Venezia75: the day after. While I’m here, trying to draw conclusions on the experience at the Venice Virtual Reality section, I find myself remembering a conversation I overheard that gave me a lot to think about.
I was having a coffee at Lazzaretto Vecchio, where the VR competition took place, when I heard some people discussing the disastrous press conference of Biennale College Virtual Reality: from what I gathered (but I was not there to witness it), during the event a journalist strongly criticized VR products, comparing their quality to what we see in cinema.
The understandable annoyance of VR producers and directors to this statement was to be expected but it was another reply shared at Lazzaretto during that conversation that caught my attention: saved for one specific installation, this person said, the whole selection of VeniceVR looked a lot like an amusement park. Somehow, this second comment – said with not so veiled derision and made by someone who had previous experiences with VR – bothered me a lot more than the sad but predictable ostracism of film critics towards virtual reality productions they were probably trying for the first time.
VR and cinema: the final frontier
I have not had the chance to try every single installation of VeniceVR (even though I tried most of them), but I’ve been spending all my life with movies. It won’t come as news to any of you when I say that VR is, without a doubt, something different from cinema, in the same way cinema is something different from radio and radio something different from television. I am not expecting it to be anything but – and frankly, I’m surprised someone does.
Certainly, an analysis of reciprocal influences between VR and cinema is of the utmost importance, scientifically speaking. However, competences, narrative and technological elements, costs, even production times are all undoubtedly aspects that differ between VR and cinema. Therefore, a comparison should, first and foremost, take into consideration these premises and what they imply for the results.
Maybe the question I posed as fanheart3 at the opening press conference of Venezia75 to Susanne Bier (VR jury president) – what is the relationship between virtual reality and cinema today and what will be in the future – should have really been asked again after the festival, as Bier herself said, after we all had the chance to experience and understand both of them a bit better (and it is a question I’m definitely asking all of you right now).
The unbearable (…?) lightness of some VR
What worries me more, as someone who is studying VR and how it works, is the other comment, the sarcastic “this selection makes VR look like an amusement park”. And not because I, myself, have not found some installations to be incredibly amusing, but because I don’t see what is the problem in that.
Back to cinema and VR’s connections: when I think back on how our beloved cinema started, what comes to my mind are trains “invading rooms” while people ran away screaming (urban legends or not) or a rocket hitting a smiling moon. Back then, cinema was all about awe and surprise and even shock, sometimes, and it must have been glorious to witness such a beginning.
Now we find ourselves at a new beginning. In VR technologies, a single year marks incredible developments, as we saw in Venice, but the “awe-effect” has not yet been buried under tons of narcoleptic contents that in cinema we all declare to love (only to rejoice when we are presented with a “Tel Aviv on Fire” after we witnessedlobotomies and slow-motion skating scenes).
So, did VeniceVR amuse me? Yes. Should I count it as a fault? Definitily not. Do I want all installations to have more depth? To be about philosophical matters? To be complex works about the problems of our society? To be honest, what I want in VR is the same thing I want in cinema: to make me reflect on this world when it is the right thing to do, to make me discover things when there is something to be known… to amuse me when I simply feel the need to be amused.
I’m not naive enough to expect all these things to come from every single story I try, but neither I’m unidimensional enough to always want one and only one of these things. As with cinema, where there are genres and different expectations, in VR too we need different experiences: some lighter installations, some more action-oriented, some stories that make us travel, think, cry. Something, this, that VR does indeed share with cinema, with radio, with television: diversity, so that we can experience awe in all its nuances.
“Which way you ought to go…”
I am afraid one of the reasons why VR is such an elitarian passion is because many keep looking at it from the wrong perspective.
On one side, we have some, like that critic at the press conference, who are biased towards it from the beginning. They keep judging VR stories as if they were short movies; something that is comparable to analyse a TV-series with literature criteria. There are elements they share, sure; but there are also many they don’t. These elements still need to be studied in deep to understand what is in front of us, starting from the active role of an audience which follows different rules to the ones we are used to.
On the other side, some who are almost VR experts are still looking in VR stories for those quality aspects that would make a movie a good movie, but that do not always make it an experience worth living. And virtual reality stories, to me at least, are all about experience.
I guess that, while not minding it at all, I would not use the definition of amusement park to define what Lazzaretto Vecchio has been to me this year. It is way too reductive, in my opinion, to describe all that I found there. But if a single word is needed, well, I’d rather choose Wonderland. A place where everything feels possible, where you witness something new coming to life before your eyes and where the intellectual stimulation, and even more the emotional one, are at their highest.