Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1987 film ‘Blind Chance’ has the main character run fast into a railway platform to catch the just departing train. There are three segments to the film placed one after another – each showing things that happen to his life, with all the philosophical and political dimensions to it, when he either catches the train or misses it. In each of these episodes, the protagonist goes through a series of distinct set of events that are activated by a host of characters that he meets and interacts with.
Asad J. Malik, a USA resident with Pakistani origins, created an Augmented Reality (AR) work in 2018 called ‘Terminal 3’, where the viewer, after wearing a headset that gives access to the virtual world, dons the role of an immigrant officer at an airport. The ‘experience seeker’ would have to select one of the six holographic characters who have just landed in the country and ask questions to them as an immigration officer would. As the interrogation gathers pace, the selected hologram which is initially only in the form of lines and shapes, starts getting clearer until we get to evidently see the features of the person sitting virtually on a chair that is in ‘reality’, physically in front of you. Ultimately, the experience ends when the participant has to decide if the immigrant is to be let into the country or not.
These two works, differentiated by a span of about three decades each, share a thing in common. They give the participant a certain degree of choice in the experience that is being partaken. While Kieślowski places all the choices in front of you in a linier and detached manner, Asad lets you choose between the six characters with whom you want to interact and have an experience.
But Asad differs from Kieślowski in one fundamental way – by making the participant an actor and a character in the whole process, he ‘immerses’ him/her right at the center of the situation that could well seem ‘real’. The personal biases and prejudices of the participant inherent in selecting the holograms as well as in framing the questions can change the course of the ‘reality’ that could shape up the virtual experience. Therefore, while ‘Blind Chance’ has a fixed length of time that it projects itself on to the screen that which every viewer would have to endure; in ‘Terminal 3’ the temporality of such nature is decided by the selection of the candidate and the questions thrown at them by the participant. Kieślowski places three ‘realities’ in front of you so for your consideration; Asad stipulates you to shape up that ‘reality’ that most likely suits your temperament.
Getting into the realm of ‘reality’ has always been the quest with human kind. It could be either in the area of metaphysical ‘reality’ or in depending on empirical evidences to know the fundamental nature of things and matters, bringing in an amount of objectivity into the whole discourse. Art too, post the scientific revolution, got into the objective ‘realist’ mode – in literature, in painting, and elsewhere. The invention of the still photography brought a sense of ‘realistic’ representation that even painting could not hope for – and when these still images got movement in the form of cinematography, it became one of the inventions of the century. The viewer could now watch the ‘objective reality’ that would be projected on to the screen.
The level of ‘realistic’ representation went up a notch higher when sound got added to movement in cinema, initially in a mono track where all projected sounds came from a single source. It soon got into the stereo mode that had two sources, then five and seven sources in the surround sound projections. You not only heard sounds from the front, but also from the sides and from the back. Presently, new technology allows one to hear sounds from all 360 degrees, placing the viewer right at the center of the action giving them ‘real’ sense and experience of the action. The immersion into the aural ‘reality’ can probably be seen as complete.
With visuals, as the celluloid raw stock gauge went from 16 mm to 35mm, to Cinemascope and to 70mm, the theater screen sizes grew larger by the year. Dome theaters in science museums and theme parks covered about 180 degrees of the audience views horizontally and 100 degrees vertically. And over the past few years, screens that cover 270 degrees were being experimented with and were just about to be picked up when, as if by conspiracy favoring the virtual world, Covid struck this ‘real’ world. The idea – similar to the one that 360 degrees surround sound has, is obviously to ‘immerse’ the audience into the visual ‘reality’ of the action that is being experienced. Does such audio-visual immersion into the ‘real’ give one a choice of any kind? Well . . .
On the visual front, there was another trend that had been shaping up over the years – the projected screen simultaneously also got smaller and smaller. The television brought ‘real’ action right at your door steps and into your drawing room, the desktop and the laptop to your bedroom and office. And then, the mobile phone brought it right on your palm – you could have access to ‘reality’ as you moved from your home to a park or elsewhere. It made the watching experience less immersive as the surround sounds that were emitted from the ‘real’ world also had to be accommodated along with those that came from the mobile phone. And then there were events in the ‘real’ world that were to be dealt with. One had to stop watching the video if the train station arrived, when the doorbell rang, or when the internet connection was too slow for the video to be played.
It is not exactly an ideal situation for the traditional movie maker who often demands full attention from his/her viewer for the created work. Since there are other factors for the viewers to deal with in the ‘real’ world while watching or experiencing, the time that he spends at a stretch on a movie by logic has therefore decreased. Movie makers responded by making shorter episodic movies – some as short as ten seconds as the Tiktok movies are. These are the ones that start and get over even before your mother could call you for breakfast after ending her morning prayers or before your husband could even take off his eyes from the newspaper. The viewer now can choose to stop watching the longer movies, pick them up later on when needed, or maybe not revisit them at all.
Over the years, the visuals that the viewer watches have become so smaller that they now are threatening to come right in front of your eyes, to take the shape of your glasses. That is what Asad J. Malik did when he exhibited his Augmented Reality (AR) experience. Back then, the dome screens were huge and it gave you the experience of being amidst the ‘real’ action. Augmented Reality (AR) headsets, on the contrary, are smaller; they still give you a similar feeling that you are ‘really’ amidst the action, if not heightening it.
Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Virtuality (AV) are phrases that might baffle a traditional movie maker like me who is up till now used to the liner kind of a narration, even when dealing with a non-linier time as did Kieślowski. Suffice to be informed that these phrases represent a range of variations between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ world that are to be projected, participated, and experienced.
In the process of giving an experience to the participant, Virtual Reality (VR) totally cuts off the participant from the external ‘real’ world and immerses him/her fully into the virtual. Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) allows you to mix the ‘real’ world with the ‘virtual’ world, in varying degrees, and Augmented Virtuality (AV) allows the participants to manipulate the ‘virtuality’ which could include things like projecting oneself into the virtual world in some form or projecting even ‘real’ objects onto it.
Phew!!! It is a whole new world out there that probably the likes of Kieślowski might not even have dreamt of when he made ‘Blind Chance’. No doubt the above applications would be useful in training, ecommerce, gaming, and other such spheres. But what does it mean to the traditional linier movie maker? What would it mean to create a work of art in this realm? What would be the aesthetics of such an expression? And the theoretical framework for its existence?
Imagine a three-dimensional virtual world that consists of a house with four rooms. You are the ‘experience seeker’, as you enter the door, you meet someone in the hall and go through a series of events interacting with that person. You might then decide to go into one of the inner rooms, where there might be another character, with whom you might undergo a series of different set of events. Or instead of going into room number one, you might decide to go into room number two, where you would encounter a different person and activate a totally different set of events. So is the case with other rooms.
And then maybe you decide to come out of the room that you have entered into and meet the first person, if he is still there in the room, setting off another chain of events. If the first person you have met is not present when you have come back to the hall, then another set of events take place. Imagine the kind of variations that the participants would be undergoing as various events are triggered in varied scenarios. If the participant wants to slap a person, a different set of events would take place and if not, a certain other set of events. After the slap, if the participant wants to apologise, that would have a different set of events and if there is no apology, a certain other set of events.
As a movie maker, one would have to create possible set of actions that would be complete and have, as Aristotle says, a beginning, middle, and an end. All these keeping in mind the characterizations, plausibility and the cause and effect factor intact; not to speak of the variations in soundscape, lighting, time lapses, costumes and other such aesthetic elements that come into play in the making of each of the possible plots. So literally, for the creation process to be complete one has to be making multiple movies that have as many plots so that the participant can make selections as per his/her whims, biases and prejudices, and have an experience. Kieślowski could think of three plots and Asad, six. If one of Asad’s character took out a gun and had shot the interrogator/participant ‘virtually’ dead, that would have been his seventh plot.
Since these sets of actions are being created in the first place for the ‘experience seeker’, how many of them have to be created? Would there be a human design to it or would it be on the basis of the strengths and limitations posed by resources of the software or the hardware? If there is a human design to it – like keeping a certain set of actions out of the gambit in favour of certain others – what should that design be? Add to this the kind of interactions the participant would have with the ‘virtual’ world, and the level and intensity of them. What about the unpredictable design of the ‘experience seeker’ who is also an active part of the plots, without whom there is no immersive cinema at all?
And then, what happens if the ‘experience seeker’ who is interacting with the virtual world has one more ‘real’ life partner to deal with? What happens if two ‘real’ people enter the virtual world that have four rooms in it? The plot of these events would not only include the interaction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ but also between the ‘real’ and the ‘real’, in the virtual world. We probably have seen similar interactions in the gaming sphere, but how does it play out in the world of interactive cinema?
Imagine such ‘branching narrative’ situations in a VR/AR/ MR or an AV whose imagery might use ‘volumetric video’ (actions captured from all possible angles & processed into a 3 dimensional space to get the ‘real’ feeling of being there amidst the action) where you become and experience the feelings of a member of a family who is stuck in a housing colony surrounded by angry mobs baying for your blood for no fault of yours or you are a student of a University who is being discriminated on the basis of caste and is about to take a decision to end life or a situation where you enter the past to observe the unfolding of the events that lead to the killing of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in a ‘virtual’ space that could be generated using Artificial Intelligence, with existing B & W film footage of the ‘real’ as reference.
All these could sound overwhelming, but the possibilities are endless. It would by all probabilities mean going beyond the confines of moviemaking practices that we know of now. Experiencing interactive cinema might well get morphed into wearing dedicated glasses or headsets in small enclosed spaces – like say in the back of an enclosed truck instead of large movie halls. Although the technology is getting there and distribution of that technology hopes to get there, I am not sure if the traditional liner kind of a movie maker – the one that I represent – is still ready for it. Since we started off by discussing ‘choices’, I would end by saying that in a few years’ time we might be having none. That is when ‘immersion’ of the ‘real’ into the ‘virtual’ and of the ‘virtual’ into the ‘real’ could be overbearing and all encompassing. So, wouldn’t it be better to start claiming and sharing that space which is presently largely in the domain of the techno wizards?
This article first appeared on the October 2020 issue of ELIXIR, a student magazine of Jadavpur University, Kolkata on page 66 in the link given here.
Working Team of ELIXIR, October 2020: Samriddha Roy, Ritwika Chakravarty, Anustup Roy, Arpan Ghosh, Madhurima Roychowdhury, Ashabari Ray, Sudeshna Mukherjee, Arya Bhattacharjee, Ishan Dutta, Rodoshee Das, Rajarshi Banerjee, Akash Kumar, Pramit Sarkar, Shinjini Mukherjee
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