Technology

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Technology

EARLY MOTION PICTURES
COLOR AND SOUND
THE TELEVISION AGE
THE DIGITAL AGE
FURTHER READING

Ever since the invention of motion pictures, movie industries around the world have counted on a stream of technological developments to maximize production processes, increase profits, and entice audiences. Yet the history of film technology, spanning a little over one century, is a finite one, more subtle and incremental than one might assume. Indeed, the basics of film production went largely unchanged for a good part of the last century. Other than several watershed innovations that required systemic overhauls, such as synchronized sound, wide-screen formats, and color processes, most technological innovations were small by comparison, affecting the final product in ways that were often not noticeable to most viewers.

Only recently, in the past few decades, has the industry begun to explore new alternatives to conventional film stock, editing techniques, and the basic motion picture camera. One explanation is the uniqueness of the movies as a manufactured product. Unlike other technology products, such as automobiles, television sets, and appliances, the movies are neither tangible nor utilized in any conventional way by consumers. The product is less material than it is imagistic, something to be recounted and remembered rather than owned and handled. In the case of television, however, consumers do more than watch it. They own, display, and control the machine, which explains, in part, the medium's dramatic technological changes (remote control, cable, Tivo, flat-screen, and VHS/DVD). Movie formats have undergone dramatic changes as well, of course, but on the whole they have been more sporadic and aimed at attracting moviegoers during box-office slumps. Another, more compelling reason for the relative constancy of motion picture technology has been a reluctance on the part of movie industries—and especially the eight major and minor studios of classical Hollywood—to make systemic changes requiring costly, comprehensive overhauls of the industry. Nonetheless, and sometimes against its will, the moviemaking industries around the world have adopted new technologies in response to audience interests, economic imperatives, societal shifts, and aesthetic trends.

EARLY MOTION PICTURES

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing throughout the century, series photography generated early interest in the possibilities of motion pictures. Inventors and entrepreneurs quickly recognized the entertainment value of simulating the movement of photographs, such that by the middle of the nineteenth century a variety of peephole toys and coin machines were appearing in arcade parlors throughout the United States and Europe. These pre-cinematic mechanisms were crucial in the technological leap from still photography to motion pictures projected on big screens for paying audiences. One of the earliest toys was the Zoetrope, a handheld spinning wheel with a series of photographs on the inside, visible to the viewer by thin slits along the top. The Mutoscope, a coin machine found in arcades, enabled viewers to see a series of photo cards flip by at the turn of a crank.

These early peephole toys and experiments with sequence photography indicate that the premise of the movies—that is, a sequential series of pictures on cards or film passed by the eye fast enough to suggest continuous movement—was well in place before the first motion pictures were made and projected onto a screen. Three critical components, however, were missing: light-sensitive and fast film rolls that could travel through a camera and capture the action sequentially on frames; a camera that would record this action; and a projector that could run the film at such a pace and with enough light to throw the images, in seeming motion, onto a large screen.

In 1882 Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), a French physiologist, invented the "chronophotographic gun" to record animal locomotion. The camera initially captured images on glass plates, but Marey soon switched to an easier, more manipulable format, paper film, thus introducing the film strip to cinematography and setting the stage for further developments. Indeed, only a few years later, in 1887, an Episcopalian minister from New Jersey, Hannibal Goodwin (1822–1900), developed the first celluloid roll film as a base for light-sensitive emulsions. Goodwin's success with celluloid film rolls was particularly significant because it made possible motion picture cameras and projection. George Eastman (1854–1932) soon thereafter adapted Goodwin's roll film, patented it, and made it the industry standard by 1890. Eastman Kodak issued this same basic stock, in rolls of two hundred feet, all the while making technical innovations to improve its quality. Eastman and his laboratories made it the most dependable film stock, and by 1910 studios and filmmakers from around the world were using it.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), inventor and entrepreneur, was in many ways an unlikely but important figure in the history of movie technology. Long before the first talkies, Edison was arguably the first to envision motion pictures as a marriage of image and sound. Before his company patented motion picture cameras—among other technologies vital to producing and projecting movies—he invented the phonograph, for which he always dreamed of producing visual accompaniment. Toward this end, he sought to invent a camera that would shoot a series of images onto a strip of film that, when projected at a certain speed, would convey a continuous sequence resembling live action. In 1883 he hired the young William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860–1935), who would greatly aid him in this quest. By 1895, Dickson ran Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory. After working on this project for a number of years, Dickson invented the first motion picture camera in 1891.

Borrowing from several earlier mechanisms, including time watch engineering and Marey's chronophotographic gun, Dickson came up with an instrument called the Kinetograph. What distinguished this new camera from other devices of the same period were two crucial additions, both of which remained defining attributes of motion picture cameras and projection throughout the twentieth century. First, it made use of a stop-motion device to regulate the intermittent motion of the film strip through the camera at various rates of frames per second (typically, 16 fps during the silent era and 24 fps for talking pictures). This allowed for the unexposed film strip to pause for a fraction of a second, during which time the shutter briefly opened long enough to sufficiently expose the film to a beam of light. Second, Dickson added sprocket holes on one side of the celluloid film strip, which could then be pulled through the machine by teethed gears. As Dickson carefully notes in his History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph, originally published in 1895, these perforations allowed for the locking device to keep the film in place for nine-tenths of a second, as the shutter opens and admits a beam of light long enough to expose the film.

The Kinetograph shot short films in 50-foot installments (typically less than 30 seconds), which could then be viewed in the Kinetoscope, a battery-powered coin machine—one of the last of its kind before motion picture exhibition became geared toward collective audiences—also designed by Edison's company. Unlike later projectors, this one operated at over 40 frames per second, nearly three times faster than what would become the standard rate. Soon entire parlor halls were filled with Kinetoscopes, drawing in customers who individually watched a number of short movies. Using the Kinetograph, Dickson shot thousands of short films in what was the first motion-picture studio, "the Black Maria," a barnlike structure with a sliding roof that allowed sunlight to enter and illuminate the subjects being shot. Since the camera was large and immobile, the "action" needed to be brought before it. The shorts were thus one-shot, one-scene "movies."

In spite of its unwieldy size and relatively primitive mechanics, the Kinetograph influenced nearly every motion picture camera made since, but especially those that followed in the decade after. Like their predecessor, these cameras were typically made of wood, sat on a box or tripod, had a hand crank for shooting and projecting, and came with sprockets that drove the film through the machine. In Europe several important early filmmakers and inventors adapted the Kinetograph to fit their own needs, which included more versatile, mobile filmmaking as well as projection. The French Lumière brothers, Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis (1864–1948), invented the Cinématographe in 1895, a remarkable machine that was camera, printer, and projector all in one device. The Lumières became famous for shooting their popular actualités, short, single-shot films of locations and scenarios, such as oncoming trains, people kissing, and distant lands. Unlike the Kinetograph, the Cinématographe was light and more easily transportable, able to capture city scenes and "exotic" locales at a time when few were able to travel the world.

With the rapid growth of camera technology came attendant developments in projection. Many early cameras were also used as projectors, whereby an arc-light source would be attached to the back, which could be opened for projection purposes. Arc lights were a popular and powerful source of illumination for early theater and photographic portraiture, and were later used for motion picture production at a time when less sensitive film stocks required powerful lighting for full exposure. As early as 1888, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842–c.1890), working in England, rivaled Dickson and his Kinetograph by patenting a motion picture camera-projector that used perforated film and intermittent stop-go motion. (Prince might have become more than a footnote in the early history of motion pictures had he and his machinery not disappeared without a trace in 1890.)

Several problems with early projection engineering needed solving, however. First, there was the matter of precisely regulating the film roll's intermittent but consistent movement through the machine, such that each frame would travel between the projection lamp and the open shutter for the same duration and at the correct pace for proper projection. German film pioneer Oskar Messter (1866–1943) developed the Maltese-cross system—still used today in most projectors—to ensure regular "stop-and-go" motion (Cook, p. 9). This gear, in the shape of a Maltese cross, sits atop the sprocket wheel that pulls the film through the projector. A pin on the edge of the wheel briefly locks with the gear, such that the film is momentarily (and repeatedly) paused and then released.

The second predicament with early projection was figuring out a method to prevent the film from tearing under the pressure of hundreds of feet of film spinning and intermittently tugging at the single strip between the reels (this pressure builds to a critical mass typically when the film is longer than 100 feet, equivalent to over a minute in duration). The solution came in 1896 with the invention of the Latham loop, an extra loop in the film's path through the projector that absorbed the tension and facilitated the showing of longer films. Although filmmakers may not have taken advantage of this new-found possibility until 1899, when longer films were introduced, exhibitors and studios did so by splicing shorter films together to make longer programs. In 1889 Edison's company and others around the world were taking patents out on projectors, and less than a decade later, on 23 April 1896, New York City was home to the first public projection of a motion picture in the United States. Both European and American audiences were quick to embrace the new entertainment, flocking to theaters and then reading about it the next day in their local newspapers.

There were many key players behind the initial technological developments of motion pictures. Yet few of these inventors were collaborating or even envisioning a common goal; even fewer foresaw the potential for movies to tell stories, create international celebrities, and entertain large audiences collectively gathered before one large screen. Eventually, however, technological advancements coalesced to match the period's fascination with mechanized movement. Together they soon offered up the possibility of the movies as an entertainment form and a highly profitable industry.

COLOR AND SOUND

Long before Technicolor revolutionized the look of movies, color appeared in movies through a number of different methods. One of the first narrative movie directors, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), known for his early special effects and camera trickery, used color on occasion to accentuate spectacle, such as bursts of yellow flame and the like. In order to achieve this effect, he had individual frames hand-painted, a laborious and expensive practice. Tinting and toning were more popular, if only because the process was easier and cheaper, though admittedly less dramatic in effect. Tinting involved dyeing the entire emulsion in one color, so that shots of sky or twilight would appear blue and fire scenes red, for instance. Toning, on the other hand, was the chemical coloring of the silver portions of the image, which changed the normally black areas of the frame into colored ones. Early directors such as England's Robert William Paul (1869–1943) and James Williamson (1855–1933) made extensive use of both techniques, which would continue in popularity throughout the nickelodeon era and beyond.

In 1908 Charles Urban (1871–1942), an American businessman and motion picture enthusiast, patented the first functional color film process, called Kinemacolor. Unlike later color processes that would become the standard, this one was a two-strip additive system. In an additive color process, the camera produced two pairs of red and green exposures simultaneously, thus requiring superimposition in the projection of the final product (Cook, p. 254). Urban and his partners quickly began making films with Kinemacolor in several countries, including England and the United States. It was mainly used on shorter films, which kept the budget down, but by the early teens it was appearing in longer features as well. Because of patent litigation and technical problems with the process, Kinemacolor disappeared several years later. Additive color methods were generally short-lived because they required faster shooting, more illumination and film stock, and tricky equipment for projecting in superimposition, which the exhibitors resisted. In spite of its brief run, Kinemacolor was very popular in its time and established the foundation for future color processes, including Technicolor.

The next legitimate color process was developed by Technicolor in the 1920s. Herbert T. Kalmus (1881–1963), Daniel F. Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott had started the firm in 1915. Like Urban and others from this period, they began with an additive process, but once that failed, Kalmus sought to invent a subtractive process that would allow the colors to print on positive stocks and thus eliminate the superimposition of negatives. In 1922 Technicolor patented the first such color process, but the high cost made it untenable for most studios. A few years later, as talkies were emerging, Technicolor was using a two-strip subtractive process that attracted the studios' attention. Warner Bros., the most adventurous of the five major studios, was one of several companies to try it out on a limited basis. After several years into the Depression, however, the high cost again proved prohibitive for studios. Making it even less attractive were deficiencies inherent in a two-strip process, namely the lack of color range in the product (it had been proven in the nineteenth century that the full color spectrum could be achieved with combinations of only three primary colors: red, green, and blue).

In 1932 Technicolor came back with a three-strip method that included a "three-color beamsplitter and a third strip of film, so that each matrix—red, blue, green—had its own separation negative" (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, p. 353). With the aid of a mirror and prisms, the image was rendered simultaneously onto three different emulsion film strips. One strip, sensitive to green, was placed behind the lens, while the other two—one sensitive to blue and the other to red—were back to back on a separate track and at a 90-degree angle from the first. Because the light was split by the prism and mirror, so that all three strips could register the image, shooting in three-strip Technicolor required a great deal more lighting on the set. Yet the result was a fuller, richer spectrum of colors on film, as is evident in the films that featured it, including Disney's animated Three Little Pigs (1933) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), as well as Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

With each year, Technicolor improved its color process, which became faster and finer-grained, offering richer colors. The process still had its drawbacks, however, namely its high cost. Shooting a film in Technicolor could add in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to individual film budgets, so studios were not ready to make most or even a quarter of their productions in color. In addition to the need for more lighting, the three-strip Mitchell cameras, owned and leased by Technicolor, were expensive, large, and heavy, making for difficult on-location shooting. The lack of competition at this time also made Technicolor more in demand and thus pricier. Further increasing the price tag, the company often required that studios rent one of its trained cinematographers. As director Alfred Hitchcock learned during the production of his first color film, Rope (1948), this was not necessarily a bad thing. A notorious perfectionist, Hitchcock was disappointed with the sunset sky's red-orange colors, which he felt smacked of a "cheap postcard." He brought in a Technicolor camera technician to reshoot the last five ten-minute takes of Rope. As this story suggests, filmmakers (not merely directors and cinematographers, but also costume designers, art directors, and set designers, and makeup artists), long accustomed to black-and-white aesthetics, underwent a necessary period of adjustment. Three-strip Technicolor remained the best and only color film method until it was updated and made obsolete in the 1950s, when single-strip color processes would emerge and television would provide legitimate competition. Only thereafter would the industry's conversion to color be nearly absolute.

Just as the idea of movies in color had its roots in the earliest recorded history of the motion pictures, so too did the notion that movies could and should talk to us. Indeed, as long as motion pictures have been projected, they have rarely been without sound and even synchronized sound, in rhythm with the images on screen. During the silent era, live organists, pianists, and symphonic orchestras accompanied the projection of movies in theaters both big and small. On occasion, live actors would stand behind the screen to speak the lines. In other countries, such as Japan, a narrator (benshi) would sometimes provide commentary on the action. By the mid-1920s, however, advancements in recording and audio technology ushered in the era of "talkies."

At first, synchronized sound systems were often on-disc, meaning that the film's audio (lines, foley sounds, and/or score) would be recorded onto a recordlike disc. Then, as the film projected, a disc player would play the audio in synchronization with the images on screen. In the United States, Vitaphone successfully used this process in the years after World War I. This method was flawed, however, and was often unsatisfying for viewers because the synchronization of sound and image was tenuous, easily disrupted. Across the Atlantic, German engineers concomitantly developed a means of recording the soundtrack directly onto the film, such that sound and image were truly wed during projection. This method, which was called the Tri-Ergon Process, converted sound into light beams, which were first recorded onto the film strip and then reconverted to sound in the projection process. In the early 1920s, Dr. Lee De Forest (1873–1961) was promoting a similar sound-on-film method in the United States. What gave De Forest the advantage over his counterparts was his ability to make sound audible to an entire audience with the aid of his patented Audion vacuum tubes, which were able to amplify sound coming out of a speaker without the usual distortion of the time.

In spite of these early sound-on-film innovations, the first talkies in Hollywood used a sound-on-disc system contracted by Vitaphone (owned by Western Electric). The major studios of the time, including Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), were not willing to take the risk on what would require such a costly overhaul of production and exhibition equipment. However, Warner Bros., a small but growing studio, anxious to compete with the major studios that threatened to squeeze out smaller competition, gambled by purchasing exclusive rights to Vitaphone in 1926. Warner Bros. started by making a program of talkie shorts before producing two features, Don Juan (1926) and The Jazz Singer (1927), both directed by Alan Crosland. Don Juan featured merely a scored soundtrack, so it still resembled a silent film. Like many films of this transitional period, The Jazz Singer was part silent and part talkie; it included several scenes with players speaking, but it otherwise used a prerecorded on-disc music score. Warner's gamble paid off handsomely nonetheless: the films did very well at the box office and only encouraged Warner Bros.—and the rest of Hollywood—to continue in the direction of talkies.

By 1929, most of Hollywood had made the conversion to talkies, implementing sound-on-film systems that allowed for the mechanical synchronization of image and sound. Much of Europe followed in the year or two after. Problems abounded during this initial phase of talkies for several reasons. Since the cameras of this era were so loud, they needed to be encased during shooting so that the sensitive microphones on the set would not pick up their audible hum. This made for a rather static kind of cinema, particularly in light of the precedents set by the highly mobile camera work of silent film masters such as F. W. Murnau (1888–1931) and Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968). Arc lights, which had become standard by this time, also were loud enough to be picked up by the microphones. Hollywood switched soon thereafter to tungsten light sources, which, according to film historian Barry Salt, did not overly change the look of the films. In addition, the industry struggled at first with dialogue, which often came off as forced, unrealistic, and clichéd. Lastly, the industry discovered quickly that not all of its best silent stars were able to make the transition to the age of sound.

As several noted film historians have suggested, however, these growing pains were relatively few and short-lived for such an extensive industry-wide conversion. The industry solved most of these problems in time with developments in audio and recording technology. For instance, before long studios were using multiple audio tracks on films, looping in dialogue, music scores, and foley sounds during postproduction. Quieter cameras and more directional microphones also freed up the camera and increased the quality of sound. By the early 1930s, only a few years since the inception of the conversion to talkies, directors such as Fritz Lang (M, 1931), Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), and Hitchcock (Blackmail, 1929) were using sound and dialogue in complex ways, proving Soviet film theorist-director Sergei Eisenstein's (1898–1948) assertion that synchronized sound could be employed as audio montage and/or counterpoint. With the conversion to sound, purists throughout the world proclaimed that the advent of talkies would be the death knell of cinema as they knew it, a singularly visual art. It was not long before film industries and individual filmmakers silenced these critics.

THE TELEVISION AGE

In the Cold War era of communist witch hunts and blacklisting, Hollywood executives had even more pressing worries: the imminent death of the studio system and the meteoric rise of television, which subsequently led to a drastic decline in ticket sales. To combat the drop in profits, the studios quickly sought to attract moviegoers—particularly families—from the living room by enhancing and exploiting their medium's technological advantages, namely its relatively large image size and its color format. Not coincidentally, the 1950s were the first decade of drive-in movie theaters, stereo sound, wide-screen formats, epics shot in glossy color, and a full gamut of movie ballyhoo such as 3-D film technology.

Beginning in 1952, Hollywood began to make the conversion to color production. As with other sectors of the movie industry, the government deemed Technicolor (and particularly its three-strip technology) a monopoly in 1950. That same year Eastmancolor, a single-strip format based on Germany's Agfacolor, emerged as a legitimate and cheaper means of shooting in color. Unlike the earlier three-strip processes, Eastmancolor (and other processes similar to it) fused the three emulsion strips into a single roll, soon eclipsing the competition and replacing Technicolor as the most widely used color process in the industry. Whereas in the 1940s less than a quarter of Hollywood features were shot in color, by the 1950s more than half were; by the 1970s, the conversion was nearly complete. Barring student productions and the occasional "art" film intentionally shot in black and white, movies made since the 1970s have been exclusively shot in color.

To complement the great rise in color production, and to increase its drawing power as spectacle entertainment on a grander scale than television, Hollywood sought to widen the aspect ratio of the motion picture image. Up until the early 1950s, the standard (or Academy) aspect ratio of motion pictures was nearly square, 1.33:1. Since the television screen adopted this same format, Hollywood had even more incentive to increase its screen image. The first such widescreen optical process, Cinerama, appeared in 1952. It was a multiple-camera and multiple-projector system that showed films on a curved screen, adding depth and spectacle to the experience of movie spectatorship. (The equivalent format for today's spectators is IMAX, a two-projector system that shows movies—many shot in 3-D—on a giant screen not only wider but also taller than typical widescreen formats.) The projected image was as much as three times the standard aspect ratio of a 35mm movie image. As with most early processes, however, this one proved too expensive and burdensome both for those shooting and projecting the picture. A small number of motion pictures were shot in this format, among them How the West Was Won (1962).

In 1954 CinemaScope emerged as the most popular widescreen format in Hollywood and other parts of the world. It was one of several optical formats that used anamorphic lenses, which allowed for a 2:1 image to be compressed onto a 35mm lens and then converted to its natural dimensions in projection. In time, CinemaScope offered movies in a 2.35:1 format, which greatly widened the image seen by viewers. Not surprisingly, CinemaScope was used for epics, westerns, and other genres that were best suited for landscape shots, action scenes, and general spectacle. CinemaScope became extremely popular with audiences, who were drawn to the heightened experience of movie watching, and with the studios, which liked its cheap price tag and ease of use.

A number of widescreen variations became available during the 1950s and 1960s. Directors such as John Ford (The Searchers, 1956) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958; and North by Northwest, 1959), for instance, famously used Paramount's Vista Vision. Some filmmakers preferred Vista Vision because it produced an unusually sharp image for widescreen formats, but it also used twice as much negative film stock as conventional shooting. By the 1960s Panavision gradually replaced CinemaScope as the standard format for widescreen cinematography. Non-anamorphic widescreen processes as well, such as 70mm, were used for popular films such as Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965).

In addition to changing the way moviegoers watched movies, widescreen cinema altered the way cinematographers approached shooting them as well. For many directors, there was more incentive to shoot long takes and to reduce the number of cuts. Yet the average length of shots in widescreen productions was only minimally longer than those in films shot in Academy ratio. The majority of filmmakers and cinematographers shooting in widescreen sought to take advantage of the extra width by lining up all the characters that could possibly fit in the frame and by adding more material to the mise-en-scène. Others, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Hitchcock, employed their own distinctive cinematic styles when using the new format. In Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), for instance, Godard seems to defy the film's width, establishing off-screen space while using only a fraction of the frame, and panning, rather than merely fixing upon, landscapes. For Godard the widescreen provided a means for compositional counterpoint. Hitchcock, in a different vein, remained true to his commitment to the principles of montage and thus cut even his widescreen films in ways that were not typical for this period. His great attention to composition, color, setting, and blocking are also on display in his later films, many of them shot using the VistaVision format.

Emulating a pattern in movie technology, stereoscopic (popularly known as "3-D") formats were introduced at an early stage in the history of motion pictures. In 1903 the Lumière brothers were the first to publicly screen a stereoscopic picture, L'arrivee du train (The Train's Arrival). The process was labor-intensive and highly expensive, however, making it largely unpopular. The increase in move lengths, due in large part to the rise of narrative and the star system beginning in the early teens, only exacerbated its high cost and unpopularity. Applying the anaglyphic system, stereoscopic productions required twice as much film stock, as shooting in 3-D necessitated using a twin-camera method that shot the same footage on two different reels, one tinted in red and the other in blue. Once processed, the film strips would be projected together for an audience wearing special glasses that had one red-filtered lens and one blue-filtered lens. Anaglyphic 3-D did not disappear, though, appearing in several European and US productions throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

By the early 1950s, Hollywood was desperate enough to overlook the format's imperfections in favor of its shock value. Several innovations ameliorated the process, as well, further explaining its enormous popularity during this period. A polarized version of the 3-D process increased precision, while simultaneously enhancing the viewing experience. Natural Vision, for instance, first introduced in 1952, fixed the dual cameras in a way that approximated the distance between the human eyes. This made for a more realistic sense of depth than earlier, less precise 3-D formats. Stereoscopic production and exhibition boomed for two years (1953 through 1954), appearing most often in adventure, science fiction, and horror movies, helping to give 3-D an aura of kitsch. Among over fifty titles shot in 3-D, its most famous include Universal's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and House of Wax (1953). Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) and the only musical using the format, Kiss Me Kate (1953), were both shot in 3-D but were screened "flat" due to the sudden decline of the stereoscopic fad at the time.

Although the 3-D craze faded less than two years after its boom in the 1950s, stereoscopic filmmaking practices have reemerged time and again, suggesting their allure across generations. They returned in the 1960s, for instance, when a string of pornographic and X-rated 3-D films enjoyed great box office success. More recently, 3-D has made a comeback in the digital age of filmmaking.

THE DIGITAL AGE

A renewed interest in film realism influenced motion picture technology during and after World War II. In order to afford greater versatility and mobility, filmmakers took to using smaller cameras that could shoot on location without tripods or heavy equipment. Shortly after World War II, director Morris Engel (1918–2005), whose low-budget films shot in New York City would later influence John Cassavetes, helped Charlie Woodruff construct a portable 35mm camera that prefigured the Steadicam. By the middle of the 1950s, cinematographer Richard Leacock (b. 1921) and sound recording specialist D. A. Pennebraker (b. 1925) innovated a portable 16mm synchronized-sound camera that rested on the operator's shoulder. These light and highly mobile sync-sound cameras were instrumental in renewing a movement in documentary filmmaking during the 1960s. Filmmakers such as Shirley Clark, Robert Drew, and Frederick Wiseman helped popularize the 16mm cameras, which were famously used in productions such as Primary (1960) and High School (1968). Thanks to new developments in film technology, and inspired by new waves of filmmaking around the world, including Italian neorealism and cinéma vérité, handheld cinematography became not only feasible but also popular in both documentary and narrative movie production.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Steadicam offered a new means of shooting handheld while maintaining steadiness of image. The Steadicam is a mount that stabilizes the camera by isolating it from all but the cinematographer's largest movements. In addition to absorbing shocks from movement, the mount also continually keeps the camera at its center of gravity. The Steadicam enabled filmmakers to shoot in tight spaces and accomplish difficult shots (such as circulars, extensive pans, and crowd scenes), while providing a degree of steadiness previously attained only by dolly shots or zooms. More recently, Hi-8 cameras, camcorders, and digital cameras have increased personal (and occasionally professional) handheld filmmaking practices. Director Martin Scorsese and his cinematographer Michael Chapman used the Steadicam quite effectively in a famous sequence in Raging Bull (1980), in which the camera follows Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) as he winds through a throng of fans and reporters on his way to the boxing ring.

Computer- and digital-based filmmaking technologies have picked up where the Steadicam left off, allowing for even greater portability and image steadiness. In addition, these new technologies are able to heighten special effects, intermix digital or virtual domains with live action, convey scale, and reduce the labor necessary in setting up difficult shots and constructing complex settings. Indeed, the new age of cinema signals the end of perforated film strips, 35mm cameras, and editing methods that have remained largely the same since motion pictures were born. While many of these changes are yet to be standardized and institutionalized, the technology has been around in some form since the early 1980s.

Disney's Tron (1982) was the first movie to include high-resolution digital imagery, but it did so sparingly. Several years later, in 1989, James Cameron took the technology to a new level, intermixing live action and computer graphics in The Abyss. Cameron proved that computer-generated imagery (CGI) could add complex yet realistic special effects while remaining cost-effective (Cook, p. 955). Cameron's success invited further experimentation with digital technologies. Since the early 1990s, many productions have implemented CGI in some form. Robert Zemeckis, in Forrest Gump (1994), blended virtual history (past US presidents, for instance) with live action. Cameron created digital replicas of Miami as background in True Lies (1994). In Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace (1999), George Lucas's crew shot every scene with computer-generated technology, simulating entire battle sequences with digitally designed extras multiplied to fill the screen. These effects are especially suitable for action-adventure films, of course, but they are being increasingly used across genres to reduce costs and save labor time.

Like previous phases of film technology, the digital age of cinema has had to weigh the advantages of spectacle with more practical matters of efficiency, economy, and realism. Digital technology has also resurrected stereoscopic filmmaking. After the success of IMAX 3-D in the 1990s, James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), a documentary on the Titanic, and Steven Spielberg's digitally animated The Polar Express (2004) both played on IMAX's giant screens. Directors Lucas and Cameron have also explored a new 3-D process in which technicians can render flat films stereoscopic using digital means. This conversion process would be applicable not only to newly made films but also to reissues of previously released movies. The technology is in place for both the conversion and projection of digital 3-D, but theaters will need first to make the conversion to digital projection, which will be the next costly—but perhaps inevitable—overhaul.