Over the years, 3-D movies have tended toward the cheesy. What can you expect from an entertainment medium requiring a room full of viewers to watch through cheap cardboard-and-mylar glasses just to get some illusory sense of depth? As a medium for art, might as well try playing classical theater to an audience wearing funny hats.
Then again, Monsters of Grace, a self-styled “digital opera in three dimensions,” does make use of those goofy cardboard polarizing specs, albeit designer ones donated by l.a. Eyeworks, combining them with the latest in computer animation technology to create a distinctly high-art multimedia event. This historic production-now concluding a 28-city tour of North America-reunites designer-director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass, whose 1976 collaboration Einstein on the Beach is a cultural landmark.
Though much praised abroad, Robert Wilson’s theatrical meditations on space and time have seldom been seen by American audiences-partly because of the huge expense of mounting them. Producer Jedediah Wheeler suggested a 3-D digital animated film as a more portable means of disseminating Wilson’s vision. Live performances by Glass and his musical and vocal ensemble accompany the 78 minutes of visuals, which constitute the first ever feature-length movie using stereoscopic, 3-D animation.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
