See to Shining ‘Sea’

Not long after the invention of photography came stereographs--twin black-and-white images that, when seen through a special viewer, fused into one three-dimensional scene. It was a simple technique but an overwhelmingly popular one, and stereo viewers were common in middle-class American homes by the late 1800s.

Things have come a long way since then, of course. With the latest Imax 3-D movies, color and motion are delivered with convincing high-tech precision on a huge screen that fills the audience’s field of vision. Theaters that can accommodate the format are going up around the country, and backers of the medium predict limitless possibilities.

But a funny thing happens in “Across the Sea of Time,” the latest Imax 3-D film, which opens today in Irvine. The film sets scenes of present-day New York against turn-of-the-century Stereopticon photos and--surprise!--the old photos more than hold their own.

Here is Ellis Island at the height of the immigration boom, with lines of hopeful new Americans waiting to be probed and prodded by doctors who will weed out the sickly. Here are beaming young bathers at Coney Island, and street throngs in a teeming neighborhood of tenements. The transfer to Imax, with its immense scale, is so successful it’s easy to feel one could walk into the scenes.

Sure, the images are static. Sure, they’re black and white. But while the present-day scenes swoop along on a roller coaster or scream down subway tracks, the Stereopticon photos hold a quieter power. It’s a power that Steven Low, director of “Across the Sea of Time,” readily acknowledges.

“To sit in the theater and look into the eyes of these people, it’s quite an emotional thing for me. You’re really looking at who we were,” Low says. “It doesn’t look that long ago when you’re looking at these people on the beach, and they’ve already lived their lives and gone. . . . I find it very poignant.”

Steve Thomas admits he’s prejudiced--he manages the huge collection of stereographs and stereographic negatives at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside from which those in “Across the Sea of Time” were culled--but to his mind, the scenes of old New York in the new Imax 3-D film steal the show. He’s been working with stereographs all his professional career, but seeing them projected on a 6 1/2-story-high screen left him “overwhelmed,” he says.

“Across the Sea of Time” is in essence a big, moving postcard of New York, unabashed in its affection for the city.

Indeed, says Low, the film (a Sony Pictures Classics release) was designed primarily for tourists as a standing attraction at the Imax 3-D theater at Lincoln Center in New York. The idea to incorporate old Stereopticon photos of the city came early in the project’s inception, but Low wasn’t sure how well it would work.

Using still photographs in the documentary format was not new to Low, who used old black-and-white images in his 2-D Imax film “Titanica.” There’s even some family history involved--Low’s father, Colin, used still pictures in a documentary called “City of Gold” in the 1950s and made the first Imax 3-D film, for Expo ’86 in Vancouver.

The photos in “Titanica” were made from 8-by-10 negatives, however, while stereographic negatives are much smaller (as small as 2 1/4 inches square), and Low worried that with the lower resolution, the images wouldn’t translate to the huge Imax format.

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Some test shots, however, dispelled any concerns. The negatives were used to make 16-by-20 prints, which were then mounted on a stand and shot with the Imax 3-D camera. “The results were quite amazing,” Low says. “We were pretty blown away.”

The California Museum of Photography, a department of UC Riverside, holds the huge Keystone Mast Collection, which comprises hundreds of thousands of stereographs and negatives. With the help of Thomas, researcher Jennifer Carter sifted through the collection and chose the ones used in “Across the Sea of Time.”

“There were thousands of pictures of New York,” Low says. “The best photographs actually were of New York, because that’s where so many of the photographers were based.” In the end, 15 were chosen for the film.

As a framing device, writer and executive producer Andrew Gellis invented the character of 11-year-old Tomas, a Russian who arrives in New York as a stowaway. A relative of the boy had come to the city late in the 19th century and later became a stereographic photographer; Tomas, armed with his ancestor’s letters and a handful of his old Stereopticon photos, retraces his steps.

Low, a veteran of the 2-D Imax format, says he sees the emergence of 3-D as more than a gimmick. “We’re a 3-D animal. [Imax 3-D] is a facsimile of life, and the closer you get to that, the greater the impact will be.

“I don’t think it hurts the narrative at all. This is just part of good storytelling, part of the suspension of disbelief. My belief is that eventually all narrative film will be three-dimensional. It’s purely a technical problem, not an aesthetic one.”

And with the advances made in the Imax format, he feels, any remaining technical concerns “are very quickly being overcome.”

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Meanwhile, the marriage of old and new 3-D technology may extend into future Imax productions. Thomas reports that Sony Pictures Classics has licensed other images in the Riverside collection; a spokesman for the company confirms that other such projects may emerge, but nothing is firm.

For Thomas, the exposure that comes from “Across the Sea of Time” helps bring the collection to the attention of the public. Since coming to UC Riverside in 1979, it has been used mostly by academic researchers.

The holdings were once the company property of the Keystone View Co., the last and largest of the stereoscopic firms (the basic premise lived on in Viewmaster reels--familiar, no doubt, to most baby boomers). Keystone was active in commercial stereography until the 1930s, by which time motion pictures and other innovations had eroded the stereograph’s appeal.

Stereographs, coming before photographs could be reproduced in newspapers, depicted everything from city views to natural wonders to wars and other news events. The popularity of stereographs peaked in the 1870s in the United States and Europe, then began to decline.

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In the U.S., however, a company called Underwood & Underwood sparked a resurgence through door-to-door and subscription sales and by tapping educational and public-library markets. Keystone arose as a competitor and later bought out Underwood and Underwood and other smaller firms.

Negatives from all those firms now reside at the Riverside museum. The success of “Across the Sea of Time” and any subsequent projects will not only help raise the collection’s public profile, it will also aid in its preservation.

Licensing fees, Thomas says, will help pay to protect the more than 200,000 fragile glass negatives against earthquake damage.