2 Ways Technology Could Change Moviegoing, From Tribeca 2015
A screenshot from a trailer for The Enemy. (The Enemy)
As technology has morphed and transformed industries over the decades, you might be wondering: Will the experience of going to the movies ever change?
For more than a century, that ritual has remained about the same: You buy a ticket, you sit down, the movie plays, and you leave. Sound and image quality have improved, and you might wear 3D glasses to the occasional blockbuster, but the most familiar form of filmgoing –– watching an uninterrupted linear work projected onto a screen before us –– remains dominant in 2015.
At the Tribeca Film Festival this year, a side installation called Storyscapes presented two alternatives to this experience. Both used modern, or emerging, technologies to subvert or enhance movie watching. And while neither of them is likely to affect the dominance of a night at the cinema (or an afternoon watching Netflix), both offer tantalizing glimpses of possible alternative movie-watching futures.
The first, and most breathlessly anticipated, of these technologies is virtual reality. The idea of virtual reality helmets and goggles has existed for decades, but a new wave of immersive and high-definition devices, including the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, has tech pundits predicting dramatic shifts in the way that visual media is consumed.
A publicity still from The Machine to Be Another.
The most common predictions cite video games and sports, but the cinema is occasionally invoked, too. Common predictions for the influence of virtual reality refer to immersion: the way that a helmet, blocking out all light, and noise-canceling headphones, blocking out all ambient sound, might create a truly distraction-free home viewing experience.
But at Tribeca, the focus shifted from immersion to perspective; the virtual reality helmet was not just a vessel for film but also a part of it. Consider a project called The Enemy: Conceived by former war photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, The Enemy lets the viewer experience the Middle East conflict from the perspectives of both an Israeli and a Palestinian, challenging the preconceived notions of the viewer and exploring the idea of a hardened lack of empathy. “Is it possible to invent a new way to make the audience care, to have them think more deeply about war?” the filmmakers ask on their website. Khelifa uses the Oculus Rift to bring you closer to the other side than you may be comfortable being, removing the fourth wall of a film that might otherwise create distance or a buffer zone.
The Enemy joins a previously released project, The Machine to Be Another, which actually let you experience what it was like to live in the body of another person wearing an Oculus Rift. The project’s creators wanted “viewers” to experience being someone of another height, another weight, another gender, a different sexuality, all through the mind-bending capabilities of the VR helmet.
Other experimental works used personalization both to tailor their films and to question ideas of privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and more. Both of these experiences are available at home and do not require expensive tech goggles. Karen is less a film than it is a narrativized app, an invented “life coach” that lives on your phone and that gradually reveals itself to be more sinister and cuttingly incisive than you first imagined. (You can download Karen for iOS here.) A Web documentary called Do Not Track, meanwhile, combines a standard documentary that questions Internet tracking technology with a personal aspect: As you go through different episodes, the interactive film collects information about you, both through Web cookies and through info that you willingly hand over, to present you with a user profile that any major website can create and sell to advertisers. The result is a film that not only tells you about the potential ills of tracking but shows them to you, too, by mining your data and attempting to define you, as a consumer, as you watch.
Neither virtual reality nor personalization is likely to define, say, the next Avengers movie. But as artists and filmmakers continue to push against the limitations of the projected image, both VR and personalized interaction seem to be candidates to make experimental cinema more immediate.
Learn more about the projects mentioned in this article:
