Watch out for that snake! A new TIFF series celebrates the giddy fun and heady experimentation of 3D movies

When James Cameron’s “Avatar” premiered in late 2009, it ushered in a new era of 3D films. Using digital technology, its immersive stereoscopic imagery wowed audiences, many of whom could only vaguely recall the last time 3D movies were a fad in the 1980s. But 3D cinema has existed far longer than that, and a new retrospective at TIFF Cinematheque aims to unearth its rich history for modern moviegoers.
“Dimensional Excursions: A Century of Innovation in 3D Cinema” kicks off at the TIFF Lightbox on Saturday by bridging that long history with a screening of Martin Scorsese’s lone 3D film, 2011’s Oscar-nominated “Hugo.” The film, set in 1930s Paris, is steeped in cinema lore and the fantastical worlds of French silent filmmaker Georges Méliès. Preceding “Hugo,” the most recent film in the series, is its oldest, the 1934 short “L’Arrivée d’un train 3D,” a stereoscopic remake of the iconic “The Arrival of a Train,” the film that famously (and perhaps apocryphally) spurred audiences to jump out of their seats at the sight of the oncoming locomotive.
For series programmer Blake Williams, a Toronto-based experimental filmmaker, 3D cinema is much more than just a fad, though the way the format’s popularity ebbs and flows is a part of its charm.
“People talk about the immersive qualities of 3D, but I always think of it as having the opposite effect, where you’re always reminded of your body. You’re reminded of the fact that you’re in a cinema, watching cinema,” Williams says. “You always have something on your face, the glasses, and so the cinema apparatus never really disappears when you’re watching a 3D movie.”
Unlike other technical innovations, like colour, sound, or widescreen, which began as novelties but quickly became the norm, the inherent hassles of 3D — such as wearing 3D glasses over prescription eyewear — have consistently kept it from becoming standardized. “That’s why it always appears and then disappears quite quickly,” Williams explains. Indeed, 3D maintains an association with gimmickry, with objects popping out at the audience.
That’s one of the appeals for Williams, whose own shorts “Red Capriccio” (utilizing found footage) and “Laberint Sequences” (set in a garden maze), are also included in the series. “It’s also part of the reason why most of the applications of it are always so playful and even juvenile in a certain sense,” he says. “I wanted to accentuate the presence of those qualities of 3D in the series.”
To that end, while the series indulges in its share of experimental work, like the abstract, animated 2017 feature “Ulysses in the Subway,” Williams has also included the goofy ’80s Indiana Jones knock-off “Treasure of the Four Crowns” — in which spears, boulders and snakes regularly appear to fly out of the screen — and 2010’s utterly anarchic “Jackass 3D,” with its bevy of gross-out stunts. The notorious Andy Warhol-sanctioned “Flesh for Frankenstein,” from 1973, thrusts viscera and terrible acting into the auditorium with a knowing wink. There’s also the 1961 Canadian surrealist-horror classic “The Mask,” featuring 14 minutes of psychedelic 3D footage.
Despite 3D’s reputation for gimmickry, many modern films released in 3D are not shot in the format, but instead digitally converted in post-production. It’s a process that Williams believes mostly killed the wider interest in 3D in the years following the post-“Avatar” 3D boom. “The 3D in those films is very conservative and very minimal. You end up paying a premium, and within 10 minutes you sort of forget that you’re watching a 3D movie,” he says. “You always sort of feel duped by it.”
“Treasure of the Four Crowns” is one film that Williams is most excited to be screening precisely because its use of 3D is anything but conservative. “If you go to IMDb or Letterboxd and look at user ratings, most people think it’s garbage,” he says. “Most of those people watch the movie flat, and I would 100 per cent agree with anyone who watches that movie flat that it’s really not worth your time. But watching it 3D, it’s like it revitalizes every single shot.”
The experimental work in the series isn’t any less playful, either. Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed feature “Adieu au langage” includes its share of scatological gags, and messes around wildly with the stereoscopic format. For its most famous effect, the director abandons 3D altogether, presenting entirely different images for each eye, practically begging audience members to engage directly by closing one eye at a time to take in the footage.
One big problem for 3D is access. Fifteen years after “Avatar,” 3D TVs are no longer being produced, and except for virtual reality devices like the Apple Vision Pro and select home theatre projectors, cinemas are the only place most people can view 3D films in their intended format. Williams’ program offers a unique opportunity to see some films that have never been made available in 3D outside of theatres.
Programming shorts to accompany many of the features allows Williams to showcase as many styles and formats of 3D capture and presentation as possible. The tour through nearly 100 years of 3D cinema puts on display the many technological developments, from the bulky two-camera system used for 1953’s “House of Wax” to the single-camera, split-lens system of “Flesh for Frankenstein,” all the way to the digital 3D of the modern era.
For Williams, the goal of the TIFF series is to introduce, or reintroduce, audiences to 3D in a new way, focusing on the unique imagery the format can create. Though 3D may have accrued a bad reputation over time, Williams hopes the series can show that the format “is not just a supplement to a certain type of filmgoing, but its own esthetic thing, with its own tool box.”