![]() At Cinerama’s release, “reviewers spoke of Cinerama as if they were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” Cinerama was described as having a larger-than-life experience that drew people away from their televisions and back into the theaters. It was originally a medium for documentary travelogues, built during a time when the film industry feared cinema’s decline over television’s growing popularity and success. In exploring these complexities we will see how documentary’s mix of fact and fiction work into the IMAX format, and where this could take the future of documentaries.Ĭinerama was one of the first successful commercialized theaters to display widescreen cinema to the masses. I will conclude in answering the question of whether the IMAX format is eradicating cinema as we know it, or if IMAX is a form of cinema’s rebirth and thus creating a form of commercialized documentary where moviegoers would actively go to a museum or multiplex to watch a documentary film for both its cerebral and cinematic experience. IMAX is hinting at a continued desire to not only continue to educate their audiences, but to also attempt to turn real life into a cinematic experience. IMAX prides itself on its unique, fully immersive format having recently invested tens of millions of dollars in its documentaries. I will also draw from John Belton’s “Digital 3D Cinema: Digital Cinema’s missing Novelty Phase,” as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s “The ‘Return’ of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century” in order to discuss the effects of 3D and digital technologies to deduce how its not only revolutionizing documentary, but also generational experiences. ![]() Yet, its images are perceived to be so real that people today are reacting physically toward films, just as they were 100 years ago to its ‘illusions.’ To explore IMAX’s influence on a documentary’s validity, I will use John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema to discuss the history of 3D and the 70mm format to provide context as to where we are today. IMAX’s technology has become so sophisticated that the manipulation of image, as I’ll discuss, has almost become a fabrication in and of itself due to its high pixel density. Documentaries, as we’ll discuss, are narratives that balance between both fact and fiction in order to explore this further, I will focus on how the IMAX format challenges or enhances the validity of documentaries given its technological advances. IMAX’s technology has introduced what I’m calling a 7 th sense, a movie-going experience that’s bringing people back into theaters and reacting similarly to how they did a century ago to films like that of Lumière and Flaherty. In this article I will explore how technological advances have had an impact on the progression of documentary filmmaking, focusing specifically on IMAX’s 3D technology. A film like Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922) was the first of its kind to utilize filmic technology to capture the unknown and deliver it to the industrial world. However, film brought more than illusion it was the first medium to capture life as it unfolds in real time. Filmmakers were like magicians, discovering new techniques to fool its viewers into believing the unbelievable, and causing them to jump at films like Arrival of the Train (Lumière, 1895). One needs to think creatively as well as critically about their entanglement, which has been oppositional, interdependent, and cooperative-complicit all at the same time.”įor audiences nearly a century ago, magic was believed to play an integral part in the production of filmmaking. “What the return of 3-D shows is how difficult it is to maintain such neat distinctions.
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