Long before the mid-century 3D boom or today’s IMAX spectacles, The Power of Love became the first feature-length 3D motion picture shown to a commercial audience when it premiered at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel Theater on September 27, 1922.
The film used the Fairall–Elder stereoscopic process, developed by producer and inventor Harry K. Fairall with cinematographer Robert F. Elder. Their custom dual-camera system recorded two views of each scene from slightly different horizontal positions, approximating the separate perspectives of human eyes. For exhibition, those views were combined in a red-and-green anaglyph print and seen through matching colored glasses, creating the illusion of depth.
Its most unusual innovation came at the conclusion. Viewers could use the red or green lens to isolate one of two endings—one happy, one tragic—making The Power of Love an exceptionally early experiment in audience-directed narrative, even if it was not “interactive” in the modern, game-like sense.
The film is now considered lost, which makes the Fairall–Elder camera and surviving documentation especially important artifacts of cinema history.
Image above: The Fairall–Elder camera used to shoot the film, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
