By Paul Whitington

As part of this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which opens next Saturday with an exciting programme from new festival director Grainne Humphreys (see panel), there will be a European premiere of Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington’s film, U2:3D.

Filmed using the latest digital 3D technology, U2:3D is a concert movie with a difference. Sporting your special pair of polarized glasses, you will be transported to a balmy night in Buenos Aires, where the band kicked off the South American leg of their 2006 Vertigo tour.

The first live action movie to be filmed, produced and exhibited solely in digital 3D, U2:3D was actually shot at a series of concerts in South America, using nine pairs of special digital cameras each operated by crews of five.

Months of filming in this multi-angle approach resulted in over 100 hours of concert footage, which someone clearly blessed with saintly patience edited down to 85 minutes.

The variously positioned cameras allow the finished film to swoop around the stage and out into the crowd at will, sucking the viewer into the live U2 experience.

As a result, the viewer (looking silly in his 3D spectacles, but then so does everyone else) is made to feel like a weightless floating eye, diving back behind Larry’s drums as he takes a furtive sip of what looked to me like cranberry juice, or right into Bono’s face which looms out of the screen towards you, nostrils flaring alarmingly, or into the secret world of Adam Clayton, noodling away to himself as usual.

The Edge’s hat is not penetrated, but that’s about the only place the cameras do not go. At one point you’re practically able to wipe the sweat from Bono’s brow (though why you would wish to do this I do not know); the next moment you’re jostling amongst a merry group of Argentinians many rows from the stage.

The 3D in this film is used very effectively and, thanks to that herculean editing job, the movie moves seamlessly from song to song, and concert to concert.

Digital 3D is a relatively new technology, and its ramifications for film-makers are only beginning to be explored. But 3D itself is nothing new at all, and has roots in the early years of cinema. The first attempt at what’s called ’stereoscopic’ or three-dimensional film-making came in the late 1890s, when British pioneer William Friese-Greene (who is credited by some with the invention of cinematography) filed a patent for a 3D movie process involving the simultenous projection of two films side by side. By looking through a ’stereoscope’ the viewer would converge the two images, creating the illusion of three dimensions. However the process was impracticably cumbersome, and not particularly effective.

Experimentation continued in the early years of the 20th century, and in 1922 the first commercial 3D film was screened in Los Angeles. Filmed with a specially designed camera rig and projected in a dual strip, The Power of Love was the first film that involved the viewer wearing distorting glasses, but the film was before its time and interest in 3D quickly died out, despite a series of other innovations.

The invention of Polaroid filters in the 1930s greatly advanced 3D film technology, but the outbreak of World War Two put an end to such frivolous nonsense, and the so-called golden age of 3D cinema did not arrive until the 1950s.

The advent early in that decade of the first colour stereoscopic feature opened the floodgates for a boom in the new technology. A craze for the films swept America, with teenagers in particular rushing to the drive-ins to don their disposable anaglyph glasses and be thrilled by the latest three-dimensional release.

The new format seemed particularly suited to action and horror films, and Vincent Price became the ‘king of 3D’, looming ominously from the screen in films like House of Wax. Sci-fi also got in on the act, in 3D classics like It Came from Outer Space.

However, there were problems with the technology. When you wore your glasses you had to keep your head still or the colours would go mad and reds and greens would bleed from the side of your line of vision. And the film-making was not sophisticated enough to capitalise on the possiblities of cinema in three dimensions.

Most crucially, the medium became associated with hack horror pictures and cheaply made B movies, and by the early Sixties was out of fashion and more or less discredited.

It bounced back, however, in yet another guise in the early 1980s. Using the innovations of IMAX and SpaceVision, Hollywood film-makers began releasing 3D blockbusters which soon resulted in a mini-craze. Small children found free 3D glasses in their Cornflakes packets, and box-office 3D hits included Jaws 3D, Friday the 13th Part 3 and Amityville 3D. But the technology was still not very convincing, and the fact that most of the films made using it were terrible meant that this craze too was very short-lived.

So will this latest phase in three-dimensional cinema by any different? The signs are that it might be, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there is no comparison between the current 3D experience and its dodgy predecessors. The advent of digital cinema has made the three-dimensional effect seamless, and a number of high-profile, big-budget films have been made using it. Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, though by no means perfect as a film, was groundbreaking in its exploration of the combination of digital 3D and animation.

Filmmakers are finally beginning to take 3D seriously, and Steven Spielberg is experimenting with a new plasma-screen 3D technology that will not involve glasses. This latest manifestation of three-dimensional cinema could turn out to be more than just a passing fad.

The European premiere of U2:3D will take place in Cineworld, Parnell Street in Dublin on Wednesday, February 20, at 8pm. The film goes on limited release on February 22.

- Paul Whitington

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