Happily, the young filmmaker Blake Williams, Texas born and Toronto based, has given his considerable energies he also works as a critic and academic to shaping a coherent history of what has so far been achieved in stereoscopy, and, more importantly, pointing toward what work remains to be done. Williams and I spoke by phone shortly after returning from four busy days in Tennessee.
Phil Coldiron Rail : In a recent interview, you mentioned that 3D has a unique aesthetic vocabulary. What would you take that to be? It's one thing to speak of the image in spatial terms, to speak of emergence and immersion; when tasked with describing the image's hapticality, its effect on the viewing body, its reorientation of how your two eyes function together and separately, the language is less developed.
A good example is Goodbye to Language's split-screen effect. There were gasps at the early screenings of that film for a reason. It was presenting an experience people had no language for, so it forced everyone to respond merely in deep breaths.
That was one of the goals of doing the 3D program in Knoxville, having this opportunity to show many short films that are each using a different stereoscopic format—like ChromaDepth, anaglyph, or Pulfrich—and using different gestures or evoking different types of visual responses that can be experienced. Rail: Here it would be useful for you to describe what you understand that shot in the Godard film to be doing, since to my mind it isolates the physiological concerns which have always been present in your work.
And I think that impulse to blink and view the film interchangeably between your right and left eyes is of course there and a significant way to experience that moment. There's, as you say, this physiological or even biological way that the shot breaks us out of the experience of being human, of being embodied in the shape of a person, with heads that have eyes that—at least for able-bodied people—see the world with binocular vision.
