By Lauren Wissot
[U2 3D is now playing at select IMAX and DLP-equipped theaters.]
Ever since the Zoo TV tour, U2’s set designs have resembled Ridley Scott productions. So what could National Geographic Entertainment’s concert film U2 3D -- the “first digital 3D, multi-camera, real-time production”, with 5.1 Surround Sound -- have to offer besides a more immersive sensory experience? Surprisingly, quite a bit. This feature -- which seamlessly integrates sections of three Argentinian concerts, plus footage from a separate, audience-free, closeups-only shoot -- has more in common with one of artist Jeff Wall’s hyper-real light box photographs than it does with the film many consider the gold standard in concert docs, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense. The camera takes us inside the action – just where you want to be for a musical bacchanal – with unsettling clarity, as when groping arms seem to be reaching upwards from the row directly in front of you. From the stagehands’ vantage point overhead and behind the stage to the super-low angle, audience shoe-level shots to the shoulder-height, fish-eye medium shot of Bono's hand grasping for your face, no perspective goes unexplored. Yet the cuts and dissolves fly by so fast that you don’t have time to think about directorial intent; you're absorbed in the overwhelming beats. Codirectors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington zoom and tilt in on the band from every conceivable angle, yet Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. hold up in the harshest high-definition light; they seem as ageless as CGI characters. It's not enough to say that watching this concert film is just like being there, but without the crush of sweaty bodies and with a better view. U2 3D lets you be everywhere at once. 
3Ality Digital Production chose the right band as its subject and put the right woman in charge of executing it: co-director Owens, U2’s longtime production designer. Like Madonna, U2 has been constantly updating, reinventing for decades. Over time, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” has ceased to be about Ireland’s regional, Catholic vs. Protestant, religious wars and become a plea for peace in the global battle of Muslim vs. Christian. The personal is as political and universal for U2 as it was for Joe Strummer and The Clash (whom Bono cited as inspiring his group's formation in Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten). But when all is said and done it’s still about the music, and in U2 3D, the band delivers a performance whose passion might shake the ground if it had originated on VHS. Such band standards as “New Year’s Day,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “In The Name of Love” and even “Bullet the Blue Sky” served to remind me why War just might be one of the most perfect albums ever recorded. Of course, War came out nearly a quarter century ago, back when adoring fans waved cigarette lighters in the air during encores; in U2 3D, when Bono implores, “Shine your electronic digital lights,” a million cell phones start swaying in Buenos Aires. This could very well be the futuristic, event-centric saving grace that desperate theater owners have been seeking. The tools change, but for Bono and the boys, the meaning stays the same.
Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Hyper-real: U2 3D
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11 comments:
Um, it's not an Imax film. It was shot in 3eality, a proprietary 3-D process that the writer has apparently taken to be the production company. Though it is playing in a handful of Imax theaters, the vast majority of its dates are in standard multiplexes.
Hi, Dave--
The IMAX reference was an editorial mistake, not Lauren's, and has been changed.
However, you're wrong about 3eality being only a proprietary process. It's also a production company that generates productions to showcase the technology. The Variety review lists the production company as "A 3ality Digital Entertainment presentation."
A Hollywood Reporter article about their move into features is here.
thanks for the article, i can't wait to see this.
and 'bullet the blue sky' is from joshua tree, not war.
This is an extraordinary movie, well worth seeing -- one that not only suggests new artistic potential for 3D, but new expressive possibilities for cinema generally. When "Beowulf" came out, I read some criticism of the 3-D version suggesting that cinema was of necessity 2-D medium, a pictorial language, and that adding a third dimension turned it into something else -- pure spectacle. I can see the logic behind that, but I'd suggest that anyone inclined to agree with it wholeheartedly reserve judgment until they've seen "U2 3D." Owens and Pellington have really thought through the visual properties of 3D, figuring out, for example, that it's not truly 3-dimensional in the sense that life is 3-dimensional; that the effect when you watch it more akin to those multiplane camera effects that Disney's animated movies pioneered (zooming out through multiple layers of 2-D panoramas), except that in this case, there is a sense of depth, of indeterminate but palpable space, between each plane.
Certain sections of this movie reminded me of the hall of mirrors sequence in "The Lady From Shanghai," only instead of a lateral series of 2-D reflections of a single person, you're looking at six, ten, or a dozen translucent screens layered on top of each other, each one fully comprehensible in all its details, and in some sense "separate" from all the others, yet also merged into a single image. The graphics on the big screen, the musicians moving onstage, the various perspectives on the audience (closeups of individuals, group shots, shots of whole sections of thousands of onlookers) all merge into a single unified whole. It's just dazzling -- and the fact that it dovetails so perfectly with U2's message (erasing national and cultural borders -- the utopian hippie fantasy of bringing the world together with music) is the aesthetic cherry on top of this multi-tiered wedding cake of a movie.
It's not so much the technology itself that made this movie possible (though I'm sure the relative portability of the digital cameras compared to IMAX film cameras, or even 35mm film cameras, helped make it possible; ditto the much greater control that could be exercised during postproduction compared to manipulating film). I suspect the adventurous spirit of the filmmakers -- and the band that encouraged them to try new things -- deserves much of the credit for what ended up onscreen.
Imagine what Stan Brakhage could have done with this technology, or Stanley Kubrick, or Jordan Belson. Imagine what Peter Greenaway could do with this. Or Errol Morris.
I can picture "Ulysses" and other novels that have long been considered unfilmable (without oversimplifying their essence) being credibly adapted using this format, which, much more so than 2D cinema, or any other form of 3D cinema, finds a visual equivalent for the crowded human imagination, a place where past events, present experience, a speculative future and mad flights of fancy all coexist simultaneously in real time.
I know that sounds like some Walt Whitman craziness, but don't rule it out.
I won't go so far as to say that what we're seeing here is the future of cinema -- but it does suggest to me that the 2-dimensional, narrative driven model that has persisted for over a century represents motion pictures in its infancy; that perhaps future generations will look back, after another few centuries of cinematic evolution, and think of the 20th and early 21st century as the cave painting years.
I can picture "Ulysses" and other novels that have long been considered unfilmable (without oversimplifying their essence) being credibly adapted using this format.
Matt, can you elaborate on that please? I am a big fan of Ulysses, and I have my own thoughts on the possibility of its being adapted to the cinema, but this is an interesting angle that I have never heard anyone bring it up. Could the same apply to possible adaptations of other supposedly unfilmable master opuses such as The Third Policeman or In Search of Lost Time? Would Tristram Shandy, already a fine adaptation as it is(of the central theme if not the "narrative), have benefited from this technological breakthrough?
Matt, Kubrick would have loved this film. I thought Spielberg's "A.I." a disappointment, but if Kubrick had lived to shoot it in this form...wow! Come to think of it, "Napoleon" would have been sensational, too.
Chris, I wrote "and even “Bullet the Blue Sky” served to remind me why War just might be one of the most perfect albums ever recorded." I never meant to imply that the song itself is on the album. My wording is a bit awkward.
Ali: The short answer to your question is, yes -- I think the refinement of 3 D aesthetics showcased in this concert film could be applied to certain works of literature, particularly works by authors (like Joyce, Borges and Proust) that slip in and out of present and past tense, memory and fantasy, description and feeling. As far as most viewers are concerned, commercial narrative cinema is the only viable, comprehensible kind of moviemaking, and while filmmakers have bent it to all sorts of uncharacteristic, uncommercial ends, ultimately they rarely depart too far from the template established by Griffith, which clearly sections off past tense from present, closeup from wide shot, via hard cuts or quick dissolves. There have been quite a few movies that attempt to infuse past with present, memory with experience -- "The Limey" and "Point Blank" and much of Wong Kar-Wai's and Stan Brakhage's filmographies spring immediately to mind -- but what Owens does in the U2 movie suggests that there's a whole largely unexplored country out there. The pristine sharpness of this new digital 3 D allows for the construction of scrims or screens that exist simultaneously within the frame without turning the entire image into kaleidoscopic , psychedelic mush (which is what many films that attempt to suggest multiple, simultaneous thoughts ultimate turn into). Eisensteinian montage allows one image to be juxtaposed with another image via a cut to suggest a new idea (synthesis), but the synthesis occurs only in the viewer's mind, not on the screen. This different approach to 3D suggests that it's possible to create true synthesis on the screen, in real time, and keep that synthesis going, while still maintaining the essential separateness of the ideas which create that synthesis. (Wow, it's 10:38 AM New York time, yet somehow in this comments thread it's become 3 AM in the dorm room.)
Here's a section of "Ulysses" that could be visualized, in all its wild juxtaposition and continuous flow of time/space, via the multi-plane 3D filmmaking that the U2 film showcases so vividly. Read this and try to imagine the different images being presented in translucent yet solid scrims on a 3D screen, so that you can see one image while another one comes up, and another, each image fading slowly, only when the filmmaker decides that its potency has ebbed from the mind of the narrator (i.e., the audience member):
"frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweet synnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo bits leaving things like that lying around hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C Ill get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the place hotter than it is the rain was lovely just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the mosquito nets and the smell of the rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche Paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on what she was very nice whats this her other name was just a P C to tell you I sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing in old Madrid or Waiting Concone is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word Icouldn't make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing still theyre lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also Captain Grove with love yrs affly x x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderillos with the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all through a mist makes you feel so old..."
It's hard to imagine a passage like this one being visualized on a big screen without losing the sense of emotional/descriptive continuity Joyce conjures. Part of the problem is that we're so accustomed to seeing memory or fantasy represented as something that exists apart from our present-tense reality. But the fact is, this way of seeing is an artificial construct that does not reflect how we actually experience life. When you're walking down the street, you're not just experiencing the street -- you're thinking about your destination, and why you're going there, and how the street has changed over the years, and how that guy standing by the lamppost vaguely reminds you of your grandfather, and how your grandfather used to wear a particular hat and coat every day, and how he sipped his coffee, and the expression on his face as he sipped coffee in the hospital waiting room on the night your grandmother died, and your grandmother's funeral, and the flowers on the grave, and how the flowers were nothing like the flowers in the window of the shop you're just now passing on your way home.
Visualize the above as a sequence of shots and cuts, and it might take ten or fifteen minutes to convey that series of sensations and impressions while doing all of them justice -- and you wouldn't do all of them justice because whether you moved from one image via a cut or dissolve, you would still be leaving certain images behind in order to show new ones, resulting in a visual/emotional shorthand that doesn't reflect how multiple feelings and sensations linger in the mind, solidly or as a kind of psychic residue. Do the same passage onscreen in 3D, with long match dissolves that keep the different elements onscreen simultaneously, and you might actually get closer to approximating what it's like to see those images and feel those feelings.
What I'm getting at is this: cinema's potential to simulate the actual process of thinking -- to allow us to actually experience someone else's thoughts, to go inside their heads for a while -- has come a long, long way, but it's still in its expressive infancy. New tools could push it along -- that and bold artists with equally bold investors backing their bravery.
PS: The fact that I could not stop myself from habitually referring to the Joyce passage and my own abbreviated, noodling approximation as a "sequence" of images illustrates just how completely my moviegoing consciousness has been colonized by the idea of linear time -- and a "reality" that's hermetically sealed off from memory, projection and imagination.
Hmmm. Now I want to see Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" become the first art porn shot this way.
As I wrote in an NYPress piece about the aesthetic potential of these new formats, "Imagine IMAX porn."
Thanks Matt - that was very interesting. I wonder how A Scanner Darkly, for example, could have utilised a similar technique (possibly juxtaposing the "real" actors with their processed counterparts). Another obvious example is Natural Born Killers, maybe...
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