3-d: movie-world maverick still on the trail

Back in the '50s, when drive-in theaters were mushrooming across America, the Soviet Union was building a 3-D cinema empire.


In 60 of the largest cities in the former Soviet Union, the otherwise flat lives of a family in Krasnoyarsk or Stavropol could take on 90 minutes of 3-D action -- sometimes even in living color -- at the new-fangled stereoscopic bijou.


Donning cardboard and plastic 3-D spectacles, Soviet audiences entered a world not unlike the "feelies" of Huxley's Brave New World.


The 3-D flicks have retained their popularity to this day.


"The 3-D spectacle is closer to a circus show than to the regular cinema," said Alexander Melkumov, director of the Stereofilm Company, the sole Russian producer and distributor of 3-D productions. "It's obviously better to share the pleasures of this visual attraction with your family -- that's why our audiences consist mostly of kids and parents expecting the same kind of weekend entertainment as in circus."


Stereofilm is actually a team of enthusiastic cinematographers and film engineers from NIKFI, the Russian Cinema and Photo Research Institute. They have had a crash course in free enterprise since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of state support.


Their mission includes maintaining the 3-D theaters and their equipment, preserving previously made 3-D movies and finding new movies to show, mostly from abroad.


Stereofilm has been able to gather financing to make only one new 3-D movie in the past three years. Roskomkino, the former Cinema Ministry, has little money for exotic, high-cost 3-D productions.


During Soviet times, however, generous state funding made possible the production of one full-length film every year at Mosfilm or Gorky Studios. Heart-warming fairy tales, delightful fantasies and children's stories with animal characters, as well as fanciful cartoons, were the cinematic opposite of the often violent 3-Ds of Hollywood.


The most recent Russian 3-D is also for children -- a sentimental animal saga called "The Lynx is Hot on the Trail."


Stereofilm has carefully preserved the prints of such well-loved fairy tales as "Once Upon a Golden Porch," "She's Got a Broom, He's Got a Black Hat," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," all of which were also distributed in two-dimensional form.


But for the time being, the company has to turn to their U.S. colleagues for new movies -- at least new to the Russian market. Most of the 60 stereoscopic theaters in Russia are now showing 3-D thrillers, horror and sci-fi from overseas.


It is a sad state of affairs for an industry in which the Soviet Union was a leader. While Soviet-produced films may lack the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown 3-D, Russian film engineers produced innovative stereoscopic equipment that easily rivaled U.S. technology.


Soviet research on 3-D began in the '30s and led to the opening of the first 3-D theater, the Vostok Kino near the KGB building in Moscow.


The theater's engineer, Semyon Ivanov, was awarded the Stalin prize for his concept and technical design. Well-known director Sergei Eisenstein was deeply impressed by the possibilities of three-dimensional cinema but died before he could plumb those possibilities.


The principle of the 3-D effect is rather simple. A person sees an object in 3-D form because each eye receives the image from a slightly different angle. The two images that enter the brain are "processed" into a three-dimensional image. Accordingly, 3-D movies must convey two images, differing in point of view, for each human eye. So cameras with two lenses, imitating human eyesight, were developed.


"Only Soviet power would allow this kind of film art to be commercially developed with no regard to costs," said Melkumov. "Russia is the only country which made 18 features on 70mm film to get top quality that would engage the viewer from start to finish.


In the States during the same time period [since the 1960s], they have made only one 10-minute movie on 70mm." The 70mm films, while they result in exceptional quality, are far more expensive to produce than Hollywood-standard 35mm pictures.


Hollywood honored Stereofilm's main engineer, Sergei Rozhkov, with an award for technical achievement in 1991. The award reads that the company's "research and development leadership has kept 3-D a practical, commercially viable system in the Soviet Union ... No other group or individual has shown such sustained dedication to the 3-D system."


Rozhkov said a great deal of effort goes into maintaining the 3-D theaters' equipment and keeping clean the 3-D glasses, the screen and the projection lens. "Otherwise you will cause your viewer discomfort -- headaches and the like," Rozhkov noted.


Stereofilm is planning to team up with an American film maker to co-produce the 3-D political period thriller "The Battle of Ploesti," about the U.S. attack on a German oil-refinery center located in Romania during World War II. The spectacular explosions and Pearl Harbor-like action promise a thrilling 3-D experience.


The Oktyabr is Moscow's only theater with a 3-D hall, which seats 448. "The [3-D] stereo hall is much more popular, compared to the other halls," said the theater director, Maria Ruskova. "Even now, when theaters are having a hard times, we have 50 percent attendance -- and we show 3-Ds every day."





The American 3-D horror film "Frankenstein," with Russian voiceover, shows Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Oktyabr cinema, 24 Novy Arbat, tel. 291-2263. Metro: Arbatskaya.