Fantastic voyages: how VR became a reality
A brave new world of virtual reality film is dawning, but will it prove as exhilarating and disorienting for modern viewers as the experience of early cinema was for the audiences who watched the Ciotat train arrive at the station in the Lumières’ short in 1896? By Marisol Grandon.
VR enthusiasts are convinced of the medium’s long-term appeal, both for video-based and interactive formats. “Traditional filmmakers are really warming up to VR as a storytelling device,” says Milk. “We’ve been taking meetings all across town with some really great traditional cinema creators, and everyone is bringing their own unique perspective to the virtual space. Everyone’s waiting for the dam to break and VR to really spill into households, which will happen very soon. What’s great though is the amount of support and interest we’ve received at this early stage.”
Certainly, Steven Spielberg’s enthusiasm for VR signals a change of mood in Hollywood, perhaps buoyed by Fortune magazine’s prediction that the industry will generate $150 billion in revenue by 2020. Notably, in 2015 Spielberg joined the Virtual Reality Company as an adviser. Recent endorsements from Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Pixar’s chief creative officer John Lasseter – and a tentative interest from Werner Herzog – have increased attention on the medium’s potential. Until now, both George Lucas and James Cameron have played down its relevance, with Cameron famously calling it a ‘yawn’.
While true VR art is scarce so far, there is a consensus that smut will sell headsets. As the literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman has written, “Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.” The 23-year-old inventor of Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, was quick to concede the inevitability of VR porn in an interview with the Daily Beast: “There’s a list of things people want to experience: fantastic things, and naked people. That will never change. We have naked people pictures going back to the cavemen.”
Milk and Arora, meanwhile, are confident in their mission and believe there is space for auteurs in VR. My Mother’s Wing, the latest UN VR film, is set in Gaza and features a Palestinian mother who describes her life and the unspeakable losses caused by the bombardments of 2014.
Waves of Grace, a short UN documentary about a Liberian Ebola survivor, shows life inside a treatment clinic and beyond – locations the media was not able to visit. It appeared as part of January’s Sundance New Frontier VR line-up along with 30 other titles spanning sensory assaults, such as Ridley Scott and Robert Stromberg’s VR spinoff for The Martian (2015) and blue whale animation TheBlu: Encounter, through to more gentle pieces such as The Rose and I, a handcrafted interpretation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince, from Eugene Chung’s Penrose Studios.
However we react to VR, the status of cinema will continue to be redefined, just as it has been following the advent of digital cameras and projection. “I have seen reluctance from the filmmaking community in embracing VR,” says Raby. “I have seen it here in Melbourne, I saw it in Mexico as well as Argentina and Brazil. But resistance actually comes from financial structures, not from the language crafters. This fear is symbolised by the question, ‘Is this yet another screen that’s going to take from our pot?’” Whatever happens next, the advent of spherical cinema will lead to profound questions about the nature, virtue and validity of rectangles.