The blockbuster syndrome

During the 1970s, the calculus by which a movie was considered successful or not in the marketplace had changed. Between the mid-and late 1960s, the studios teetered on the brink of insolvency because of the impact of the Paramount decrees, the national diffusion of television, and poor financial decisions made in their wake—the abortive attempt to convert to full stereoscopic production in the early 1950s among them. Starting with Universal's acquisition by MCA in 1962 and Paramount's absorption by Gulf and Western Industries in 1966, the classical Hollywood studios were all bought up by larger corporations who didn't really know how to run them, resulting in an industry-wide recession between 1969 and 1971. At the same time, in October 1968, the 34-year-old Production Code Administration (PCA) was replaced by a Code and Ratings Administration (CARA) that transformed the national audience—more or less homogeneous since its formation, except at the ethnic fringes—into a demographically segregated one. The conviction grew in Hollywood that the regular flow of product was no longer profitable because there was no longer a regular and predictable audience for its films. In such a volatile context, if a few productions became big hits, they could amortize those that produced a loss or simply broke even. This idea of engineering “event” movies to generate windfall profits and carry the rest along with them became known as “the blockbuster syndrome.” This was not a new phenomenon—“blockbusters” like Paramount's The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) and MGM's Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) had kept their respective studios profitable for years after their release, and expensive flops like Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1963) had nearly ruined 20th Century Fox. What was different was the amount of capital involved in hedging the bets.

Between 1972 and 1979, the average production budget or “negative cost” for a single film rose by 178 percent, or nearly four times the rate of general inflation. By the end of 1979, negative costs had doubled their 1977 level to reach the then-staggering sum of $8.9 million, so that the financial risks of production were substantially multiplied.

The final volume of Gretsch's travel letters begins with a letter about Teplitz. Gretsch describes traveling through Bohemia to Prague and then onward through Regensburg, Munich, Vienna, Kiev, and other cities, before finally returning home to St. Petersburg. This third volume contains only eleven letters, partly because Gretsch needed the last third of the volume to print the extended excerpt of his report to the government called Survey of Technical Educational Institutions in France and Germany Compiled in 1837.

Gretsch's Attitudes toward Germany and Its People

Despite his complaints about the French and their culture, Gretsch certainly enjoyed many aspects of his time in France in 1837. However, the July Revolution of 1830 was still fresh in Gretsch's mind; evidence of Napoleon's influence surrounded him there; and the not-so-distant memory of the French Revolution of 1789 haunted many of the places he visited. Gretsch simply could not bring himself to trust the French fully, and traveling through their territory gave him a sense of anxiety. When he crosses into the German Confederation as recorded near the end of Volume 2, Gretsch breathes a sigh of relief. “Glory to God; I am free!” he says. He then explains that he views France as a chaotic country, while the Germans uphold centuries-old laws and governments. Gretsch acknowledges that he is stereotyping the French because many of them truly are good people, but he complains that the majority of them seethe with malignancy.

Gretsch's family originally was German, a fact that he always kept in mind and that he seemed proud to acknowledge. In his Notes on My Life, for example, he relates an instance when he was a child in which a police officer came to their home looking for French sympathizers. His mother proudly proclaimed the family to be of German, Bohemian, and Polish heritage with “not a single drop of French blood.” In fact, he acknowledges that German was the most commonly spoken language in the household and that his mother sometimes had him read German books aloud.

While digital stereoscopy represents the most recent manifestation of a process that began with Charles Wheatstone's stereoscopic line drawings nearly two centuries ago, it is not the end of it. The ultimate technology for seeing things in three dimensions is Virtual Reality (VR), which uses a hybrid of advanced modern technology—Lidar scanners, hyper-accelerated graphic cards, and so on—and the stereoscopic illusion first quantified by Wheatstone to create a state of sensory immersion that borders on otherness. Finding a way to massmarket the VR experience as a form of popular cinema, rather than as an enhanced form of video game, has become the new Grail Quest of the film industry. But VR also has a more elevated, philosophical justification.

The iconic French film theorist André Bazin believed that each new technological development in the history of cinema (e.g., the introduction of sound, color, widescreen, and 3-D) brought it closer to its ultimate destiny—the production of a total simulacrum of realty—which was implicit in its very beginnings. As he wrote in 1946:

Vienna is the most original and most bustling city in Germany. In most streets of the city center, the lower levels of houses are occupied by flamboyant and gleaming shops. The signboards on some of them are of elegant design. They still follow the old tradition of distinguishing shops, not by number, but by some special feature. In Paris, this practice is disappearing, but in Vienna, it continues to be widely used. In the cloth and silk shop zum Primas von Ungarn, the sign-board depicts the Primate of Hungary in full regalia; the sign-board of the fashion shop zur Hofdame features a beautiful lady in a court ball dress; farther on are Hernnhuter, The Shepherd Girl, Cupid—and even the Roman Emperor!— The streets are paved quite sturdily, with natural, fine-grained stone, which is used also for tiles, snuff boxes, etc. The equipages for hire are very good: they consist of comfortable two-seater carriages drawn by one or two horses. In every carriage, there is a small mirror between the front glasses. The cabmen drive very fast. My lackey, trying to find a carriage for me one day on the Graben, was scrutinizing the numbers on them very carefully.— “Which number are you looking for?” I asked.— “Sir, I am trying to make sure I don't hire the carriage with number 308.”— “Why so?”— “The Russian emperor deigned to ride in it, and now the owner of the carriage asks riders to pay double the charge.”— “Find it for me,” I answered: “I will pay four times more.” The old man opened his eyes wide at me and then suddenly came to his senses. “Ach, ja! Sie sind ja, halt, ein Russe!” This carriage, however, was not available that day.

Vienna abounds in public promenades. Under the bastion, right in front of the imperial palace, there are two very beautiful gardens, the Hofgarten and the Volksgarten. One of the main features of the People's Garden is the Temple of Theseus, modelled on the Athenian temple, and it has the finest sculpture in it—Theseus taming the Minotaur, a work by Canova.

Most of the three-dimensional (3D) cinema discussed or mentioned in this book originated in the United States and Europe, with some nods to work done in China, India, and Japan. Many other countries experimented with stereoscopic motion pictures in the early 1950s (e.g., Hungary, the Soviet Union, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico), but each produced only a few films in the process and experienced nothing like the 1952–55 boomlet in Hollywood. In the post-Avatar period, 2010–20, digital 3D movies were widely popular and produced by many non-Western industries, but only a handful of such films appeared outside of their domestic markets either in theaters or on 3D Bluray discs. When the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21 ravaged the world's film industries, stereoscopic films nearly disappeared altogether because they could not be viably exploited in either theaters, due to the possibility of viral infection, or homes, due to the scarcity of 3D-capable televisions since 2016. The omission of non-Western cinema cultures from this study is therefore due to a lack of accessibility rather than critical choice.

Now it would be appropriate to describe the way of life in Vienna, sketch the different levels of the local society, castigate the aristocracy, as is customary in travel accounts. But I do not have an opportunity to do so. I have not been introduced in Vienna society, do not know either its broad or narrow circles; I am familiar only with the exterior part of Vienna. During the very first day of my stay in the capital of Austria, I went to the opera and found myself among my countrymen. In the first rows of the stalls, I found the secretaries of our embassy, K. A. Zherve and A. P. Adelung, my old acquaintance Y. N. Tolstoy, I. L. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who came to Vienna as a diplomatic courier, A. A. Iskritsky, Prince Baryatinsky, and N. F. Remer, who are here to take the Austrian thermal waters. Plenty of acquaintances, plenty of guides: I was inseparable from them. Y. N. Tolstoy, on his way to Paris, was staying in apartments in the same corridor with me. I saw him in the mornings and spent evenings at tea in friendly conversation. We usually had dinner in one big, all-Russian company in the best hotel of the city, the White Swan (zum weissen Schwan) at the Neumarkt. Imagine a magnificent, tastefully decorated hall with up to twenty large and small round tables. At each table sits a special company. It is not difficult to distinguish the Russian table by the carefree, loud gaiety, by the exclusive use of the Russian language, which sounds inexpressibly dear in a foreign country, and by the abundant dessert. I will say here, to the point or not, that in Vienna, there are no common tables (tables d’hote), but people dine everywhere a la carte, choosing the dishes. This might not be exciting to someone who is not an inveterate gastronome. Moreover, in Austria, one is expected to be familiar with special restaurant terminology. Before my trip to Vienna, I thought that eingemachte Sachen meant jam from berries or fruit, but here, this expression refers to any dish served with a sauce. What is Uffieten? An appetizer served on platters (hors d’oeuvres): cheese, radishes, etc.

Motion pictures

The source of Émile Reynaud's despondency was apparently his failure to have invented true motion pictures, in which he was preceded by the Edison Corporation in 1893 and Lumières Freres in 1895. The Edison Kinetograph, actually “invented” by laboratory assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dixon (1860–1935), was a clever synthesis of existing principles and techniques derived from Eadweard Muybridge (series photography), Étienne-Jules Marey (chronophotography), and others that used celluloid roll film in a battery-driven camera to take photographic exposures of things in motion at the approximate rate of 40 frames (and later 16 and 24) per second. The Kinetograph incorporated what have come to be recognized as the two essential components of motion picture camera engineering: (1) a stopmotion device to ensure the regular but intermittent movement of the film strip through the camera (adapted by Dixon from the escapement mechanism of a watch) and (2) a perforated film strip (first innovated by Reynaud for his Théâtre Optique). Intermittency permits the unexposed film strip in its transit through the camera to be stopped for a fraction of a second before the lens while the shutter opens to admit light bouncing off the subject and expose the individual frames. The synchronization of the film strip and the shutter is accomplished by the perforations in the film strip, which is pulled through the camera by a system of clawed gears known as sprockets. This process is reversed in the projector or viewing device, with the perforations—or sprocket holes—ensuring the exact regularity of the film strip's movement as it passes through both machines. Because it was battery-driven, the Kinetograph was virtually inert, weighing about 600 lbs, and it could only be used inside of a purpose-built studio called the “Black Maria.” Furthermore, Edison did not initially commission the designing of a projector, so motion pictures made with the Kinetograph were first seen in a coin-operated peepshow device called the Kinetoscope. (In 1896, Edison bought the rights to a projector invented by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and patented it as the “Edison Vitascope,” so that Kinetograph films could then be exhibited to large audiences.)

If I had to use hot baths, i.e., hot mineral baths, to cure cold, rheumatism, etc., I would choose Teplitz as my place of residence. The town is small, clean, nicelooking. The promenades are beautiful: the Castle Garden (Schloßgarten) and the garden of Count Clary. In the first one, the trees are of incredible height and beauty; in the latter—a beautiful covered gallery in which one can partake of all kinds of mineral waters. There is even a small theatre, but no gambling houses: neither a bank, nor roulette—establishments, offensive to humanity, in which time, property, health, and honor itself sometimes perish. The high season was already gone by the middle of August; there were not many visitors, but among them was one, a dear, noble, educated man, a lover and connoisseur of fine arts and—conditio sine qua non—a Russian, who delighted my stay in Teplitz, refreshed my soul, warmed my heart, and left an eternal memory. In the company of the gracious Baron Fircks, I had rejoiced that he was not a woman; with Modest Dmitrievich Rezvoy, I regretted, that I, myself, was not one—a beautiful, young woman: if he had fallen in love with me, I would have lost my mind!— The pleasantness of Teplitz owes much to its incomparable surroundings: Castle Hill (Schloßberg) and the Milleschauer's large and small peaks, and many other picturesque places, from which the view stretches in all directions across a splendid picture of living nature that cannot be captured by still art.— Teplitz has the main market for Bohemian glass products: mugs, glasses, bowls, cups, demitasses, plates, saucers—all of these are made with extraordinary skill from fine, multicolored glass. Glass garnets do not differ from real ones in appearance.

On Thursday, 12/ 24 August, at six o’clock in the morning, I departed from Teplitz in a bad diligence. Traveling with me were a merchant from Leipzig and an elderly lady and young girl of a poor rank, but with a pretty face—both Bohemians or Czechs. I amused myself during the journey by asking them the names of different objects, actions, etc.,

Initially, I intended to stay in Vienna without hiring a lackey as I had done in Paris and in some other cities. Impossible! Vienna is such a strange labyrinth that it is difficult to find one's way. I spent three weeks in Vienna, went out several times a day, and could not do without a guide. The streets are extremely narrow; the houses are tall; on the lower floors are the shops, distinguished only by signboards; the shops, incidentally, look very similar. Vienna has a very original layout. The city itself lies in the middle and is surrounded on all sides by bastions that, in the past, protected it from enemies, but now have become the most pleasant promenade. From the bastions, a glacis, or a green square, runs in all directions, intersected by beautiful alleys, and behind the glacis are the suburbs, thirty-four in number, circumscribed by the border line that I mentioned earlier. There are many magnificent churches, palaces, and public buildings in the environs, but Vienna itself is fashionable, commercial, industrial, and the focal point of the city is the ancient, venerable cathedral of St. Stephen. In no other German city is there such noise, such fast traffic, on the streets, as in Vienna. Cabmen's carriages (fiacres) drive at a fast trot along the narrow streets, yet it should be mentioned that accidents caused by fast driving happen rarely. People say that the wagons, or wheelbarrows, are much more dangerous. The driver shouts, “Look out,” after he already has knocked over a passerby.— In Vienna, apart from the churches, there are few large, monumental buildings—whose aesthetic effect is limited by the narrow streets anyway—but the residential houses are magnificent, beautiful, and cozy.

Shall I describe Vienna? Shall I enumerate its treasures of art, sciences, history, and antiquities?— Spare me from that. You, my readers, will have to be content with a brief account about the impressions produced in me by what I saw, heard, felt, thought, during the three weeks of my stay in this pleasant, interesting city.

Stereoscopic prehistory

Most of us see the world in three dimensions. This is so primarily because humans possess binocular vision, although other factors such as foreground overlap, gradient texture, and relative size are important to depth perception too. (For example, the illusion of depth on the flat surfaces of paintings, drawings, and photographs depends on the replication of these alternate depth cues through the system of linear perspective.) Because our two eyes are aligned so that their fields of vision partially overlap, causing a slight parallax in which each eye sees objects from a slightly different point of view, their combination in our minds creates binocular vision. The distance between the two eyes of a normal adult is almost invariably 6.5 cm, and this binocular disparity provides cues that the brain automatically interprets as depth.

Humans since ancient times have also been understood as beings who create and manipulate signs—things that take the place of or stand for other things. We are the “representational animal,” or animal symbolicum in the term of early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Representation (or “re-presentation”), significantly, is the central characteristic of art. So, it is not unnatural that three-dimensional representation would become an important issue for aesthetics early in our history. By the middle Renaissance, such concerns were manifest in the development of linear perspective in painting and drawing, as noted above; the disposition of scenographic space in the theater; and the manipulation of spatial perspective in landscape architecture, sculpture, and bas-relief. Contemporaneously, at the level of popular entertainment, a cultural precedent for three-dimensional cinema appeared in the form of the European peepshow, which in the eighteenth century spread to the United States, China, and Japan.

According to Richard Balzer, a peepshow is a closed or semi-closed box having at least one hole through which a perspective is seen, which may or may not use mirrors to create its illusion; the factor of enclosure is important, because it gives the viewer the sense of approaching an inaccessible space and seeing a hidden image, similar to the voyeuristic experience of watching a movie in a darkened theater. Its origin seems to date from the work of Italian painter and architect Leone Battista Alberti, who in 1437 developed an instrument to view perspectives through a small hole in a box.

Finally, I am in Kiev. In my mind and imagination, I have always longed to travel there, as to the Promised Land. This city, since my childhood years, has engaged my fancy—nourished me with thoughts of great deeds of valor and piety in centuries past and with the eternal beauty of nature on the red banks of the Dnieper. My dear mother, who was born in poetic Malorussia and grew up in Kiev, inflamed my soul with this spark of love and respect for southern Russia, for the ancient, sacred city of Kiev. Plaintive songs of Malorussia lulled me to sleep in the first days of my existence. Kiev, with all its beauties, legends, popular beliefs, was the fairytale land my childish imagination sought. And the very language of Malorussia was familiar and dear to me. Even in later years, I could only with difficulty give up using some Malorussian words—so emphatic and soulful—in writing …

I cannot express the pleasure, rapture, affection, with which I arrived in Kiev, a city beautiful in every respect! After traveling through dark towns with tall Gothic houses, with narrow streets, after seeing dirty settlements inhabited by slovenly Jews, I found myself in spacious, open heights, on wide, clean streets lined with small, pretty houses.

Shall I describe Kiev? For those who have been there, my description will be weak and lifeless; for those who have not, the passing glance of a traveler who spent three days in this city will not satisfy their curiosity. It is only in this place that I could share what excited my soul, what aroused the sacred awe of great recollections. Do you want to enjoy the truly beautiful? Go to Kiev. It is located on sloping hills from which the wonderful view changes continuously. The old Dnieper draws its streams amid wide sandbanks. Look from the porch of St. Andrew's Cathedral or from the triangular platform in the Palace Garden at Podil, the lower part of the town, as it appears gradually out of the grey-haired fog! … And I enjoyed these views in the middle of October! How beautiful it must be here in the spring and summer, when the Dnieper floods all these temporary little islands.

On the 21st of August, at six o’clock in the afternoon, I departed from Prague. My kind friend Hanka saw me off to the diligence, and when the equipage started out from the post yard, he went through the side-street to the main street and waved good-bye to me one more time from afar. I had arranged a seat in the cabriolet, or coupé, but when I got into the diligence, I saw my mistake. The cabriolets here are different from those in which I rode across France, Prussian domains, and other countries of Germany: These lack window glass, but have only leather flaps, which poorly shield from the rain and do not protect from cold at all. In Prague, on the advice of my friends, I provided myself with a warm cap, a warm camisole, etc.; but it was not enough, and I paid for my imprudence with the bad cold. The part of Bohemia we traveled through does not present any captivating or picturesque views: There are hillocks and mountains, but they are unattractive, prosaic. The Bohemian Forest (Böhmerwald), a large, quite high, but not steep mountain range, lies at the border. On the road between Pilsen and Beroun, the conductor pointed out the nearby village of Ratzau, which is famous for one of its inhabitants. A simple, illiterate peasant discovered the means to cure fractures of legs, arms, and so on. He rubs the fractured place with an ointment, which he composes himself from different herbs; then he bandages the wound in a special way, and the fracture very soon heals without leaving any trace. He not only cures recent fractures, but repairs poorly healed ones after breaking the bone again. The injured flock to him from afar.

The next day was Sunday. When we passed through a small town called Teinitz, the people were walking from church, and I could see the Sunday attire of the local villagers. The men were dressed in long, clumsy caftans, with high waists, embroidered on the backs with multicolored silk; each one had a staff in his hand.