Parallax Effects: Epistemology,Affect and Digital 3D Cinema

Abstract

This article puts Alfonso Curaon’s Gravity 3D (2013) into dialogue with 19th- and 20th-century writings on the stereoscope in order to show how digital 3D cinema remediates stereoscopic 3D aesthetics to effects that extend beyond the production of an immersive sensory experience. Recent digital 3D films update for a new media environment the tendency of the stereoscopic 3D image to tie z-depth (or positive parallax) with the desire to see and know (or ‘epistemic seeing’) and emergent images (negative parallax) with ‘affective seeing’ (a mode of perception organized around heightened emotion), while exploiting the illusory solidity and tangibility of the 3D image to (melo)dramatic ends. I show how Gravity 3D elaborates the terrors and pleasures of various forms of connectivity (technological, material, metaphorical) as it provides the spectator with the illusory experience of sensory immersion within the radically inaccessible, sublime location of outer space – a setting that constitutes the limits of the visible and knowable and makes locatability a matter of life and death.