Cinema, as an application of photography, has implicitly broadened the scope of perspective. In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci explored the effects of motion on perspective. Even so, these problems were ignored until the development of Cinema in the latter 19th century.
Cinema implicitly introduced new paradoxes by presenting an interior screen as if it were a window onto an outside world very different from the surrounding theatre. A new type of illusory spatial reality is produced, so realistic that the viewer can forget their real spatial environment and enter the filmic space almost completely.
Brief History of Techniques
Ever since Auguste and Louis Lumière created the first moving images in 1895, filmmakers have sought to accurately capture/present spatial reality using a host of perspective methods/technologies.
For example, filmmakers have relied on camera movements such as Pan,Tilt, Dolly,Truck, Pedestal, and Zoom. And other perspective tricks have not been in short supply. For example, ‘Metropolis’ (1927) employed artificial Art Deco cityscapes (overt perspective framework structures), whilst in ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) director Alfred Hitchcock used Low/High-Angle-Shots and Long-Shots to enhance the feeling of a deep, cavernous space. And in the film ‘2001’ (1968) Stanley Kubrick created faux ‘satellite’ images of the entire earth before spacecraft had even taken such an image.
Perspective techniques, as used in film, developed rapidly over the next 50 years. For example, ‘Superman’ (1978), used optical special effects to depict Superman flying at great speed. Whilst ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) imagined an interesting multiscale perspective instrument that demonstrated scale and resolution changes within a perspective image.
Digital Filmamking and CGI
In 1982, ‘Tron’ employed over 60 minutes of CGI imagery to depict a character who entered a 3-D computer world. Later, ‘The Matrix’ (1999) brought ‘bullet-time’, which enabled a subject’s movements to be viewed at super-slow speed, but seen from multiple points of view using a type of ‘fixed-snapshot’ sphere-of-revolution perspective.
Next, as computer rendering/ray-tracing techniques became more powerful, movies such as ‘Lord of the Rings’ (2001) and ‘Avatar’ (2009) used live-action motion-capture, in which actors were overlaid with computer-generated characters (in post-production).
Today, photographic film has largely been supplanted by digital cameras/projectors, along with digital processing/storage/ delivery/display systems, etc. Overall, the cinematic perspective introduced dramatic changes in the capture, recording, layering, processing, and display of images of spatial reality. Whereby moving and motion perspectives have become so ubiquitous that a new kind of cinematic/television/video reality emerges which supplants—or at the very least augments—physical reality.
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