The road from Munich to Vienna runs through beautiful locales. To the left of the road is a settlement called Hohenlinden, famous for the victory won on the 8th of December 1800 by General Moreau over the Austrians. This place looks very prosaic and does not excite any interest unless one consults a historical dictionary. The first town that is beautiful and original is Wasserburg: it lies in a deep ravine on the bank of the River Inn, which makes a sharp curve at this location. In general, the valley of the river, winding between high hills, is very picturesque. The Salzburg Mountains look blue in the distance. Occasionally, the ruins of knightly castles appear: the most notable of them is Werdenfels. But there are sites even more ancient: a small place called Partenkirchen was a glorious and rich town named Parthanum in the times of the Romans. The Roman troops bivouacked in it during the campaign from Italy to Germany. In later times, when trade routes from the East lay through Venice and Genoa, the town served as a center for storing merchandise. The proximity of Italy is becoming more noticeable: in a small place called Mittenwald, the men make violins, and their wives knit silk purses: both of these items are shipped to foreign lands in large quantities. Just past Teisendorf is the Austrian border. Here, I said goodbye to Bavaria, which I shall not forget as long as I live.— We arrived in Salzburg in the evening and stopped for the night. Our departure was set for ten o’clock in the morning, and I hoped to walk for two hours through the town and feast my eyes upon its charming surroundings. It was not meant to be. In the morning, we had to complete the customs procedures—wait for the customs officials, open suitcases, sign papers. The time slipped away. The hour set for departure arrived, but we still were not finished. It turned out that the next scheduled diligence conductor was sick, and there was no official replacement for him. One old man among the passengers took the duty of a conductor upon himself—collected travel vouchers, fees, etc., and we departed after eleven.

After I finished all my business in Vienna, after I surveyed the main parts of the famous capital of the Austrian monarchy, after I visited the most interesting places in its suburbs, I began preparing for my return trip. Until then, I had been traveling like a philosopher, in diligences, haphazardly without worries and without care. Now I had to think about how to travel to and through Russia, where diligences are not available yet, and traveling by post chaise, an unaccustomed traveler risks leaving all his bones behind by the fourth station. On the advice of my Vienna acquaintances, I went to the best local cartwright, Brantmeyer (in the suburb of Rossau), and immediately chose a pretty, good-looking little carriage, a two-seater, but with a top that transforms it, if necessary, into a four-seater. The cartwright asked 800 guilders in silver for it, i.e., approximately 2,000 rubles, and while I was sitting in it thinking about whether I should take it, a tall, very beautiful lady, accompanied by another woman and some fidgety cavalier, came to the carriage door, and she said to Brantmayer: “I think I will take this one!”— “No, madam!” I objected: “This carriage is mine. Brantmeyer! I will not get out of it, without having received your word. I did not bring any advance money but will pay you in full tomorrow. Even if you send for the police, I will not yield it.” Brantmeyer liked this determination, and he said to the lady, “I do not have the power to sell you this equipage, but why don't you choose a different carriage? That one over there is no worse than this one.”— “That carriage is blue, and I want to have one of a different color. In Stuttgart, where I am from, all the carriages are blue. And why did you, sir,” she asked me with some discontent, “choose this carriage in particular?” With these words, she looked at me like Medea.— “Precisely because it is green, and in Petersburg, where I am from, almost all carriages are green. I am not a lady and not a beauty and do not have the need to differ from the others.”

Another noteworthy temple of fine arts in Munich is the Pinakothek, or simply, the picture gallery (see Figure 3.7, The Pinakothek). The museum building, original and magnificent, is located not far from the Glyptothek. The design for this project was completed in the year 1823, under the late King Maximilian, but the construction works began under the present king on the 7th of April 1826, on the birthday of Raphael. The building is shaped as a parallelogram that runs from east to west. On the lower level are furnaces from which heat is dispersed through pipes. The rooms run in three parallel rows: in the middle are seven huge halls illuminated by skylights; along the northern side are twenty-three smaller rooms, or studies; along the southern side stretches a gallery divided into twenty-five sections. In addition, there are two separate halls on the western side, and one on the eastern; the latter is for the renovation (restoration) of paintings.

The entrance is magnificent. Portraits of the sovereigns who collected the treasures of fine art displayed in this museum adorn the huge antechamber: Here, we see Kurfürsts Johann Wilhelm, Maximilian Emanuel, Charles, Charles Theodore; Kings Maximilian and Ludwig. Next, one enters into the large halls decorated with sculptured, gilded ceilings and cornices. The walls are covered with red and green damask patterns. Skylights illuminate the space from above. The frames of the doors are made of grey marble. The paintings are exhibited on the walls with a proper observance of lighting. It seems to me, however, that in the Berlin Museum, where light falls on the paintings from the side, they are lighted better. Additionally, the Pinakothek's galleries are partitioned into several sections: This division interferes with the greatness of the whole but is convenient for a connoisseur.— The first two halls display paintings from the German School: Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, van Eyck, and others.

The environs of Munich are not attractive: the city lies on an elevated plain (1624 Par. feet above sea level) bound on the south by the Tyrol Alps, which shield it from the southern winds and thus cause considerably harsh temperatures. The soil is sandy, barren. Forests and groves are very rare. The Isar and other rivers that we crossed flow quickly down the slope to the north, and in the summer, they overflow from the melting snow at their sources. As we approached closer to the city, the royal summer residence of Schleissheim appeared in the distance to the right, and on the left—small country cottages separated from the road by wide meadows. A large park was visible behind them. At the entrance to the city from this side, there is neither any gate, nor guard post, nor bascule barrier: The houses of a wide street (Ludwigßtrase) begin abruptly along both sides of the road immediately at the end of the open fields—two rows of big, magnificent buildings, in part finished, in part under construction, some merely foundations and others being decorated inside. The first building on the right side is a university: a huge structure, already finished in the rough. Next is an institute for girls and a school for the blind; on the left side is the Church of St. Ludwig, with the house of the archbishop and a seminary; farther on is a public library and other large-scale buildings constructed with delicate taste. The whole town is clean, neat, respectable looking. There are fairly many people in the streets, but no beggars. The sidewalks are not made of slabs, but are paved with small stones, laid out in beautiful patterns. Soon, the street split into two: the left ran past the old royal palace; the right, past the magnificent Theatiner Kirche to the post house. On the advice and with the help of a friendly travel companion, Mr. Fickenscher (son of a famous manufacturer from Wunsiedel), I took a room in the oldest hotel in Munich—of the Black Eagle on Kaufingerstraße.

Toward the end of the 2010s, many proponents of 3D thought it had arrived to stay. Some industry insiders were convinced that the process, in its digital form, was the shape of the future, and several scholarly books and articles were written at the time extolling its aesthetic virtues. The most comprehensive of these was Miriam Ross's 3D Cinema: Optical Illusion and Tactile Cinema (2015), yet all dealt essentially with two opposing phenomena—positive parallax (images receding from the screen in depth) and negative parallax (images emerging from the screen into audience space). Flat images exist at zero parallax, where objects seem to reside on the screen's surface. While the best stereoscopic scenography attempts to create spatial continuity between objects in positive and negative parallax, it is negative parallax that gets most of the attention. Whatever the degree of continuity, however, the stereoscopic cone of vision is only about 130 degrees. Viewers cannot turn their heads and crane their necks to see what is behind them. (In fact, in most systems significant head movement will destroy the 3D illusion within the cone.) The illusion of 360-degree space—and moving through it rather than simply watching it—can only be experienced through the technology of Virtual Reality (VR), which is the next step in the march toward André Bazin's “total cinema” (see Chapter 8).

As Ross suggests, stereoscopy is not merely an effect added to preextant moving images but one that provides “a unique kind of visuality” (a term borrowed from Thomas Elsaesser) by offering an illusory yet simultaneously tangible sense of presence, which is fragile precisely because it is false. Although three-dimensional moving images can be understood as a means of replicating natural human vision, they should also be understood as a form of illusion that makes the stable boundaries of the screen seem permeable and diminishes “the stability of the self in space.” This is especially true of IMAX 3D, where the borders of the screen are lost and stretch beyond the audience's field of view in a kind of floating window; in standard digital 3D, the edges of the screen are still highly visible and can conflict with feelings of immersion when an audience is made aware of them.

Renewal attempts

There were several stabs at a 3D revival during the 1960s before the 1970s surge in soft-and hardcore pornography stimulated by the scrapping of the Production Code and implementation of the CARA (Code and Ratings Administration) system in October 1968. September Storm (Byron Haskin, 1960), independently produced by Edward Alperson and distributed by Fox, was the only film associated with the 1950s boom that was released in both Natural Vision 3-Dimension and CinemaScope, as well as in Eastman Color with prints by De Luxe, but it apparently wasn't filmed with anamorphic lenses as were contemporaneous features bearing the “CinemaScope” trademark. According to Bob Furmanek, who supervised the 3D Film Archive restoration in 2016, September Storm was shot full-frame using the same aspect ratio as Bwana Devil and House of Wax (1.37:1) and then extracted in postproduction to create optical prints for 2.39:1 anamorphic projection in a process similar to RKO's SuperScope (see Chapter 3). Shot on location in and around the Spanish island of Majorca, the film is a seabound adventure about a search for sunken treasure that nevertheless features impressive 3D interiors and some stunning underwater sequences; it opened in 3D in a number of major cities in September but was released flat elsewhere (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The following year, Warner Bros. released the independently produced Canadian film The Mask (Julian Roffman, 1961), a fairly conventional black-and-white 2D horror thriller with wildly creative anaglyphic 3D dream sequences. The story revolves around an ancient mask, modeled on a real one used in Aztec peyote ceremonies, that causes the wearer to hallucinate murderous visions from the unconscious mind. The director had originally signed legendary Hollywood montage artist Slavko Vorkapich to design these sequences, but his script proved too expensive for the film's relatively modest budget (although he still got screen credit for it), and Roffman ended up directing them himself to create a psychedelic, occasionally disturbing viewing experience. Although they were part of a William Castle-like audience participation gimmick in which spectators were given “Magic Mystic Masks” (anaglyphic 3D glasses) to see them, Roffman himself regarded the film as an avantgarde experiment, which extended to the use of electronic music composed by Myron Schaffer and Louis Applebaum to underscore its surrealistic 3D images.

Hollywood at the brink

The year 1948 was a terrible one for the American film industry: television was spreading through the country like a plague, the anti-Communist witch hunt and blacklist reared their ugly heads, and the Supreme Court had ordered the demonopolization of the studio system in the United States v. Paramount decision, resulting in the “Paramount Decrees” in May. In 1946, weekly motion picture attendance peaked at an all-time high of 100 million, or twothirds of the population; by the end of 1948 it had declined to 75 million—the lowest number since the Great Depression—and in 1952 it declined still further to half the 1946 figure. It was all bad news, but the worst of it was the little black-and-white box called television. When it was introduced as a mass entertainment medium in the United States just before the Second World War, there had been argument among its promoters as to whether it should be marketed as “radio with pictures” or “movies in the home.” After a brief hiatus to accommodate wartime manufacturing restrictions, they decided to go with the latter—going in head-to-head competition with the world's most powerful leisure time industry, and by 1948 they were starting to win: in that year 1 million Americans owned television sets, and two years later there were ten times that many; general diffusion of the product followed during the next decade, and by 1960 market saturation was complete. After some fumbling attempts to buy up the TV networks (foiled by the Supreme Court's 1948 divestiture order), the Hollywood majors saw that they would have to fight the small-box cancer on its own terms—with image size, sound, and color.

First, since television was still a black-and-white medium, the film industry attempted a conversion to full-color production, stimulated by a conversion from three-color Technicolor to far cheaper single-strip Kodak Eastmancolor stock. (The now notorious fading problems with Eastmancolor nearly caused a generation of 1950s color films to be lost until digital restoration became possible in the 1990s.) In 1947, only 12 percent of American features were made in color; by 1954 the figure had risen to more than 50 percent, and by 1975 to 95 percent.

The Creation of IMAX

During Expo 67 in Montreal, two shorts produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) were presented that used 35mm and 70mm film projected simultaneously onto five screens, combining them into a single image in the manner of Cinerama. They were In the Labyrinth (Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, and Hugh O’Connor, 1967) and Man and the Polar Regions (Graeme Ferguson, 1967), and, according to Time magazine, they both produced a “stunning visual display […] [to] suggest that cinema—the most typical of 20th century arts—has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities.” But there were technical difficulties with the process that led Kroitor, Ferguson, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw to found the Multiscreen Corporation in September 1967 to design and build a single-camera/ single-projector system that would produce large-screen images with a very tall aspect ratio (ultimately between 1.42:1 and 1.90:1) for theaters with steeply raked stadium seating. Their system used 70mm film running horizontally at 15 perforations per frame to produce an area nine times larger than standard 35mm and three times that of conventional 70mm film, which at the time ran vertically at five perforations per frame. Projected on a slightly curved screen more than seven stories tall (75–117 feet), such images provided a dramatically immersive experience. Two years later, the company was renamed IMAX, which is not an acronym but an invented word evocative of “maximum image.” Appropriately Colin Low, one of the founders, later remarked “I always felt that IMAX should be in 3-D.”

In 1970, Tiger Child (Donald Brittain), the first IMAX film, was shown at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, and the following year the first permanent IMAX system was installed at the Cinesphere Theater in Toronto, debuting in May 1971 with the travelogue North of Superior (Graeme Ferguson). The first IMAX theater with hemispheric dome screen geometry was opened in 1973 in San Diego, where it doubled as a planetarium, and the first permanent IMAX 3D theater was built in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1986 for Expo 86, where it showed the first IMAX 3D film, Transitions (Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo), produced by the NFB.

A great deal of human energy has been spent in trying to make flat surfaces look three dimensional. This is in part an effort to extend human vision with the promise that the depth perspective (and perhaps life itself) never ends.

From the foregoing, it should be clear that in one sense the history of three-dimensional cinema parallels, and sometimes burlesques, that of twodimensional cinema—that is, it represents a kind of alternative current to the mainstream film industry (and, later, the gaming industry). When that industry began to experiment with sound and color during the 1920s, it also experimented with two-strip anaglyphic 3D; when it sought an audiovisual alternative to television in the 1950s, it briefly adopted two-strip polarized 3D; when it sought to exploit post-Code “porno-chic” and sensational violence in the wake of CARA in the 1970s and the 1980s, it turned to 3D again, this time in single-strip form; and finally when CGI and digital production/ distribution transformed the industry globally in the 2000s, digital 3D became the blockbuster gold standard for a decade. Beyond that, VR clearly signals a new phase for 3D cinema, but it has failed to materialize as mass entertainment, although it has been mainstreamed in game-like formats for individual viewers.

The ideal of stereoscopy, however, has ancient roots. To see things “solid” on a flat surface has been the dream of science, art, and philosophy at least since the bas-reliefs of the Renaissance, which themselves had a long history in the art of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome. Systems for achieving this end realistically and their commercial exploitation go back to the seventeenth century, and the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century ensured that they would continue after the invention of motion pictures into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The history of three-dimensional cinema then falls into several distinct stages. First there was the period experimentation in the formative years of the classical Hollywood system, 1915 (Porter and Waddle's Famous Players screenings) to 1951 (the Festival of Britain's Telecinema screenings).

You might ask why I developed such passion for Munich, why I talk about it more than any other city I visited, why I keep praising it. There are two reasons: first of all, Munich, located off the main road on which our fellow countrymen travel to France and Italy—the main destinations of Russian travelers—is not so well known among Russians as Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, and yet it is worthy of attention for many reasons. Secondly, in the new novel by Ludwig Tieck, Young Carpenter, the protagonist describes the city of Bamberg to his friend with great admiration, and the friend remarks that it is not so much Bamberg itself that impressed the protagonist, but what the city has to offer. Indeed, the young man experienced soulful pleasures in this city, and they illuminated this place with the most beautiful rays in his imagination and in his memory. The same happened to me in Munich: I was traveling there without great expectations or hopes but was met with the invaluable welcome of kind and venerable countrymen, spent most of my time in their pleasant company, and their conversations, tenderness, and friendship delighted my heart.

To start, I will say a few words about Bavarians. The local people are distinguished by frankness, honesty, coarseness, gaiety, and love for earthly blessings of all kinds. After a hard day's labor, they amuse themselves in country taverns with music, dances, and—beer. Beer is the essential element of a true Bavarian. The local beer, of a beautiful, amber color, does not foam much and is light and pleasant to the taste. What lard is for a Malorussian, cod for a Dutchman, roast beef for an Englishman, panade for a Frenchman—for a Bavarian, it's beer. They say that in the old days, the monks reigning in Bavaria systematically saturated the common folks with strong, thick beer that kept them in a perpetual hangover.

In June 1940, as the German army advanced through France, Ginette Eboué, a Guyanese philosophy student, found herself in Paris, a city I do not love. Eboué came from an important family. Her brothers Robert and Henry were soldiers at the front, and her parents, Eugénie Eboué-Tell and Felix Eboué, were in the colonies. Unable to flee France in time, Eboué stayed with a distant relation, while she looked for a way to leave and for something to do in the meantime. French historians love Paris. On social media during the Covid lockdown, they regularly lamented about missing their annual research trips and access to patisseries and cheese. My feeling was unending gratitude and relief that I was not stuck in the two-bed flat in a Parisian suburb that had been my home for almost ten years. Instead, I was in a two-bed flat in a village outside of St Andrews, Scotland. Despite having a view of the Eiffel Tower (in winter, when the trees are bare, and only if you lean precariously over the balcony and angle your head to the left), Paris has always left me feeling suffocated. Paris has vast boulevards, world-class architecture and beautiful, curated walks along the Seine, some of which we will visit with Eboué. However, it is in Scotland where one can breathe. Fife has space and colour: fields full of wheat or sheep, dramatic clouds span the horizon and the wind blusters off the North Sea. So, it is from the east coast of Scotland, in the drizzly rain, that we travel from Paris, to the south of France, over the Pyrenees, through Spain and onto Brazzaville with Ginette Eboué. We will experience the German invasion of France, the defeat, the implications of the armistice agreement and the emergence of two different ‘Frances’ – one under Phillippe Pétain in the metropole and one under Charles de Gaulle in the colonies. As we travel with Eboué, we are comforted with how this new reality contrasted with an imagined ideal of Paris and the French Republic while examining how our personal experiences of place and space engage with our historical understandings.

Ginette Eboué's narrative reveals the movement of a wealthy, young, Black woman through the highly regulated space of German-occupied France.

When this volume was proposed during the spring of 2020, we, as editors, considered the various obstacles that might emerge during its production. During those early days of the global pandemic, one such obstacle that we anticipated might emerge concerned the very impetus for the project: the Covid-19 pandemic. We, rather naively, questioned whether the effects of this pandemic were likely to be as significant or long-lasting as many predicted. Remembering the outbreaks of bird flu in 2005 and swine flu in 2009 that had dominated the headlines for months before being swiftly forgotten, we wondered whether the Covid-19 outbreak would likewise prove something of a ‘flash in the pan’. The thought occurred to us that, by the time of the volume's publication, the global pandemic that inspired its production would have slipped from the popular consciousness and our project lost its relevance. This, evidently, has not been the case.

The production of this volume began in earnest just as the United Kingdom entered its first national lockdown on 16 March 2020. It was as the United Kingdom entered its second national lockdown on 5 November of the same year that we prepared to submit a first copy of the manuscript to our publishers. Besides the hundreds of thousands who have died globally as a result of this virus, the knock-on effects of lockdowns and social isolation have irrevocably changed the lives of almost every human being on this planet. It remains unclear how things will develop in the run-up to this volume's publication. There is increasing hope that vaccines may offer the solution to the world's ills, although many remain sceptical we will ever return to what we once considered normality. One thing is certain, though: our initial suggestion that this virus might end up as little more than a ‘flash in the pan’ was most definitely wrong.

What is certain is that this pandemic has unequivocally changed how we think about travel and travel writing. Worldwide travel has ground to a crashing halt. Here in the United Kingdom, those who might ordinarily jet off to Spain or the Seychelles for a summer jaunt have instead fixed their sights on the likes of Somerset, Salcombe and Skegness.