Blood Jump #17: A New Dimension
A deep-dive into the history of 3D movies and three pillars of the medium.
I talk a big game about elevated taste, but I’m a sucker for a gimmick. I can’t go to a concert without buying merch, commemorative glasses comprise half my drinkware, my favorite band once themed a residency around donut flavors. For as much as I’d like the MCU to implode under the weight of its own CGI sludge, I drool with envy at the franchise landfill tie-ins that litter the multiplex as I trudge toward my ascetic indie du jour; in a perfect world, Tár would have had a collectable popcorn bucket. Humanitas, tchotchke, always you wrestle inside me.
In an act that inspires my own pronoia, Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, a Blood Jump favorite just minutes from HQ, installed a new and state-of-the-art 3D projection system and ran a week-long film series to recoup costs and celebrate the occasion. I’m not equipped to speak productively to the specifics of the technology, but the system, called XPAND, utilizes active 3D—meaning the illusion springs from the glasses themselves, rather than the traditional, screen-based, “passive” 3D we’ve all grown to lament. That means no need for a silver screen, no blurry picture, no headaches. And, critically, it means the Music Box gets to bring the funhouse gimmicks of 3D projection to the arthouse.
So, in today’s issue of Blood Jump, we’re detailing three installments of the Music Box’s flagship 3D series, movies that indulge in the medium in pursuit of the novel, the metaphysical, and the inscrutable. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Long Day’s Journey into Night. Goodbye to Language. Let’s begin.
Actually, before we begin, it’s worth noting that the first high-definition 3D short came courtesy of Insane Clown Posse’s video for their song “Bowling Balls.” I did my damnedest to work that into the article but couldn’t find any placement organic or revenant enough to do this info justice. OK, now let’s begin.
Post No Gills
3D tech feels paradoxically modern and ancient; it only seems cutting edge (or baroque, depending on your vantage) until you really think about it. Depending on who you ask, still images capable of producing the illusion of 3D predate motion pictures entirely by about 50 years. A history of the medium by Little White Lies puts the first public screening of a 3D movie at New York City’s Astor Theatre in 1915, where patrons could gawk at three-dimensional renderings of test footage through stationary, stereoscopic viewing lenses. (Less reputable sources cite earlier dates with different films.) The first formal, wide-release 3D feature would come half a decade later with 1922’s The Power of Love, a movie, now lost to time, that audiences watched through anaglyph glasses—the red-and-blue (at the time, red-and-green) lenses that have come to define the medium, at least through iconography.
3D movies’ sway in the multiplex has swelled and ebbed since their inception. They saw a peak in popularity when, in the 1950s, polarized lenses reduced the chromatic and positional headaches that marred so many trips to the theater. Science center–adjacent IMAX screens and Disney 4D experiences helped elevate polarized lenses through the 90s to remain our generation’s most common 3D viewing experience; we’d snap on our rented goggles to dodge flying egg yolks and gawk at Miss Piggy, gobsmacked with pre-9/11 futurism’s unbridled optimism. Polarized lenses endure as a vanguard for 3D, but active projection methods—like those of the Music Box’s XPAND and the Dolby theaters that screened 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water—promise to shake off the silver-screen fatigue that have dulled our collective enthusiasm for the medium since 2013’s Gravity.
Despite a handful of speed boosts courtesy of updated tech since, 3D movies reached their zenith in the zeitgeist in the 1950s. Desperate to compete with a proliferation of TV sets in middle- and upper-class homes, studios tapped 3D—in tandem with emerging technologies like Cinemascope—to recapture an increasingly domestic America’s interest. Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil, a pro-colonizer lionsploitation flick that would set the course for trash-canon bangers like Roar and Beast, led the charge. Bwana Devil ushered in a new age for 3D and laid tile for classics like the Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax, the Hitchcock heavyweight Dial M for Murder, and director Jack Arnold’s deceptively tender and prescient Creature from the Black Lagoon.
If you haven’t seen it, you can probably guess what Creature from the Black Lagoon is about. A monster lives in the dark bogs of an uncanny valley; he shares man’s silhouette but is alien in every other way. Lured by a fossil of the creature’s ancestors, a team of scientists—some piously methodical (Richard Carlson and Julia Adams, played with tandem dreaminess), others drunk with bravado (Richard Drenning)—descend to the monster’s native Amazon. It is a hunt for knowledge for some, and plainly a hunt for others. Plagued by a handful of new and hostile foreign bodies in his orbit, the creature—canonical parlance calls him Gill-Man—becomes hostile himself. Black Lagoon is a story as promethean as any entry of the Universal Classic Monsters, a ribosome in the netting of a modern myth that weaves its way from John Carpenter and James Cameron to Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro.
As a showcase for 3D’s potential, Creature from the Black Lagoon is surprisingly modest. There is a smattering of well-placed pop-outs; Gill-Man’s webbed claws lurch out to grab viewers, Carlson shoots plumes of underwater poison at the camera. But even these moments feel restrained, especially among the shoulders of Lagoon’s contemporaries. (Music Box’s screening of Lagoon was preceded by the Three Stooges short Spooks, which takes every opportunity to prove that Shemp cannot be restrained to two dimensions.) Instead, Black Lagoon’s real technical marvel is its underwater sequences. Ricou Browning, who plays Gill-Man in the film’s sub–sea level scenes, is credited with directing the underwater footage with camera operator Scotty Welbourne. Browning glides through the water like rain across a windshield, and Welbourne’s footage is crystalline and effortless. Ben Chapman dons the Gill-Man suit on land, and his performance—a drunken toddler’s stilted waltz—is the photo negative of Browning’s piscine arrow. The two actors conjoin to comprise a creature only halfway evolved, trapped between man and nature, accepted by neither.
To watch Creature from the Black Lagoon in 2024 is to trace its influence across 70 years of filmmaking. Its aesthetic legacy is obvious: You see the Gill-Man in The Shape of Water, you see his shadow in Alien and The Abyss John Carpenter’s The Thing. But Black Lagoon endures most strongly in its refusal to allow its creature to fall squarely in our deepest fears or greatest sympathies. It is difficult to know whether to feel tender toward Gill-Man as he flees his pursuers or to recoil with terror when he climbs aboard their ship, to revere nature or to milk it for its worth. In the face of impossible paradox, we so often side with even the film’s more noble scientists: we absolve, we conquer, we do away with all things reversible.
Sound You Can Feel, Dreams You Can Touch
To market a movie like Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is to spoil its biggest swing, and if you’ve even heard of the movie, you likely already know what that is: the film’s final 59 minutes comprise a single, unbroken shot, filmed and presented in 3D. The story up until that sequence is opaque almost to the point of provocation. A man named Luo Hongwu mourns his friend, Wildcat, whom he lost to violence in childhood. Luo tracks down Wildcat’s killer through a woman named Wan. Wan convinces Luo to take revenge. Books of poetry give way to spells. Luo visits sex workers and movie theaters and chomps his way through at least two apples in real time. He takes revenge, or maybe he doesn’t. We see this all through disjointed fragments, stories of someone else’s memories. Then Luo dozes off and hatches a dream in a new dimension.
“The difference between a movie and a memory is that movies are always false,” Luo narrates in Long Day’s first half. “In a movie, one scene follows another. But memories mix truth and lies. They vanish before our eyes.” It feels dishonest, and a bit reductive, to accuse Bi Gan of trying to obfuscate the line between film and memory, or even to conflate the two. But his 2018 epic does reckon with both entities as two of our most commonplace libraries of personal and communal history, in all their wretched unreliability.
Long Day’s worships at the pulpit of Andrei Tarkovsky, offering prayers via direct homage and a general adherence to a glacially patient, nonlinear structure. That sort of approach is a natural fit for something like Tarkovsky’s Mirror, a metaphysical meditation on the weighty ghosts of a life devoted to art and spirituality in the shadow of war. In Long Day’s, the abandonment of traditional narrative trappings often feels more like a troll. The film trades heavily in noir, and while its methodology is unconventional, the whodunit of it all is bound to hook even disinterested viewers by the nose. It’s an effective bait-and-switch: Luo lays out Wildcat’s injustices as traditionally as anything in The Big Sleep… but then timelines obscure, new narratives are introduced, motives shift, focus tilts. The mystery can be traced, at least to a degree—The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw does an admirable job with his plot summary—but to do so might come at the expense of the film’s otherworldliness and the viewer’s sanity. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a mystery in the sense that David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice are mysteries; a sense of truth might be less easily found by solving a riddle than by submitting to the dream of it all.
And, in this instance, the dream is critical. Long Day’s is a 2D film for the better half of its runtime, until, waiting to meet a sex worker who may or may not offer another piece to the film’s puzzle, he enters a movie theater. He dons a pair of 3D glasses—a sly nod to the audience to do the same—before drifting off to sleep. Then, almost an hour-and-a-half into the film’s runtime, the title card appears, the few traded conventions are abandoned, and we’re plunged into Luo’s dream, a complete and planar remove of the visual currency we’d been struggling to internalize.
“After the first part (in 2D), I wanted the film to take on a different texture,” Bi Gan says in a promotional interview. “… I believe this three-dimensional feeling recalls that of our recollections of the past. Much more than 2D, anyway. 3D images are fake but they resemble our memories much more closely.” It’s a risky bet, but one that pays in spades. Long Day’s is unlikely to be anyone’s first experience with 3D, and Gan’s intention—to introduce a new texture rather than to capitalize on a sense of immersion—doesn’t concern itself with the novelty that incites a good majority of filmmakers and studios to lean on the technology. Luo’s dream is less a continuation of or codex to the film’s mystery than its hazy complement. Details reemerge, characters warp, ideas flicker back into frame; to a degree, the recontextualization provides a better sense of some of the story’s more slippery nuances, but neither Luo nor the viewer can expect to wake up with a litany of answers. Instead, the plunge into the new, three-dimensional texture speaks to the movie’s more important questions: to the tethers and divides between memory and recorded history, to the ways each will fail us in ways we cannot predict.
Dog Days of Post-Cinema
Creature from the Black Lagoon and Long Day’s Journey into Night were two of three movies I watched via the Music Box’s 3D mini-fest. The third was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, a brilliant (if befuddling) late entry into the French titan’s monumental body of work. I’d planned to write more extensively on Goodbye to Language in this issue, but I’m woefully ill-equipped to speak on Godard: this is only the second title in his filmography I’ve seen, after the 1960 nu-wave classic Breathless. As my best bud Austin pointed out, that’s sort of like trying to write about Bob Dylan’s career having only heard “Maggie’s Farm” and “Murder Most Foul.”
Goodbye to Language is a collection of heady, philosophical conversations shot (presumably, possibly) from the perspective of at least one dog. It’s difficult to find a popular analog for something so singular, but Richard Linklater’s Waking Life might be a helpful touchstone; if Waking Life is a good fit for passing a bong back and forth on a college quad, then Goodbye to Language is akin to entering a k-hole with Jacques Lacan. Formally, it feels untrue to compare Goodbye to any feature film—it trades in a language closer to video art, a collage of footage shot on Canon 5D and Flip Minos cameras. In that sense, Godard—a video artist in his own right—owes more of Goodbye to the influence of someone like Ryan Trecartin than to Ernest Lubitsch.
And, of course, Goodbye to Language is a movie presented in 3D. Unlike Creature from the Black Lagoon and Long Day’s Journey, though, it’s difficult to point to the methodology here with any concision—even when you turn toward an artist statement. “Maybe I’ll even shoot my next film in 3-D,” Godard said. “I always like it when new techniques are introduced. Because it doesn’t have any rules yet. And one can do everything.” There are no rules, and he does do everything. Even for a notoriously experimental filmmaker, Godard breaks the mold here; he uses double exposures and parallax views that, projected in 3D, can be utterly disorienting and often dizzying. Somehow, it works. Much of the conversation presented in Goodbye to Language reckons with our relationship to the physical body, the ways our mortality and materiality limit and inspire and form the shape of our philosophies and the ways in which we communicate. The materiality lent by 3D projection isn’t quite utilitarian in that respect, but it deftly commands attention toward the shape of bodies and objects and the new shapes that form when those bodies and objects collide. If that choice takes a headache or two as collateral, then so be it.
I wish I could speak more to Goodbye to Language’s place in Godard’s work and the arc of an unparalleled career. Absent of that, it’s nothing short of awesome to see the same passions and curiosities and innovations burn as brightly within a new digital landscape as they did while pioneering the French nu wave. A new filmography to discover and love! Sometimes life can be so sweet.
Sample Draws
I’m extremely late to the party here, but I was so enamored by a recent watch of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. So much has been made about the tenuous future of cinema, and for good reason, but movies like this feel like an unabashed win for the longevity of the medium. Jane Schoenbrun has the goods.
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is admirably ambitious but the kind of movie I wish would have taken a beat and left about forty minutes on the cutting-room floor. Léa Seydoux is as great as you’d expect her to be; I’m not sure that George Mackay has much juice when he’s not playing Porky Pig in World War 1.
I’m going away to hang with my film club for a weekend, and as is becoming an informal tradition for the occasion, I rewatched Michael Mann’s Miami Vice—this time, on the big screen. It remains an undersung and postmodern masterpiece. God bless Mann for shooting Jamie Foxx in low fidelity digital.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next installment.