If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion of a picture plane is something that has been foundational in Western art and visual regimes for nearly 500 years. But the idea of “depth” has only existed as a sign- a trick that suggests but does not manifest. Spectators, aware of the contradiction (how can depth be translated in a plane?), have willing participated in this signifying of depth, imagining some things “further back” than others even as they were represented on a single plane. Film scholars like Sigfried Kracauer have joyfully praised the idea of depth in films as something that makes narrative more complex. With “deep focus” techniques, two or more “levels” of narrative can share a single shot, thus relating two scenes that previously required montage. Deep focus has been a major part of cinema, and suggested that depth of vision complicated and improved the cinema’s ability to represent nature, and tell stories whose events might occur simultaneously.
Avatar changes the history of depth in Western visuality because it problematicizes the assumption that depth can occur in two dimensions. With the single hovering water droplet above our protagonist at the very opening of Avatar, we know that we can no longer believe in the technique of depth in two dimensional images. We can no longer let depth occur where it has not been earned by this new high technique, where our eyes are truly employed (as a biscopic mechanism) to preceive depth. It’s not that this technique is not also a trick, for indeed it is, but rather that it progresses a long stultified evolution of perspective that begins in the West with relief drawing and moves into a whole science of vanishing points. The depth of James Cameron’s Avatar changes our way of seeing, in that it creates new ways for the cinema to be seen, and thus re-informs our expectations of what is possible. This technological urge, to pursue new possibilities in the age of the digital, is something that the 21st century has been thoroughly caught up in, and now we have a film to mythologize our transition to digital culture. For Avatar’s plot is simple and its meaning translucent- in a world of new images and new technologies we are all the closer to identifying with images- the avatar of Second Life and other digital domains has entered cinema, where the out-of-body experience has long been present and is now re-invented.
Three dimensions also means that Avatar’s cinematography provides texture to the spectator in ways never before conceived. In one scene, Jakesully and his attractive love interest, swim beneath a neon brook, and we know they are swimming because the water is dimensional, with so much depth detail, that it feels real. It is some form of kineaesthesia or a visual tactility. We know it’s water because it looks like water, not because it is a imagic sign of water. Depth changes the image, because depth escapes the picture plane, exploding its limitations however superficially.
Watching Avatar, I came to the conclusion that when 3D filmmaking becomes cheap enough for the avante-garde to try it, we will have some truly incredible objects of cinema. What would Godard do with 3D filmmaking? How best to unravel its techniques? How best to subvert the spectator in a world of depth?
Whatever the avante-garde does with 3D, the history of the image is changed, the expectations of the cinema spectator challenged, and the nature of cultural production complicated. For as powerful as 3D will be in producing new immersive worlds, even the 2D world changes now as it may take on a patina of authenticity and simplicity that black & white film continues to exert in a color world.