Nederland in 3D

Shortly after World War II two Dutch men, village doctor Frans Reijnders – previously a doctor at Soesterberg military airbase – and engineer Frank Weber, presented their experimental 3D films.

Reijnders, a doctor with a special interest in how our eyes work, and Weber had developed a system to make it easier to shoot 3D films. They called it Veri-Vision, a technology that allowed for stereoscopic films to be made pretty easily using linked cameras.

Golden future

The test films they made included an athletics contest featuring Fanny Blankers-Koen and the first ‘Prinsjesdag’ with Queen Juliana. The latter footage in particular, in colour, made a good impression; it looked like a golden future awaited the two inventors. However, conflicts and differences of opinion between the pair led to Veri-Vision dying a quiet death.

Other systems for making 3D films proved more successful; for example, Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Dial M for Murder was shot in ‘stereo’, and James Cameron made Avatar in 3D in 2009.

Once a month, always on Friday

How Veri-Vision worked and what films were made using the system is explained by Eye curator Rommy Albers (Dutch film) on the basis of film clips from the Eye collection. He also talks about technical details, illustrated by looking at the original recording and screening equipment, which is preserved in the Eye collection.

‘The Netherlands in 3D’ is the first instalment of Meet the Archive, a monthly series on Friday afternoons in which an Eye curator talks about the Filmmuseum’s wide-ranging collection. Including stories about (early) film history, exceptional restoration projects, areas of the collection such as the collection of film journals from the Biograph & Mutoscope Company or updates on new research projects (‘Early female filmmakers’).