A History of Three-Dimensional Cinema

A History of Three-Dimensional Cinema chronicles 3-D cinema as a single, continuous and coherent medium, proceeding from 19th-century experiments in stereoscopic photography and lantern projection (1839-1892) to stereoscopic cinema’s long novelty period (1893-1952). It proceeds to examine the first Hollywood boom in anaglyphic stereo (1953-1955), when the mainstream industry produced 69 features in 3-D, mostly action films that could exploit the depth illusion, but also a handful of big-budget films-for example, Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)-until audiences tired of the process; the anaglyphic revival of 1970-1985, when 3-D was sustained as a novelty feature in sensational genres like soft-core pornography and horror; the age of IMAX 3-D (1986-2008); the current era of digital 3-D cinema, which began in 2009 when James Cameron’s Avatar became the highest-grossing feature of all time and the studios once again stampeded into 3-D production; and finally the future promise of Virtual Reality.