moon with production-line efficiency. In 1905, Pathé Frères introduced a stencil colour process, while film tinting continued to be popular throughout the twenties and thirties, and was even used as late as 1951 for the sci-fi feature Lost Continent. Meanwhile, three-strip Technicolor, which had become popular in the thirties, heralded the arrival of full-colour cinema, which would co-exist with black-and-white features for decades before effectively becoming industry standard in the sixties; by the early seventies, no one was making monochrome features as a matter of course, only as a matter of design. Unless specified otherwise, all movies were in c
olour.

  The same is true of widescreen cinema in all its various forms. Today films shot in the squarer ratio of 1.33 have become rare enough to draw complaints when correctly projected in cinemas, such as Andrea Arnold’s critically acclaimed feature Fish Tank or Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, both of which sent patrons scurrying to the projection booth claiming that the sides of the picture were missing. Even TV programmes (once the last bastion of old school 4x3 ‘Academy’ framing) are now standardly shot and broadcast in 16x9 (or, in cinema terms, 1.77:1). In short, widescreen has become normal screen, with screen dimensions ranging from 1.85:1 to 2.39:1 being what everyone expects from the movies.

  Crucially, all these innovations (sound, colour, ’Scope) were accepted almost at once by the movie-going public, despite the technical teething problems that each encountered. Early soundtracks were scratchy, distorted and often out of sync; colour was patchy, irregular and unreliably changeable; widescreen projection was costly, cumbersome and (in its earliest multiple-projector incarnations) given to break down at regular intervals. Yet, despite these manifest failings, the public never expressed enough disenchantment or lack of interest for the studios simply to give up and move on to the Next Big Thing. On the contrary, the progress of all three formats has been more or less a continuum, a steady rise in public acceptance and expectation halted only by the failure of technology to come up with the goods at an affordable price. Oh, there were long periods during the early silent era when film-makers who had experimented with sound decided that the process of matching images with dialogue was simply more trouble than it was worth. But as soon as reliably synchronised sound and film became both possible and practical, audiences took to it with alacrity. At no point did they decide that, actually, they weren’t that interested in this new ‘novelty’ after all, or realise that another advancement altogether was the true way forward.

  In this respect, 3-D is unique. Despite being as old as film itself, stereoscopic cinema has been rejected by audiences and superseded by competing ‘revolutionary’ formats on at least three separate occasions in the same century. Unlike colour, sound or ’Scope, its driving force has always been industry need rather than consumer demand. Whereas other systems have had to prove their worth in cash terms from the get-go, 3-D has been thrust (like the lion in Bwana Devil) into the laps of movie-goers by studios desperate for audiences to embrace the format whatever the cost. Like Microsoft attempting to ram their latest version of Word down our throats when most of us were happy with the old one, the inevitable move toward a stereoscopic future has been pushed from the rear rather than led from the front, foisted upon consumers who have been told what to want and then forced to pay for something they never asked for in the first place.

  You want proof? OK, here’s proof – Clash of the Titans. Not the 1981 Ray Harryhausen production which, to be honest, was never the maestro’s finest work (and in which, despite the title, titans never do actually clash). No, I’m talking about the aforementioned 2010 Louis Leterrier remake starring Avatar graduate Sam Worthington, whose previous success has a lot to answer for. As we have already observed, James Cameron’s 3-D spectacular took just shy of $2.8 billion at the worldwide box office, making the director the proud helmsman of the two biggest money-making films of all time, neither of which had been burdened by a half-decent script. In the wake of Avatar’s bum-numbing stereoscopic success, every half-witted Hollywood producer without an original thought in their coke-addled heads decided that 3-D was a cash cow and all future products must be forced to conform to this glutinous economic paradigm forthwith. Never mind the fact that Cameron had spent years gazing at his own navel trying to figure out how to make a game-changing movie in a medium which no one had liked for almost a century. Say what you like about Avatar (that it’s infantile, overlong, shamelessly derivative, wildly patronising, and laughably lacking in humour from start to finish – which it is), at least its creator believed in the technological innovations apparently required to bring the damned thing to the screen. (According to an interview in Entertainment Weekly, he also believed that The Hurt Locker would have been improved by being in 3-D.) Never mind the fact that the film looks a million times better in 2-D (clearer, brighter, sharper), or that Pandora is a far more immersive world when not viewed through the alienating annoyance of polarised lenses that make everything seem dark, dingy and dismally diminutive. At least Cameron thought he was doing the right thing – like Tony Blair deciding to invade Iraq, only with less tragic results.

  In 2010, punters wishing to see Clash of the Titans (more fool them) were asked to stump up a surplus charge in order to pay for the 3-D glasses that would enable them to experience the miracle of stereoscopy which made the movie such an allegedly unmissable experience. Unfortunately the film (which had gone into production long before Avatar broke box-office records) had, as noted previously, been designed and shot in plain old 2-D, in which format the director had originally intended it to be shown. However, in the wake of Avatar’s ‘game-changing’ success, it was declared that movies had to be in 3-D in order to be hits. So Clash of the Titans was handed over to a bunch of computer nerds, who set about digitally reconfiguring the images to impose a clumsy illusion of stereoscopy upon a picture which was never intended to be anything but monoscopic. To achieve this retrofitted 3-D effect, the techies took a parallax hammer to the background footage, imposing an eyeball-twisting illusion of depth that caused the unfazed foreground images to appear flat but nearer. Then they repeated this trick in reverse (negative parallax) on some of the pointier foreground images, making them appear even nearer, and even flatter. The result was not a fully rounded 3-D experience – it just looked like a bunch of flat things happening on opposing planes of flatness. In the business, this apparently common phenomenon is referred to as the ‘cardboard cut-out’ effect – meaning that the cast of Clash of the Titans were not just wooden, but cardboard. Thanks for that. A similar process was applied to equally dismal effect on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, producing results so piss-poor that 3-D evangelist James Cameron took to the press to badmouth the kind of ‘slapdash conversion’ processes that were giving 3-D cinema a bad name. Even Michael Bay, the reigning champion of artistically bankrupt blockbuster cinema (and latterday advocate of ‘real’ 3-D), announced that he was ‘not sold right now on the conversion process’. Which is rather like Max Clifford declaring that he’s worried about certain forms of press coverage lowering the general tone of news reporting.

  In the case of Clash of the Titans, the clear consensus was that the retrofitted 3-D had damaged rather than enhanced the movie, an opinion shared even by those who made the film. Although initially obliged to say only positive things, Sam Worthington later ruefully admitted that ‘I think … we kind of let some people down’ (you think?). Leterrier was more forthright, telling The Hollywood Reporter: ‘I was saying to them, “Don’t make it so much like a ViewMaster – so puffed up.” It was not my intention to do it in 3-D. It was not my decision to convert it in 3-D … Conversions, they all look like this. Alice in Wonderland looked like this. The technology was not ready.’

  If you’ve seen Clash of the Titans both in theatres and on 2-D Blu-ray disc (which I have, because that’s my job) you’ll realise just how ‘not ready’ the technology really was, and just what a mess the conversion made of an otherwise merely bland fantasy remake. The film may not be much good in pristine 2-D, but it’s a hell of a lot better (brighter, clearer, more focused) than it was in a screwed-up 3-D conversion. Yet even devoted fans of Louis Leterrier and his explosive oeuvre (I have an ongoing weakness for his Transporter movies which, for me, are essentially homoerotic male wrestling pics posing as action adventures) were bullied into watching Clash in a format for which it was neither designed nor intended. Worse still, they were made to pay for the privilege. Just think about that: Hollywood execs take a vaguely watchable film, make it all but unwatchable, and then ask you to pick up the cheque.

  Smile
and wave, boys, smile and wave …

  In many ways, the depressing case of Clash of the Titans is symptomatic of the fraudulence of the entire 3-D fad through which we are currently suffering. Not only does it highlight the technical shortcomings of the process, but more importantly it demonstrates that the current 3-D craze has nothing to do with what’s on screen and everything to do with what’s in your wallet. Terrified by piracy and goggle-eyed by the spectre of Avatar, Hollywood studios told audiences that 3-D was the future, and then made sure that it was by any means necessary. And it worked, at least for a while: Clash of the Titans took around $450 million worldwide – not quite what the suits were hoping for perhaps, and certainly not a patch on Avatar’s box-office bonanza, but still far better than the spectacular floppage this mishandled stereoscopic mess of a movie clearly deserved to suffer. Duly emboldened, the executives declared that all future blockbusters would be released in 3-D, whether their creators and/or audiences liked it or not. Suddenly 3-D was not an option; it was an order, an edict, an inevitability.