The Gimmick That Ate Hollywood

THEY HAVE GONE DOWN IN POPULAR history as just another silly fad from the 1950s. The most lasting images they left behind are photographs of people crowded in theaters wearing cardboard spectacles. Yet there was a time when three-dimensional movies were seen as the savior of America’s film industry. “There is in Hollywood these days a state of upheaval such as motion-picture makers have not known since sound became an overnight sensation a quarter century ago,” The New York Times Magazine reported in March 1953, at the height of the 3-D frenzy. And for a time, people thronged movie theaters to see objects hover in front of the screen or come hurtling out at them.

If you have two good eyes, you see in three dimensions. Our eyes are spaced about two and a half inches apart, so each one perceives objects from a slightly different angle. Our brains merge these distinct images to create an appearance of depth. Objects up close appear the most three-dimensional, while those farther away appear flatter, as the angle of difference between the eyes and the object decreases.

Long before movies, during the earliest days of photography, experimenters had already found ways to create the appearance of three-dimensional images. The basic apparatus was built as early as 1832 by the British physicist Charles Wheatstone, who six years later published a description of how paired drawings could yield a 3-D image. Around 1850 Sir David Brewster invented an instrument he called the lenticular stereoscope, which was a closed box with adjustable lenses for viewing a pair of images. When it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London the following year, stereo photography became a craze.

By 1861 the American poet, physician, and philosopher Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., had invented the hand-held stereoscope, which became a staple of middle-class households. To use it, a viewer took an oblong card bearing two separate images—a stereo pair—photographed from slightly different angles, usually by a camera with twin lenses set a couple of inches apart, and slipped it into a viewer. A barrier down the middle of the device ensured that each eye saw only one of the images, thus creating the appearance of three dimensions. This technology enjoyed a revival in the 1950s with the paired slides of the View-Master.

Creating 3-D moving pictures, then, was a simple matter of replacing the still photos of the stereoscope with moving ones. A few early peep shows used precisely this method; in fact, some of them, using rapid sequences of stills instead of reels of film, date as far back as the 1850s. The first true motion picture in 3-D was exhibited in England by William Friese-Greene in 1893.

A much harder problem, though, was making 3-D movies that could be projected onto a screen and watched by a large number of people in an auditorium. The basic idea was simple enough: Shoot a scene with lenses a few inches apart and show the two films simultaneously. But how to make each of the viewer’s eyes see only the images intended for it? Doing this with a viewer’s naked eyes seemed impossible (though it was actually accomplished in the Soviet Union decades later, as will be explained). The solution lay in having audience members wear some sort of apparatus that would block out the wrong images and let the right ones through.

In 1903 the Lumière brothers of France may have made the first public exhibition of a projected 3-D movie (the record is not entirely clear). Their short film, titled L’Arrivée du train , is said to have startled audiences even though it showed nothing more than a train pulling into a station. While the precise details are lost to history, the filmmakers probably used colored filters. In this system, audience members wear glasses with a different colored lens, usually red and green, over each eye. The two stereo images appear atop each other, slightly askew, on the same screen, but one is projected through a red filter, making it invisible to the eye wearing the green lens, while the other is projected through a green filter, making it invisible to the eye wearing the red lens. This method of creating 3-D effects, which remains popular today, is called the anaglyphic (Latin for low-relief ) two-color process.

In 1915 Famous Players, the predecessor of Paramount Pictures, released a group of anaglyphic 3-D shorts. The process used in that demonstration had been coinvented by Edwin Porter, a cinematic pioneer whose other accomplishments included making The Great Train Robbery , the first major film to tell a story, in 1903. According to a contemporary review, “Images shimmered like reflections on a lake and in its present form the method couldn’t be commercial because it detracts from the plot.”

Three-dimensional movies had their first burst of popularity in the 1920s. In 1922 the Teleview Corporation screened Radio Mania , a science fiction feature about an inventor who communicates with Mars via television. It played for a month at a theater in New York City that had spent $30,000 to install the system. Radio Mania created the 3-D effect with a single piece of film that had images for the right and left eyes on alternating frames. Instead of wearing glasses, audience members watched the movie from behind individual viewing devices. Spinning shutters in these devices were perfectly synchronized with the projector, so when the left-eye image appeared on the screen, the shutter blocked off the viewer’s right eye, and vice versa. The Teleview process was invented by Laurens Hammond, who would later endear himself to generations of musicians by inventing the Hammond organ.

A handful of other 3-D films were released in the mid192Os, all of them made with the anaglyphic two-color process. These included The Power of Love (1922), from Perfect Pictures, the first 3-D feature (barely beating Radio Mania ), and an experimental program called Movies of the Future (1922), which included a demonstration of how a short could have two endings, one shot through a red filter and one through a green filter. Viewers who wanted to see the happy ending looked through their red lens; those who wished to see the sad one looked through the green.

Also in 1922, Educational Pictures released a group of shorts, including one called Plastigrams , in which red and green images were printed on opposite sides of the film, eliminating the need for special projection equipment. The method was coinvented by Frederic Eugene Ives, who was responsible for a number of important innovations in photolithography, color printing, and color photography. In 1924 a soundtrack was added, using the Phonofilm process of the inventor Lee de Forest. Meanwhile, in France, the director Abel Gance filmed some 3-D sequences for his monumental 1927 wide-screen epic Napoleon , but he cut them because they distracted the audience.

A few other 3-D films were released in the mid-1920s, mostly shorts (including at least one more with sound), but their appeal quickly wore off. Anaglyphic technology was forgotten in the rush to talkies, though it would be revived sporadically, most notably in a series of comedy shorts by MGM’s Pete Smith, the most popular of which was Third Dimensional Murder (1941).

Other than as a novelty, prospects for the future of 3-D movies looked unpromising because the reliance on tinted lenses made 3-D with true colors impossible. (The Teleview process, nowadays known as field-sequential 3-D, allowed for color, but since it required precision machinery for each viewer instead of throwaway tinted glasses, it was too expensive for mass adoption.) The movie industry needed a system that did not interfere with color quality, and in the 1930s a young inventor named Edwin Land offered a way to do that.

Natural light is unpolarized, meaning that its waves oscillate in all directions. Polarized light, by contrast, oscillates in only one plane. Since the seventeenth century it had been known that certain natural crystals can turn an unpolarized beam of light into a polarized one. They do this by acting as filters, letting the light’s up-down component (for example) pass through while absorbing the left-right component (or, with some substances, collecting the left-right component into a separate beam). Therefore, if a beam of light that is polarized up-down falls upon a filter that is polarized left-right, no light will pass through.

This phenomenon offered a promising new path to 3-D. If a pair of images polarized perpendicular to each other were projected on a screen, and viewers wore glasses with one lens polarized each way, the result would be the same as in anaglyphic 3-D, but without that method’s color problems. The trouble was that making glasses out of natural polarizing crystals would have been impossibly laborious and expensive.

In 1927 Land, a freshman at Harvard University, decided to develop an artificial polarizer. He took a leave of absence from Harvard, moved to New York City, and tackled the task himself. During the day he conducted research at the New York Public Library or in his rented room. According to legend, at night he climbed up a fire escape and sneaked through an unlocked window at a Columbia University physics laboratory to use the equipment there.

He wrestled with the problem for most of two years. Finally, during a night of research in 1928, he used a magnet to align tiny, needlelike crystals of herapathite, a quinine derivative, and watched as they polarized the light he beamed through them. This was his key advance. At last he had a way to make individual polarizing crystals line up without being part of a large single crystal. He embedded the crystals in plastic to create a material he called Polaroid, which could be manufactured cheaply in sheets. Land’s discovery paved the way for sunglasses, polarized automobile headlights, photographic equipment, and hundreds of other applications. After much further development, he announced his discovery in January 1936 and demonstrated 3-D movies four months later. With the backing of Wall Street investors, he founded the Polaroid Corporation the following year.

In 1939 Polaroid produced In Tune With Tomorrow , a 12-minute 3-D short that the Chrysler Corporation exhibited at the New York World’s Fair. The film dazzled audiences by showing automobile parts gradually assembling themselves into a completed Plymouth. “The picture projects itself in front of every spectator, and at times women scream, for a second of instinctive alarm, when it looks as if some metal part is coming right at them,” reported the New York Post . Fairgoers in 1939 saw the film in black and white; in 1940 it was in color.

The new technology was ready for commercial use, but the major Hollywood studios were reluctant to adopt it. When Land arranged a demonstration for Warner Brothers, Harry Warner expressed complete indifference to the film. Only later did Land discover why: Warner had a glass eye, and it takes two functioning eyes for the 3-D effect to work. Not long afterward 3-D film research was shelved for World War II. Polaroid applied its technology to make such things as 3-D terrain maps for Army officers.

After the war the movie industry entered a period of turmoil. The Hollywood studio system had begun to totter, with stars suing to break free from the contracts that kept them chained to individual studios. Worse, a Supreme Court decision forced the studios to sell their theater chains, which had been a vital part of their business. But the most chilling threat was television.

As ticket sales dropped by a third between 1946 and 1952, the industry scrambled to find something films could give viewers that television couldn’t. Color provided a temporary fix, but everyone knew color television was not far off. Stereophonic sound was a help, though a modest one. And almost every major studio invested in a wide-screen process, such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, or Todd A-O.

Amid all this activity, 3-D movies attracted little interest. They were still thought of as basically a novelty, and studios were concentrating on wide-screen. In any event, when color television arrived, it would be possible to make that 3-D as well, so the movies would not gain anything. But while 3-D might not have made sense to the large studios, a businessman named Milton Gunzburg saw opportunity in it.

Time magazine described Gunzburg as “a mild little man of 42 whom one Hollywoodian has dubbed ‘the least likely Messiah in the history of hope.’” He had written a few screenplays for the studios in the 1940s, and in the early 1950s he was planning to produce a documentary on his own (a project he eventually abandoned). When Gunzburg heard what a sensation a program of 3-D shorts had made at the Festival of Britain, in London, earlier that year, he decided to investigate 3-D himself.

Gunzburg got together with his brother Julian, who was an optician, and Friend Baker, who had started out as a cameraman in the mid-1910s and gone on to a career in cinematography, film engineering, and camera design. They created their own 3-D system called Natural Vision by joining together two 35mm cameras and using polarizing filters to project the resulting images. They demonstrated their setup to prospective licensees, and while the major studios turned the Gunzburgs away, an independent producer and director named Arch Oboler was fascinated.

Oboler had made his reputation in radio, most notably with a scary program called “Lights Out,” before moving into film and television in the 1940s. When he first saw Natural Vision, he had already begun shooting The Lions of Gulu , a low-budget action picture set in the early 1900s about a pair of man-eating lions that menaced the builders of an African railroad. After seeing what Gunzburg’s 3-D system could do, Oboler scrapped the footage he had shot so far and started the film from scratch.

The cast included Robert Stack, who later starred as Eliot Ness in television’s “The Untouchables,” and Nigel Bruce, best known for playing Dr. Watson alongside Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes. Test screenings began on November 30, 1952, and when audiences responded enthusiastically, the film was released widely with a new name, Bwana Devil . By March 1953 it was playins in theaters across the country.

Critics were not kind. Time called it a “dog,” while Hollis Alpert of Saturday Review wrote, “It is the worst movie in my rather faltering memory, and my hangover from it was so painful that I immediately went to see a two-dimensional movie for relief.” The polarization process, he said, darkened the image “so that everything seems to be happening in late afternoon on a cloudy day.” And the depth effects were odd: “Nigel Bruce will either loom up before you or look like a puppet.”

Audiences didn’t care. They lined up to see the movie and screamed when a lion appeared to leap out of the screen (“A lion in your lap!” ads had promised) or spears were tossed at the camera. In January 1953 United Artists bought Bwana Devil for half a million dollars plus a share of the profits. Suddenly Hollywood was paying attention.

Studios hurried to develop their own 3-D processes, all of which used polarization (though anaglyphic would reappear years later as a cheaper alternative). “Plans for more 3-D productions are daily being announced all over the Hollywood lots, and hardly a week passes that someone does not pop up with a new ‘system’ for beating the 3-D game,” reported the critic Bosley Crowther in March 1953. But studio heads also shared a nervousness about 3-D’s shelf life: “The riddle in the motion-picture industry is whether it has actually got hold of some sort of mechanical marvel that will revolutionize the screen or whether it is wildly romancing a novelty that will soon turn out to be a dud.” One-eyed Harry Warner became an enthusiastic convert, asserting that in a year or two all films would be in 3-D. His brother Jack predicted publicly that audiences would learn to wear 3-D glasses “as effortlessly as they wear wrist watches or carry fountain pens,” though in private he was less sanguine: “It’s a novelty, good for a fast buck.”

Natural Vision and processes like it had some definite problems. Shooting movies with them used twice as much film stock as did 2-D. So did exhibiting, which also required spending thousands of dollars to install a dualprojection system, stereophonic sound, and a wide screen. Since the polarizing filters on the projectors absorbed much of the light that fell on them, exhibitors needed more powerful projection lamps and screens with greater reflectivity. Filmmakers had to open up their apertures to brighten the images. And the projection process became much more complicated: Not only were there now two projectors, but the paired images needed color matching, extremely precise focus, and perfect synchronization.

Nonetheless, Warner Brothers—the studio that had sounded the death knell for silents with The Jazz Singer in 1927—signed up with Natural Vision for a 3-D remake of a 1933 film called The Mystery of the Wax Museum , originally shot in two-color Technicolor. The remake, titled House of Wax , starred Vincent Price, in his first horror role, as a madman who is disfigured in a fire at his wax museum and stocks a new one by stealing corpses from the morgue and coating them in wax. The producer was Brian Foy, who a quarter century earlier had directed Warner Brothers’ The Lights of New York , the first all-talking film ( The Jazz Singer had just a few talking sections). The director was André De Toth, who, like Harry Warner, had only one eye.

After a visit to the set, Thomas Pryor of The New York Times wrote: “André De Toth … and his cameraman appeared to be more exacting than usual about measuring the distances of players in relation to the twin cameras operated as one from a single mount. Otherwise the operation appeared normal. The director in a brief conversation between scenes did say, however, that working in three-dimension was a new adventure which had its own ‘problems and dangers.’ But most of the new thinking in terms of dramatization had been worked out during the preparation of the script, he explained.”

At Paramount, the producers William H. Pine and William C. Thomas scrapped 10 days’ worth of footage for Sangaree and started over in 3-D. “In a sense, it was a journey into unknown seas,” they wrote in May 1953. “For one thing, space distortion had to be dealt with, as the cameras seem to widen the normal space between actors. Faces seemed to be narrowed at the same time. Props that were insignificant and in their normal places began jumping off the screen at us, or assumed exaggerated visual importance.” The producers tried to fix the spatial problems by carefully working out the shooting angles and chalking on the floor the “line of conversion,” beyond which an object would appear to come out of the screen. “It was carefully avoided unless it was to be used to heighten the effectiveness of a scene legitimately.” The actors’ movements had to be painstakingly planned, and the new process demanded longer shots because rapid cutting could prove disorienting to the audience.

The fever for 3-D spread worldwide. Hungary and Britain had already made 3-D films, and studios in Mexico, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands were developing their own processes. Most impressive of all, the Soviets had been showing 3-D movies for years, according to the Very Reverend Dr. Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean” of Canterbury, England. Johnson said in 1953 that he had seen some examples nine years before. “I ducked when I saw birds flying at me,” he reported. “There was not a lion, so I was not afraid.” Moreover, the system did not require glasses.

For once, fantastic stories of Soviet technological prowess were not just Cold War propaganda. February 1941 had seen the opening of Concert , a 3-D film that could indeed be viewed without glasses. It was shot with an ordinary 35mm camera in a prototype of a process called Stereokino. The camera had two mirrors positioned in front of the lens to direct the pair of stereo images side by side onto a single frame of film. The projector had mirrors of its own to direct these two images toward the screen at slightly different angles.

The screen was the crucial element. Instead of being a solid sheet, it was a “raster” consisting of thousands of tiny vertical reflective strips in a zigzag pattern, angled so that the left and right images were reflected separately into the audience, making stereo viewing possible.

While the lack of glasses was impressive, Stereokino had severe drawbacks of its own. It would not work on screens larger than about 9 by 12 feet; 3-D viewing was possible only from certain spots on the floor; and even so, the effect was ruined when viewers moved their heads. Fortunately, Stereokino could also be exhibited using polarizers, and most Soviet 3-D films were eventually shown that way. Three-dimensional movies remained popular in the USSR long after Western audiences tired of them, and the Soviets became leaders in 3-D research. In 1991 the Stereokino company received an Academy Award for its achievements.

As spring turned to summer in 1953, Americans flocked to theaters to watch objects come out of movie screens. In House of Wax , audiences thrilled to the sight of the museum’s barker playing with two paddleballs, along with an equally gratuitous scene of leg-kicking cancan dancers. Columbia’s Man in the Dark hurled a spider and a cigar in viewers’ faces. Filmmakers had to do these things even when they had no importance to the story, because otherwise a 3-D movie would not have looked much different from a 2-D one. To frequent moviegoers, the barrages became annoying. In April 1953 Hollis Alpert wrote, “Life, I can see, is not going to be easy for the movie reviewer for the next year or two, not until our playfellows on the West Coast get some of the prankish fun out of their systems.”

The stumbling block, as ever in Hollywood, was the quality of the films. For every well-done genre picture like House of Wax or high-budget prestige package like Kiss Me, Kate , there were half a dozen quickie exploitation flicks on the order of Cat-Women of the Moon or Robot Monster , a perennial favorite in lists of the worst movies of all time. Aggravating the lack of good stories and the rush to get films in theaters was the general lack of experience with 3-D among directors and cinematographers. Most of them had never even seen a 3-D film, and now they were expected to turn out a polished product their first time out.

By autumn, studios were starting to worry. In October 3-D movies in Chicago were doing worse than their 2-D counterparts. In New York, Paramount pulled a musical called Those Redheads From Seattle less than two weeks after its release. Some theaters began advertising, “2-D, no glasses needed.” In October The New York Times reported on the industry’s mood: “The ultimate test, it is felt, will come with the release of such big-scale attractions as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ Columbia’s ‘Miss Sadie Thompson,’ Paramount’s ‘Money From Home’ and Warner’s ‘Dial M for Murder.’” But MGM hedged its bets by testing Kiss Me, Kate as a 2-D film in some markets. To do this, theaters projected only one of the reels of film.

Warner Brothers staked its hopes on Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder . Hitchcock approached the gimmick with little enthusiasm, instructing his cinematographer to place the dual lenses only one and a half inches apart, a move that would decrease the sense of dimensionality as well as the distortion resulting from it. He did provide for one or two effective 3-D shots, especially when Grace Kelly’s arm reaches out into the audience to grab a fatal pair of scissors, but in general Hitchcock refused to “capitulate to the eccentricities of the 3-D process,” as his biographer Donald Spoto put it. Although the film, despite Hitchcock’s claims to the contrary, did get a limited release in 3-D when it came out in May 1954, most theaters showed it flat. As Hitchcock summed up the episode, 3-D was “a nine days’ wonder, and I came in on the ninth day.”

One bright spot amid the deepening gloom was Universal’s Creature From the Black Lagoon , today recognized as a monster classic. Its director was Jack Arnold, who had made Universal’s first 3-D movie, a science fiction chiller called It Came From Outer Space . For the creature feature, the cameraman Charles (“Scotty”) Welbourne designed a lightweight, waterproof camera unit for the lengthy underwater sequences. Even though it was released in March 1954, after the 3-D boom had already begun its decline, Creature did so well that Universal made its sequel Revenge of the Creature in 3-D as well. It came out in May 1955 and was the very last film of the 3-D boom, though most theaters showed it flat. Nevertheless, Revenge did well enough to spawn another sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us , which was shot in 2-D.

Creature notwithstanding, the 3-D fad had peaked by the end of 1953 and was all but over by mid-1954. The combination of poor films, inexpert projection at movie houses, audience irritation with 3-D glasses, and resistance among producers and exhibitors alike to the difficulties and expense of 3-D all helped kill it off. Unlike sound, which had taken over the film industry at the end of the 1920s, 3-D never transcended its status as a novelty.

Instead of adding to viewers’ sense of realism, as its boosters had hoped, 3-D had just the opposite effect. By calling so much attention to itself, it constantly reminded them that they were watching a movie. Crowther grumbled that the practice of hurling things out of the screen was “as arch and meretricious as it would be if an actress in a play suddenly turned and threw a vase at the audience.” In most cases, filmmakers learned, audiences do not need to feel that they are a part of the action, especially when it’s only in brief intervals between long sections when they are spectators. That simply isn’t how movies work.

Although 3-D seemed to have become a thing of the past, technicians continued to work on new and better methods. In Hungary, Félix Bodrossy developed Plasztikus, a system that put two polarized stereo images on top of each other on the same frame of film. An adapter placed on the projector merged the stereo images onscreen. Companies in the United States later introduced similar “over-and-under” systems, which cut print costs in half, simplified editing, and eliminated the need for a dual projection system. Anamorphic “side-by-side” systems worked in similar fashion, squeezing the stereo pairs into two narrow images that occupied the left and right sides of a single film frame. The projection system unsqueezed the skinny images and projected them through Polaroid filters onto the screen.

Three-dimensional films have enjoyed a number of revivals over the years. In fact, more 3-D films have been made since 1955 than were made before. In 1960 Twentieth Century-Fox tried to bring back the boom times with September Storm , which combined 3-D and CinemaScope, but few people were interested in either the technology or the film’s other slender merits. In 1966 Arch Oboler, the director of Bwana Devil , released The Bubble (renamed Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth in its 1970s re-release), which was made with a single-strip over-and-under process extravagantly dubbed SpaceVision TriOptiscope 4-D. It, too, failed at the box office. Oboler’s last 3-D film, Domo Arigato , was made in Japan in 1974.

Meanwhile, pornographers began to adopt the technology in such works as The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and The Stewardesses (1970). This did not improve 3-D’s mainstream reputation. But a ludicrous spaghetti Western called Comin’ at Ya! (1981) ignited another miniboom, which was fueled by gimmicky blockbuster sequels like Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D (1982) and Jaws 3-D (1983). More recently 3-D has been used in everything from Cirque du Soleil: journey of Man (2000) to Howard Stern: Butt Bongo Fiesta (1992).

Today companies like Canada’s IMAX use 3-D for visual spectaculars that play on huge screens. Here, at last, 3-D may have found its niche, saved for movies (mostly documentaries) where it serves a genuine purpose. Most IMAX theaters hand out standard polarized lenses, but some instead use fast-changing shutter glasses (E3D glasses, as the company calls them). In a process reminiscent of the Teleview approach of 1922, E3D glasses have a layer of liquid crystal that instantaneously changes from clear to opaque and back again when an electric current is applied and shut off. An infrared signal emitted by the projection equipment synchronizes the shutter action with the images onscreen. The blinking method works better than polarization since no light is lost in the process.

Finally, glasses-free holographic cinema—which Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography, foresaw in his 1971 Nobel lecture—remains an area of active research. In smallscreen form, the technology was demonstrated in the Soviet Union as long ago as 1977 and is now fairly well developed. With interactive features that can let users alter the images they see, video games and computer-assisted design look like promising markets, though it remains to be seen if the technology will become cheap and reliable enough to get beyond the demonstration stage. Large-screen holographic cinema is a project for the future.

Through good times and bad, Arch Oboler remained a steadfast 3-D proponent. Shortly before his death in 1987, he told the magazine Stereo World that “until there is some artistic level of choice of stories in the studios, we may have the same reaction to the present 3-D excitement that we had back in the Bwana Devil days. The audience will become surfeited with gore, with bad stories. The only hope for 3-D is that someone will come along with taste and understanding and do a good story without regard for the extremes of 3-D—using it in terms of the story itself.”

Is there a role for 3-D, as Oboler suggested? Will it always remain a clever technology in search of an application? Or will filmmakers someday learn how to integrate it into their stories in a way that does not make it look like a stunt? Thus far the inconveniences involved in 3-D have far outweighed the meager dramatic possibilities it adds. In an information-dense future, however, as the distinctions among film, video, and virtual reality dissolve, putting a large group of people in a room to watch projected images may come to seem as hopelessly old-fashioned as Bwana Devil does today. When technology makes 3-D as normal as sound and color, filmmakers will learn to integrate the third dimension into their thinking. But as long as 3-D remains a cumbersome and intermittent sideshow, it will have a hard time establishing itself as a legitimate tool of cinematic art.