3-D Cinema and Trauma by Dor Fadlon

Author:Dor Fadlon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031128219
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

As Gravity is set in outer space, the space of the film is mostly hyperbolic, particularly in its exterior shots. The encounter with the primordial hyperbolic space experienced by the protagonists is extended in several ways to the audience through stereoscopy. First, through the stereoscopic image inspiring a “vertiginous uncertainty about the distance separating forms” (Crary 1992: 125). Secondly, because Gravity accentuates the D3-D characteristic of dissolving the distinct boundary of the screen (M. Ross 2013: 406). Due to the infinite positive parallax space in Gravity and the lack of Euclidean markers, viewers reflexively recognize their vision is failing to establish Euclidean coordinates, failing to discern up and down. Consequently, viewers’ bodies become involved in the effort to reorient themselves in the diegesis. A hyper-haptic visuality thus ensues in which the audience is drawn towards the image, attempting to graze its surface, in the search of a ledge or some form of texture to hold onto.

However, as the setting of Gravity is outer space, and as stereoscopy dissolves the surface of the screen, images in Gravity are voided of any such surface. The viewer is instead drawn even further into the depth of the diegesis, and the darkness of outer space intermingles with the darkness of the auditorium, eliciting a sensation that “outer space” is about to subsume its audience. The lack of Euclidean markers in Gravity emphasizes the diffusion of the rectangular shape of the screen in 3-D cinema, perhaps the most obvious Euclidean marker in the movie theatre, and one which signals the audience’s distance from the image. This is perhaps why Richmond (2016a: 3), in his analysis of Gravity, confesses to gripping the armrest of his seat, a hinge of the external diegetic world, felt and sensed but not seen in the darkness of the theatre. Gripping the armrest can enable one to retain a sense of separation, a Euclidean measurement, from the “expanding” diegesis. If one accepts that the space portrayed in Gravity is indeed hyperbolic, then by no means can it have a disembodying affect, rather the body becomes the focus of the audience’s experience of the cinematic space.

The opening of Gravity thus offers in my reading not a sense of disembodiment, but what Sobchack argues for as the effects of encountering a hyperbolic space: disorientation, unsettlement, and peril. This substitution of spaces, from a familiar Euclidean space which governs our everyday lives, to the hyperbolic space of Gravity, necessarily implicates a body which is “becoming.” We now “reach towards” in a different manner. Outer space, by virtue of its features which are objectively alien and dangerous, creates a new sense of movement and of being-in-the-world. In Gravity, the worlding of outer space hence implicates both the protagonist and the audience. Since it is the audience’s participation that animates the environment with unfamiliar striking force, it follows that this force must, to a certain degree, originate in the audience. As audiences encounter the diegesis, as they are implicated in its creation, the force of the environment “brushes off” on them.

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