Seeing the Big Picture in 3-D

Stephen Low tried to avoid becoming a filmmaker, having spent “too many hours around film sets” as a youth, when his father was making notable documentaries in the early 1950s.

A self-described “outdoors guy,” the 47-year-old Canadian director--his Imax 3-D movie “Mark Twain’s America” opens today (review, Page 23)--recalls that he “fell into filmmaking” through the peculiar circumstance of working as a scuba diver in Newfoundland.

“I [got] hired onto ‘Orca,’ ” he said, referring to a 1977 Richard Harris action movie about a killer whale that bites off Bo Derek’s leg. “They needed scuba divers. Then they needed drivers more than they needed divers. So I drove Bo Derek around for the rest of the picture.”

That movie, “a real mess,” Low adds, led to other production jobs--film loader, camera technician--until he finally decided, “The heck with this. I want to make my own films.”

Like his father, Colin Low, who made “Universe” (a special-effects film that influenced Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”) and later the first Imax 3-D movie, “Transitions,” the son turned to the 3-D Imax format because it was a new cinematic language.

“I think 3-D is a much better narrative medium than 2-D,” Low said in a recent interview at the Irvine Spectrum. “3-D gives a sensible scale to everything [in the frame] so that it’s more natural.”

With Greg MacGillivray, George Casey, Graham Ferguson and a few others, Low is one of the more prolific filmmakers working in Imax. Low has made five Imax films in 2-D, among them “Beavers,” “The Last of the Buffalo” and “Titanica,” and three in 3-D, including “Across the Sea of Time.”

The idea for “Mark Twain’s America” goes back to 1993, when Low was researching “Across the Sea of Time” at the California Museum of Photography at Riverside and found, along with the 19th century stereo-optic photos used in that movie, archival pictures of Twain as well.

“We discovered original 3-D shots of him that had never been seen,” Low said. “I don’t think we would have embarked on this project if we hadn’t had wonderful 3-D stuff on him to start with.”

Three-dimensional stills--or stereo-optic photos--were common as early as the 1850s. People subscribed to 3-D card collections. “They would look at these cards through stereopticons, some very elaborate ones, which they had in their living rooms,” Low said. “It was a kind of precursor to cinema.”

When motion pictures came along, movement took precedence over 3-D effects. However, when it proved too difficult technically to combine 3-D and motion, 3-D essentially disappeared.

Even today, with the successful introduction of the Imax format, the limitations of filming in 3-D are still so considerable that we’re not likely to see any full-length 3-D Imax feature films any time soon.

“Drama is not on the horizon,” Low said. “I wish it were. I’d love to make Hollywood features [in this format]. But the economics are not there, and the art of the cinema is totally economics. It drives the whole thing.”

One reason for the problem is the high cost of Imax production. “Mark Twain’s America,” a 40-minute documentary that includes only short sequences of live-action footage, cost $6 million to make over 14 months.

“It could easily have cost $20 million,” Low said. “This format is much more expensive than the basic standard 35 millimeter.”

And more cumbersome.

3-D Imax cameras--of which there are only three in the world, Low says--weigh roughly 250 pounds. That compares with 30 pounds for a 35-mm camera. Imax film stock is 20 times larger than the 35-mm negative. Because of that, the sprocket rate of the film must be faster to achieve the motion-picture standard of 24 frames per second.

As a result, the Imax camera runs at very high speed and can only hold three minutes of film at a time; plus it takes 20 minutes to reload. (Standard 35-mm cameras hold 10 minutes of film and take a few seconds to reload.)

Shooting in 3-D is like using “two 70-mm films, pulled sideways through the camera,” Low said. “It’s six times bigger than the 70-mm film used for ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ You want big format? You gotta pay.”

If feature-length dramas are not on the horizon for Imax moviegoers, then what is?

“Documentaries--maybe,” Low said. “They cost less. But at the moment, we’re not getting much of the box office. It’s a complicated problem, and it’s frustrating.”

In L.A. and Beyond

The American Cinematheque’s “Jean-Pierre Melville and the French Crime Film,” one of the most enjoyable Cinematheque offerings ever, continues Friday at 7:15 p.m. at Raleigh Studios with Melville’s “Army of Shadows” (1969), one of the major discoveries of the Melville retrospective of two years ago.

What has made this series so potent has been the French knack of combining a surface realism and an underlying romanticism while dealing with questions of honor, betrayal and the workings of fate. With “Army of Shadows,” Melville took these skills and concerns and brought them to bear on a story of treachery within the Resistance in Occupied France in World War II.

Melville, a member of the Resistance, tells it as a gangster thriller, but obviously the moral stakes are much higher and the impact of this eloquent, harrowing film is truly devastating. The large cast is headed by stalwarts Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Simone Signoret.

Science fiction assumes the form of the ‘40s detective thriller in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” (Friday at 9:45 p.m.) It’s as if Humphrey Bogart were taking on Big Brother as Godard calls upon the old-time heroes to put down future tyrants. And as 20 years ago collides with 20 years from now, there emerges not only an anguished vision of the future and a romantic lament for vanished values but also an indictment of the dehumanized present.

Out of the tension created by the juxtaposition of the images of yesterday and tomorrow, Godard projects a terrifying portrait of today, for Alphaville is at once the capital of a distant planet and Paris now.

In this superb seriocomic 1965 classic, secret agent Lemmy Caution is sent from Earth to Alphaville on a double mission. First, he must find Professor Von Braun and convince him to abdicate as Alphaville’s ruler or kill him and, second, he has to find fellow Earth agent Henry Dickson, who has disappeared.

That “Alphaville’s” plot sounds like a parody of Flash Gordon (and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” for that matter) is precisely Godard’s point, for it is going to take men of the stature and sentiment of the old tight-lipped heroes to defy enslavement by technology.

But Flash and Dick Tracy are gone, leaving only Caution, a hero of countless French B-movies, played, as he is in this picture, by trench-coated and world-weary Eddie Constantine.

Just as he uses the “real” Lemmy Caution, Godard also uses the sterile contemporary buildings and settings of actual Paris to create his city of the future. And just as Constantine sets off a chain of nostalgic associations--it’s not for nothing that his bedtime reading is “The Big Sleep”--so does Paris, which we at once know is the present-day city yet accept as Alphaville, so careful has Godard been to avoid all tell-tale landmarks.

The effect is chilling: 1984 is made to seem already upon us. It is the creation of the atmosphere of Alphaville that is Godard’s particular achievement. It is an ominous, sinister place of dark shadows and harsh light.

Here, the master computer, that ultimate symbol of the triumph of logic, has outlawed love, and one who dares express it ends up being shot off the end of a diving board, to be retrieved in a vast pool by a phalanx of bathing beauties--execution as an aquacade, making legalized murder a public spectacle at its most banal.

Here, the master computer, that machine that does not comprehend but only fears human emotions, eliminates “dangerous” words from the dictionary--and we’re left lamenting the prohibition of “robin redbreast,” “weep,” “autumn light” and “tenderness.”

“Alphaville” will be followed by Raoul J. Levy’s 1965 “Hail! Mafia!,” which stars Constantine as a mob witness chased across France by American hit men Jack Klugman and Henry Silva.

Claude Sautet’s 1971 “Max et les Ferrailleurs” (“Max and the Scrap Dealers”) (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.) is an unjustly neglected gem made between the two films--”The Things of Life” (1970) and “Cesar and Rosalie” (1972)--that established the director’s enduring international reputation. All three memorably team Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider; that “Max” missed out in American distribution may be because it’s a genre film, yet it is much more one of Sautet’s classic studies of character than a crime film.

Piccoli plays a former Lyons judge of independent means, so enraged to have to let go a killer because of a technicality that he became a Paris cop in order to fulfill his obsession to convict criminals with iron-clad proof. He zeros in on a gang of shady scrap dealers in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, led by a man (Bernard Fresson) who had been a casual friend years before but has been plagued by bad luck. The warm, likable Fresson and his pals enjoy much camaraderie, and this easygoing leader of this gang of petty crooks has settled in to life with a beautiful prostitute (Schneider).

Then the ice-cold Piccoli devises a way to manipulate her into egging on Fresson to attempt a bank robbery, which will send him and his cohorts up the river to do serious time.

Warm, observant and wise to the ways of human nature, “Max,” which has Sautet’s usual intimate, subtle style, begins slowly and builds to a payoff with a stunning, unpredictable twist of stinging irony.

“Max” will be followed by an Alain Delon double feature. In Henri Verneuil’s “Any Number Can Win” (1962), an example of the caper picture at its sleekest, Delon is memorably teamed with Jean Gabin, an aging ex-con who needs the agile young Delon to carry out his elaborate plan to rob a Riviera casino, which becomes the film’s knockout set-piece. This traditional yet shrewd and perceptive picture is unusual in that the real suspense kicks in after the robbery is attempted. Also featured is Viviane Romance, a vamp of the ‘30s and ‘40s, as Gabin’s elegant, resigned wife, who would also like to go to the Riviera to open a modest little hotel.

In “Any Number Can Win” Delon plays a gigolo, a role at which he was expert, and Rene Clement’s 1964 “Joy House” could almost be a sequel. On the lam from having messed around with an American gangster’s wife, Delon winds up taking shelter in the home of a rich American widow (Lola Albright), in a provincial small town, and her young niece (Jane Fonda); both are profoundly attracted to him. Although stylish, “Joy House” doesn’t quite work, despite its intriguing cast and distinguished director. (213) 466-FILM.