LECTURES

D-3-D: THE RETURN OF DEEP SPACE
With the not entirely unexpected box-office success of Avatar, 3-D films are all the rage. But this 'return of deep space' had been prepared for long in advance, and it is not at all obvious, what reasons, forces or intentions stand behind this change in viewing experience and perceptual habits. The lecture wants to dig a little deeper into deep space by offering a more layered but also more historical informed account of stereoscopic images and three-dimensional motion pictures.

Thomas Elsaesser
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is internationally known for his writings on classical and post-classical Hollywood, national cinema (Germany and Britain) and film history (early cinema and new media history, the relations between mainstream and the avantgarde in European cinema). He is working on a study of ‘melancholy and mimicry’, and his current research interests include a project entitled 'contact spaces', which deals with the evidentiary status of sense experience and the location of perception in the cinematic event.