Films With Depth

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 916, 8 March 1930, Page 24

Films With Depth

NEW PATENTS APPLIED Another Revolution Possible ANEW development of great importance to motion pictures will be made this month when Radio Pictures of America adds third dimension and pictures that fill the entire space of the silver-sheet and ean be seen without dis- * /tortion from any angle in the theatre. These innovations are the result of the purchase by Radio of the Spoor-Bergren patents covering third dimensional projection, screening and, possibly, a new method of producing sound in addition.

Speech and sound liave yet some distance to go in reaching the stage when the mechanics of their manufacture are not apparent, and colour is still in the developing stage. There have been sequences in colour for a iong time, and even before the art of making colour photographs had become a fact, the old, old film of Pathe

Freres in their Paris laboratories coloured films by hand. COLOUR ATTEMPTS After colour had come into special ises, there was a full-length picture, ‘The Toll of the Sea,” which had nuch of beauty, although it was blurred in outline. Anna May Wong, the California-born Chinese girl, was its little heroine. Douglas Fairbanks made an experiment in colour with his “The Black Pirate/’ which confined itself mostly to monochrome tints with an occasional bright spot —Billie Dove’s gown of green, or a bright sash on Fairbanks, and there have been others. The most successful use of colour to date was in “The Gold Diggers of Brpadway.” Sound has become a common-place and is growing better as the studio engineers get more and more into the swing of creating noises and the actor's grow accustomed to speaking into the microphone. SPOOR’S EXPERIMENTS Now come the wide screen and depth; figures that stund out aud have i hickness as well as height and width. George K. Spoor, of Chicago, one of the pioneers in making motion pictures, has been working for four or five years with a scientific mathematician named Berggren on third dimension pictures, and believes that he has perfected them for commercial use. He has spent between £750,000 and £1,000,000. After a long series of negotiations, Itadio Pictures, through its parent, (lie Radio Corporation of America, has contracted for the use of the process, and promises the first pictures so made will be on the market in February. Perhaps it may be later in

the year, hut they are coming, and it seems probable there will be another revolution in the manufacture of pictures. OLD BEAUTY LOST There is only one flaw in the perfection of this structure. In adopting speech, the manufacturers of pictures have found it necessary, or expedient, to use the technique of the stage. Before the advent of sound and speech a new art of the screen had arisen—something different in rhythm and meaning from stage representations of life; a fuller, freer evocation of beauty than is possible within the limits of stage art.. In applying speech to the screen this has been scrapped and in its place the more limited methods of the stage have come into use, much to the hurt of beauty and the fine imaginative effects that had become part and parcel of motion picture art. Perhaps this older glory of the screen will return as directors, actors, camera-men and the various engineers In charge of the making of pictures become familiar with the new phases of the industry and bend them to their purposes, rather than be ruled by them.