Denis Gaubert's 3D Documentary 'La Vie en relief' Brings Jacques Henri Lartigue's Stereoscopic Photographs to Theaters

Denis Gaubert's 3D documentary La Vie en relief opens in French theaters on Wednesday, September 16, drawing on stereoscopic photographs that Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986) began making at age nine with a stereo camera lent by his father. The film is dated 2026 and runs 100 minutes; viewers watch with 3D glasses, a device the source calls unpleasant but fully justified here. Lartigue's output is estimated at 120,000 images, made as an amateur at the crossroads of a journal and a family autobiography. Though he intended to become a painter, his canvases never brought recognition; a major MoMA exhibition in New York in 1963 finally established his name in photography. The stereoscopic work is less familiar than the rest of his oeuvre. The snapshots foreground speed, explosiveness and flight defying physics, tied to automobiles, aeronautics and sports including skiing, jumping, tennis and skating. Beyond the images, the documentary details Lartigue's novel-like life as a pampered child, alongside his brother Zissou, a brilliant but obscure inventor, raised by a banker father who ensured both sons enjoyed an easy, lavish, high-society existence. Joy, play, seduction, wild inventions and comical accidents govern this dream life, sublimated through a unique photographic act of witness in which suffering and sadness are barred yet a secret foreknowledge of the ephemeral shows through — the quality that makes Lartigue's capacity for wonder so precious.