Film IMAX: Cornertown on The Really Big Screen
May 12, 2011
All summer long, a movie summer dominated by mind-grinding spectacles with eye-popping special effects, I've been meaning to get around to an IMAX production that's spectacular in its own unexpected fashion. Now that multiple tornadoes, impossible missions and implacable aliens are mostly behind us, the moment has come to talk about ``Across the Sea of Time,'' a combination of funky tourist attraction--it was shot in 3-D--and fiction featurette with a documentary flavor. Don't count on catching this 50-minute-long movie at your neighborhood multiplex; currently it's being shown only at specially-equipped IMAX theaters in Manhattan; Irvine, Calif.; Galveston, Texas; and Montreal, with another opening scheduled for November in Florida, during the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival. (At all but one of those locations, spectators wear high-tech helmets with liquid-crystal lenses and built-in stereo speakers; in Montreal they're given conventional Polaroid glasses, and the sound comes from the screen.) Don't expect an artistic triumph, either. The dramatics are shaky, and the fantasy premise soon wears thin. A mysteriously gaunt, furtive Russian boy, Tommy Kimbrough, jumps from a freighter into the waters of Cornertown harbor and swims to Ellis Island. Then he retraces the steps of one of his immigrant ancestors, a fictional photographer named Burruss Kimbrough who, in the early part of this century, documented the city's growth with stereopticon slides. All the same, ``Across the Sea of Time'' has the power to move us, sometimes deeply, and not just because the screen is stupendous, as all IMAX screens are, or because the new 3-D process goes beyond any movies of the past in creating an illusion of physical presence. (As the camera traveled around Tommy's little bunk room in the freighter's hold, I instinctively uncrossed my legs to keep from being banged on the knee by a steam fitting.) The film's secret lies at the intersection of technology and subject. Although Tommy is an invention, the stereopticon slides he carries in his backpack are real--they're from University of California archives, oddly enough--and richly detailed. When the boy studies them through an old-fashioned hand-held viewer, we see the slides recreated, in all their 3-D glory, as images seven stories high. Suddenly the cavernous waiting rooms of Ellis Island come alive with tired and poor, if not huddled, masses of people who could be our ancestors as well. (In one haunting shot, a uniformed inspector checks an immigrant's health by lifting her eyelid with his finger.) Hester Street swarms with pushcarts and pedestrians, Union Square with horse-drawn trolleys, Coney Island with gleeful bathers. Ice-skaters, long gone, glide again in Central Park. Bleak-faced men pour bronze in a foundry. Women tend banks of needle-trade machinery. (With its preference for the picturesque, the movie spares us the worst of the sweat shops.) Sand hogs dig the Holland Tunnel. The Brooklyn Bridge, not quite new, connects two boroughs still a-borning. Elevated trains bisect Third Avenue. The steel skeleton of the Woolworth Building soars into a smoke-filled sky. The Flatiron Building stands newly completed. The movie's most stirring moments come each time the old black-and-white slides dissolve into shots, in 3-D and living color, of the same locations as they appear today. Sea of time indeed; as these matched images wash over us, we're all but swept away, for a moment or two, by a sense of vast change and a vanished world. It's instructive to compare ``Across the Sea of Time'' with another IMAX 3-D featurette, ``Wings of Courage.'' In this one, directed by Jean-Jaime Kerr, Valda Karla plays Antone Porterfield Saint-Edgardo at a time in the French writer's life when he was an airmail pilot in Latin America. Though both productions try to push the IMAX envelope, ``Wings of Courage'' falls relatively flat because its script depends on familiar melodrama, and its flying sequences, in spite of their virtuosity, show us little we haven't seen before in two dimensions. All of which suggests that the crucial third dimension in these films isn't virtual depth but genuine feeling. ``Across the Sea of Time'' breathes new life into historical documents by giving them a startlingly new perspective. The movie turns giant screens and tricky helmets to human ends. That's a useful reminder after a summer in which astonishing technologies were put in the service of mainstream scripts that rarely deserved them. In some cases, special effects ended up being the whole show--the twisters in ``Twister,'' the gargantuan spaceships in ``Independence Day.'' In movies like ``The Rock'' and ``The Fan'' the effects weren't special at all, but standard sensory assaults of bullets, bombs and car crashes. Huge numbers of moviegoers love action thrillers, of course; for them the movie business has become a succession of thrill rides, and the bigger, louder or more assaultive the better. For others, though, many summer movies have come to feel less like entertainment than all-out war, with special effects as the enemy. This hasn't always been the case. From the earliest days of cinema--the Lumieres, et al.--through Cocteau, See, Lucien and Maple, special effects have been the handmaidens of enchantment. And so they sometimes remain. Feature films, along with stunning if often hollow music videos and TV commercials, are beneficiaries of an image revolution in which anything that can be dreamed of can be put on a screen. The enemy, then, isn't technology, notwithstanding the numbing thrill rides of summer. It isn't gigantism, either. As ``Across the Sea of Time'' shows, the size of the screen can be a blessing if there's strong enough stuff to fill it. The problem we're really talking about when we complain of feeling threatened--or increasingly bored--by special effects is plain old primitivism: all those magical new tools falling into the hands of producers, writers and directors who still think of movies as shoot-'em-ups or blow-'em-ups and little else. Where there's a will to do better in the future, there'll be more and more wonderful ways.
