After the end of the main unit of the 11th Beijing Film Festival, 14 VR short films such as "Blind Girl", "Change" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" were screened in Shougang Park. There is much discussion in the academic community about the relationship between VR and film. Proponents believe that VR's immersion, interactivity and conceptuality can greatly expand the boundaries of film creation and feeling; opponents oppose the invasion of VR on the grounds that the sense of boundaries and closure required by movies and the sense of security and low substitution required by audiences to watch movies are opposed. Although 2016 did not become the first year of VR as fans expected, vr movie creation attempts have now blossomed.
The power attribute of "seeing"
Released in the underwater exhibition hall of the Blast Furnace No. 3 in Shougang, "The Executioner at Home" is the third VR film I have watched (or "experienced"), which won the best VR film at the 77th Venice Film Festival. The movie begins with a box of matches: I have to go through the joystick, polish the matches with a virtual hand, and land in the room. There are three doors, a window and a basement in the room, and the doors of each space can be pushed open, and the audience can control the handle and get infinitely closer to watch the furnishings in the house, the installations, the people's every move, and the interesting thing is that the people in the room will eventually see you.
The importance of "seeing" in movies cannot be overemphasized. One of the conventions of traditional narrative cinema is that the camera must hide itself to create a "dreaming" environment, under the premise that the character cannot look directly at the camera, otherwise the audience will realize the fictionality of the dream. Although many film works have tried to break the convention: at the famous end of the New Wave masterpiece "Four Hundred Blows", the young Antoine ran out of the confinement room, ran through the playground and the low jungle, ran to the beach, looked at the sea for a while, looked at the camera, the camera zoomed in and then froze, and the eyes were full of questions to the audience: "Where can I go after my family, school, and society have abandoned me?" The audience feels the impotence of the skin and a sense of guilt of being the same perpetrator. But in most films, viewers as viewers have the absolute upper hand: safely watching the characters' every move while hiding in the dark without fear of being discovered or offended. In addition, another "unspoken rule" of filmmaking is that the attribution of "seeing" often implies the attribution of power, which is why the feminist film theorist Laura Murvie keenly exposes the triple gaze that women suffer in film: male actors, male directors, and male audiences, which makes them absolute objects and objects of oppression. Therefore, the power of gaze means to a certain extent the right to act, the right to take the initiative, and the right to execute.
The power to see and be seen "reversed"
The interesting thing about The Executioner in the House is that, on the one hand, it achieves a certain degree of "reversal" of the power to see and be seen — the audience is "watched" by the people in the play, which means that the audience must think about both "seeing" and "seeing itself"; on the other hand, it goes further than simply watching, and the audience is transformed into an actor and participates in it.
The title of the film comes from Carl Sandberg's verse: "When an executioner comes home from work / What does he think?" The film does not specifically refer to the "executioner", and it can thus be referred to as the invisible "big other" who caused the situation of the people in the film. The story is set similar to Hitchcock's famous film "Rear Window": the male protagonist with a leg injury peeks through his own back window to spy on the neighbors' every move. In The Executioner, the viewer has to peek into every space in the room. Entering the first room, a young man who lived with his parents, sneaked around in the bed like a chicken and a dog, and walked out of the room bored. In the second room, the father entered the house to look for his daughter, he knocked on the floor and pretended to look out the window, making an anxious state, the daughter in the closet suddenly jumped out, and the two laughed and played. However they "saw" me, the daughter quickly hid in the closet, and the father "slammed" the door in front of me; in the third room, the young nurse who tried to steal the gold ring from the old woman's finger fled after seeing me; in the fourth room, the old man who was used to hiding in the war turned over a record player in the messy bomb shelter, and the music in the bombing sound was gentle, quiet, and even a little romantic, and the old man slept peacefully after finding my snooping; in the fifth room, under totalitarian power, the black pregnant woman who secretly hid books, After hearing the dangerous knocking on the door, she chose to commit suicide, jumped off the window for the last time, looked at me, and then I stood in the middle of the room, with an extra box of matches in my hand, and the door was more and more fiercely slammed, only to realize that she chose to die, but hoped that I would burn books to protect myself. At the almost "451 degrees Fahrenheit" style moment when the fire was lit, it was almost impossible for me to distinguish between the virtual world and reality, and the shock was indescribable.
Being discovered by the filmmakers means that I am forced to think about both the content of "seeing" and the act of "seeing" itself. The film presents several different character "watched" reactions - daily life is spied on is a legitimate anger, crime is exposed is obviously frightened, and the old man's reaction is the most intriguing: just a second of hesitation, and then continue to sleep - in war, bombing, violence, death becomes routine, when there is nothing to lose in life, small "being watched" is not offensive, at this time watching becomes one of the violence of invading life, it becomes commonplace. This further points to a more serious future: the possible consequences of the dailyization of power – the habituation of power. Similarly, the viewer will reflect on the mentality of being "watched" several times: after scaring the offender away, a sense of justice arises, disturbing the father and daughter to play is guilty, and looking at the elderly is speechless and powerless.
VR movies in response to the streaming crisis and home theater
Beyond watching, we continue to discuss "experiences". In the fifth room, when seeing a woman waddling and pacing, the first thing we get is the regular experience of watching movies: caring about her condition and being curious about what happens next; then, in a violent knock at the door, she found that the books were hidden, so she pushed open the window and stared at the audience at the same time, at this moment we felt a sense of connection to help and the impending feeling of death; but before we could continue to react, "I" became "her", Become the protagonist of the room frightened by the knock on the door: the woman decides to jump downstairs in the choice of whether to burn books to protect herself, and if I want to leave the room, only the choice of burning books, even "I" have no time to think so much, and the sudden rise of survival instinct makes me polish the matches without thinking. Immediately after, the fire burned and the pages turned to ashes. The momentSaint me lost the ability to think about action, and it became clear after I left the room that in an age of despair, the individual had little choice, and the leap of a black woman suddenly became particularly sublime. So far, I have experienced watching as an audience, looking at each other when breaking the fourth wall, and participating as a person in the film.
The author does not hold the view of technological optimism or cheer for VR to enter the film, but there is no doubt that technology provides the flesh for the film, and the development of technology always extends the path of film aesthetics, and more importantly, technology is often used to face the crisis moments of the film. In the middle of the 20th century, in the face of the television crisis in Hollywood, directors focused on genre renewal and created various blockbusters that were more suitable for theater viewing; theater owners laid a large number of open-air theaters in the suburbs to reduce the obstacle for audiences to go out to watch movies; inventors also continued to develop new technologies, with new attempts such as 3D, stereoscopic films, and olfactory movies, to explore the possibility of dimming and re-seeing. Today, movies are eager to embrace new technologies such as VR, 5D, and electronic sense of smell, which is not a response to the current theater facing the streaming media crisis and the impact of home theaters stimulated by the epidemic - if the theater does not provide a more spatial, physical, that is, only the cinema can provide the experience, it is difficult to retain the audience in many impacts.
Of course, the stimulus of technology alone is not destined to last. Rather than using technology to provide fresh stimuli and experiences, it is more difficult to perceive and understand the old and new experiences that human beings continue to produce.
(Original title: VR Movies When the Audience Becomes "Watched" and "Participant")
Source: Beijing Daily
Author: Yang Jianing
Process Editor: L061