Review by Andrew Swafford
Cinema’s third dimension is perhaps its most underrated. Although 3D-IMAX did have a brief heyday in the 2000s and 2010s thanks to the immersive world James Cameron technician-ed into existence with Avatar, its popular use never transcended beyond being a rollercoaster simulator (and has unfortunately devolved into the unbearable ordeal that is the 4D-IMAX experience). However, few tools have quite so much potential to open new doors for cinema than 3D glasses in all their forms and functions. My mind was first opened to the wonders of 3D avant-garde cinema at Big Ears 2017 (which I also wrote about for Cinematary). The fest featured a 3D film slate curated by Blake Williams, whose absorbing feature film PROTOTYPE opened the festival and who joined Cinematary for a conversation about Jackass 3D ahead of the festival. Blake Williams is both a craftsman and a scholar of 3D cinema, and his recent shortform work has been no less dazzling than his feature.
Laberint Sequences, Williams’s newest work, takes as its subject a hedge maze in Barcelona, making of it a filmic structure appropriately labyrinthine. Through the slightly graying blur of Williams’s chosen set of glasses, the film presents its audience with varying vantage points of the maze in no discernable order until the film begins looping back on itself. I counted 2-3 revisits of the opening image before I got the impression that every trip through the maze was unique, and that the viewer wasn’t so much restarting but moreso going deeper with every go-round.
At the center of the film’s maze is a smaller one, more specifically a repurposed scene from a 1950s 3D experiment called The Maze. That film, originally in black and white, is here viewed at an ersatz angle and beamed out of a laptop screen, the glittering pixel-flare and 3D glasses giving this echo of the past a washed out overlay of vague, spectral color. The characters in the 50s film are themselves navigating a hedge maze, after dark, with only the light of a candelabra to guide their path. They discuss the best past to the center, with one character ultimately declaring that there is no center to find.
One experience I imagine I might share with Blake Williams is a tendency to view my own life through the prism of cinema, getting deeper into movies not only as a way of having all types of experience movies can provide (3D movies and avant-garde movies both opening a myriad of pathways), but also to see life through new lenses and vantage points. Now, I have no idea if Blake Williams meant to suggest that there is no “center” to cinephilia just as there is no destination to be arrived at in questioning the purpose or direction of our lives, but that was the thought that struck me as I experienced the final moments of this extraordinary film strobing across my eyes.
3D avant-garde cinema will never be the phenomenon Avatar was – it’s even possible that Blake Williams’s new film will never screen for an audience bigger than the one that gathered in Toronto’s Lightbox Theater, much as I hope that’s not the case. But the internal structure of film distribution is changing beneath our feet. To quote director Kent Jones, “there will be no death of cinema. Rather, it is in the process of being culturally marginalized, which means that it is assuming a proud place alongside poetry, dance, and concert music.” Only those willing to explore every corner of cinema’s own labyrinthine history will find singular experiences like this one awaiting them. Provided they have the appropriate 3D glasses and screen, of course.