From Cinema To Virtual Reality. A Phenomenological Approach To The Experience Of Immersive Documentaries

From cinema to virtual reality

A phenomenological approach to the experience of immersive documentaries Name

Sarah Tavares Barbosa

Student ID #

6112936

E-mail address

[email protected]

Course code

MCU4800

Group number

00

Supervisor/tutor

Jack Post

Assignment name

Final Thesis [Abstract]

[Status]

Academic year

20152016

Date

31-8-2016

Words

25.269

From cinema to virtual reality Table of contents

1. Abstract………………...…………………………………………………………….……..2 2. Introduction………………………………………………………………………....………3 3. Methodology………..………………………………………………………….….………..8 3.1. Building familiarity with immersive documentaries……….………..………….……8 3.2. Phenomenology and the lived experience of immersive documentaries…….…10 4. From cinema to virtual reality: the technological transition……..………………14 4.1. Immersion and illusion in the cinematic experience………....……………………14 4.2. Virtual Reality: How is it used by the cinema industry?......................................17 4.2.1. Active embodiment………….....……………………………………..……….19 4.2.2. Spatiality of the display………………………………………………….…….21 4.2.3. Transparency of the medium…………………………………………………22 4.2.4. Alternative embodiment……………………………………………………….24 4.3. Immersion, interactivity and illusion in the experience of immersive movies…..27 5. From cinema to virtual reality: The perceptional differences…...……….………33 5.1. The sense of presence in cinematic experiences…………………………………33 5.2. The sense of presence in virtual reality experiences……………………………..38 6. The real and the virtual in the transition from cinema to virtual reality…..……44 6.1. Cinema and the documentary representation of reality……………………...…...45 6.2. Virtual reality and the illusion of reality……………………………………………..50 7. The subjective meanings of the experiences of immersive documentaries…..54 7.1. Case study 1 – Witness 360: 7/7……………………………………………………55 7.2. Case study 2 – The Displaced………………………………………………………57 7.3. Case study 3 – Reframe Iran………………………………………………………..59 7.4. The feelings triggered in the experience of immersive documentaries…….…...60 8. Conclusion…………………………………….....…………………………..…………...64 9. References………………………………………………………………………………...66

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From cinema to virtual reality 1. Abstract Virtual reality technology has been developed over the last sixty years, but only recently it became cheap enough to become accessible to the population. Among the majority of game-related content that is being produced for virtual reality devices, the production of documentaries that can be experienced with head-mounted devices is also becoming relevant. With these documentaries come big claims about the power of virtual reality as a machine that triggers emotions in the audience and that has the power to change the world. Through the use of a phenomenological approach that does not accept this determinism of the technology upon the lived experiences, I will argue that all the different aspects that constitute the experiences of documentaries produced with virtual reality technology are equally important for the full comprehension of the meanings behind the experiences. This study will conclude, then, that the emotions triggered by the experiences of virtual reality documentaries are the result from a complex and dynamic relation between the body, the technology and the world, not from a technological imposition.

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From cinema to virtual reality 2. Introduction Nearly 60 million people around the world have been driven away from their homes by war and persecution – more than at any times since World War II. Half of them are children. The only reason why I know this information is because it is displayed as a title in front of me, as I am about to watch the stories of three of these kids in a documentary called The Displaced. In one of the initial scenes, I see a young boy looking at the camera with a mixture of anger and sadness in his eyes. This is Chuol, inform the subtitles, which also tell me that he and his grandmother had to fled in the swamp. The image fades to black and I start listening to his voice, speaking an unrecognizable language that is translated by the subtitles. He is telling me the story about the getaway, about how they were surrounded by crocodiles, and about how they lost his mother during the escape. Another image slowly fades in, and now I can see the swamp. Chuol is pushing the boat, which gradually starts to move. The boy softly gets inside and starts guiding the small vessel. I see all of this as if my vision was the vision of the camera, as if I was siting inside of the boat, where the camera is positioned. In fact, I can do more than just passively stare at this scene: If I turn my head to the left, I can see the green bush passing by; the clear sky is shown if I look up, and if I l move my body in 180degrees, it feels like I am at one of the edges of the boat, sailing away while Chuol conducts us to some unknown destination. The experience of exploring images and sounds in 360-degrees, of feeling like part of the scene, is made possible by a virtual reality device, a head-mounted display that tracks the movements of the head, allowing the control of the angle of the images. This type of device positions the screen only a few centimeters away from the eyes, and isolates the vision and the audition from the external world. There is no frame limiting the image. All that is seen and heard refer to the content that comes from the medium. For many years, virtual reality devices have been restricted to only a small part of the population, mostly for research purposes. Recently, companies like Oculus, Samsung and Google have launched more affordable devices like the Samsung Gear VR and the Google Cardboard, both devices that are quickly getting popular among users. Through these devices, people can now access experiences like The Displaced, the documentary described above. Through experiences like this one, people can feel like 3

From cinema to virtual reality they are immersed in another reality. In an emblematic speaking, Chris Milk (2015), producer of The Displaced and of many other immersive documentaries, coined virtual reality as a machine capable of triggering deep emotions in the audience as it puts the viewers in the place of other people, acting straight into the consciousness. For him, virtual reality is a technology that has great potential for changing the world as it connects humans to other humans in a profound way that was never seen before in any other type of media. Questionings concerning how virtual reality technology affects the audience are also present in academic discussions. For instance, studies focused on this subject are being conducted by research labs like the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the Virtual Human Interaction Lab from Stanford University, as well as by the Interactive Media Arts department from the University of Southern California, among others. In a recent interview to Henry Jenkins, William Uricchio (2016), professor at the MIT and at the Utrecht University, and part of the board of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, talked about how immersion can make people react differently to the facts that are presented, with less indifference, sometimes going further than just passively absorbing the content. In his words, Immersion can offer a counterweight to indifference. It can lure us into being interested in a topic we might otherwise gloss over, can encourage a search for facts, or a desire to learn. Rational debate, as a mode of discourse, is usually driven by some sort of motive. Immersion can help to create that motive, but – at least until we develop better ways of shaping and directing immersive experiences – it is not, in itself, a mode of discourse (quoted on Jenkins, 2016). Uricchio also mentions that one of the big issues in the experiences of immersive documentaries is how they can change the way people process the experience, from a representation of reality to a real-world experience of reality. For Sandra Gaudenzi (2016), co-director of I-Docs, a research initiative from the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE Bristol, the role of the audience in immersive documentaries is still blurred between being a simply “viewer” and an “interactor”. For them, viewers are “disembodied observers with turning headsets”, asked to have empathy for what they see. 4

From cinema to virtual reality In all these statements, the role of the technology is put as a determinant factor in the process of absorbing the content that is presented by immersive documentaries. This is a top-down imposition of the technology in which the role of the body is neglected in the process of making sense of the experiences we live. This is a determinist perspective that is broadly questioned by authors from the phenomenological tradition like Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack. For Ihde (1990), who developed a phenomenology focused on how technology mediates our experience of the world, the relationship between people, the media, and the world, is a dynamic relationship in which all the elements plays significant roles. As for Vivian Sobchack (2006), researchers in media studies need to get acquainted to where they stand in the world, otherwise their thoughts about the world will have no existential grounds from which to empirically proceed. In her phenomenology, Sobchack (2004) deals with the neglected role of the perceiving and affected body in the experience of film. In her words: “this is a bottom-up emergence of aesthetic and ethical sense as it is written by carnal experiences on – and as – our bodies rather than a top-down and idealist imposition on them” (p.3). Taking into account this phenomenological tradition that puts under questioning determinist points of view, before the theorization about the effects that the new practices involving virtual reality and documentaries have in the audience it is first necessary to take into consideration an existential approach that helps the understanding of what the experience of these new documentaries are like. The research present in this thesis aims to contribute to these discussions by assuming the importance of the role of the body in the process of making sense of the experiences of immersive documentaries. In order to do so, the research will aim to answer the following questions: What are the experiences of immersive documentaries like? And how does virtual reality technology influences the emotions in the audience in the experience of immersive documentaries? In order to answer these questions, phenomenology will be taken into account not only as a philosophical theory that reflects upon the mediated relationships between people and the world, but also as a research method that helps to understand the meanings of the experience as we live it.

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From cinema to virtual reality Virtual reality devices are becoming popular, but this is still a recent process. The access to this type of experience is restricted to people who own a device like the Samsung Gear VR or the Google Cardboard. As I did not have access to none of these devices during the conduction of the research, and as I needed to become familiar to these new practices, a partially ethnographical approach was taken in the beginning of the research in order to inform the phenomenological inquiry. Among other things, the participation in festivals dedicated to virtual reality allowed me to experience quite a few immersive documentaries, among which three were selected for the phenomenological analysis. The combination of these two research methods will be detailed in the next chapter. Although phenomenology does not give space for generalizations or effectual conclusions, the use of this method gave the possibility to explore the experiences in a subjective and detailed way that gave insights about the broader meaning and significance of the experience of immersive documentaries. The phenomenological perspective adopted in this thesis lead to the argument that all the different aspects that constitute the experiences of documentaries produced with virtual reality technology are equally important for the full comprehension of the meanings behind the experiences. This study concludes, then, that the emotions triggered by the experiences of virtual reality documentaries are the result from a complex and dynamic relation between the body, the technology and the world, not from a technological imposition. This thesis is organized in chapters that progressively help to build these arguments. In the next chapter there is an explanation of how this research was conducted using phenomenology as a method – a phenomenology that was partially informed by ethnographical practices. Then we will follow to the sequence of chapters that will provide a combination of theories and descriptions of selected experiences in order to contextualize immersive documentaries as experiences involving the self, the media and the world. Chapter four will focus on the technological transition from cinema to virtual reality and will clarify the role of the technology in the experience of immersive documentaries. In the sequence, chapter five will approach the role of the body in the experience of immersive documentaries and how it perceives the sense of presence that is characteristic from the use of virtual reality technology. The sixth chapter will 6

From cinema to virtual reality focus on the complex relations between the real and the virtual and how they are lived in the experience of immersive documentaries. Finally, chapter seven will complement the analysis with a discussion of the subjective meanings found in the experiences of three selected cases, and how different emotions were triggered by the lived experience of the three immersive documentaries. In chapter eight, the research question will be answered and concluding thoughts will be presented. In the last part will be listed all the references used in this thesis.

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From cinema to virtual reality 3. Methodology 3.1. Building familiarity with immersive documentaries Despite the popularity that virtual reality has acquired in the past year, the access to the cinematic content produced with the use of this technology is mostly limited to festivals, what follows the cinematic tradition of keeping the content exclusive to these events before the release for the big audience. Participation in these festivals, in the experiences and discussions that they created, and observations of user practices were crucial in order to build familiarity with the new practices related to film and virtual reality. The investigation of the new cultural practice by means of participation in, and observation of, the field characterized an ethnographic approach that was partially conducted in this research in order to inform the phenomenological analysis proposed in the next chapters. Mitchell (2007) explains “the fieldwork concept, which involves social immersion in a particular setting. It generates a totalizing and holistic description that accounts the group being researched - and that can be called ‘the ethnography of’ a particular practice. Participant-observation is the dominant method within this fieldwork and consists of observations, collection of stories, interviews, surveys, archival research and so on” (p. 56). The selection of the festivals that could properly represent this field was made while taking different aspects into account, such as their pivotal roles in the development of virtual reality as a new tool for cinematic practices. The first contact with virtual reality, both concerning the device and the immersive documentary narrative, was at the Kaleidoscope VR in Amsterdam, a worldwide festival completely dedicated to immersive content. Another meaningful participation was the one at the first edition of the World Virtual Reality Forum, placed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. Both events propose to be platforms for the discussion and development of virtual reality, and both of them provided not only screenings of different immersive documentaries, but also presentations, talks and debates, creating a rich environment for the representatives from the industry, for researchers, and for the general audience. In order to create diversity and to understand the use of immersive narrative in other contexts, I also selected two other festivals that had virtual reality only partially in their programs: the Go Short Film Festival in Nijmegen, which has an old tradition in supporting innovative 8

From cinema to virtual reality technologies and research, this year represented by a session dedicated to virtual reality; and the WE Festival, a cultural festival placed in Maastricht that allowed me to provide the experience of different immersive narratives to the participants, making it possible to closely observe people’s first reactions to the experiences of immersive documentaries. The festivals were taken as an empirical and analytical starting point to look for people, technology and content as they filled the atmosphere with discoveries, exchange of information and experiences, and excitement with the newness. The festivals involved different contents and their creators, technology developers, researchers and general enthusiasts of virtual reality. To assure the clarity and in order to understand the practices properly, I took into account the most outstanding evidences among the observations, which later also influenced in the selection of a few narratives to guide the phenomenological analysis. The cases chosen were: Witness 360: 7/7, The Displaced, and Reframe Iran. Witness 360: 7/7 was my first experience of an immersive documentary, and the most impressive one. As the newness of a technology plays an important role on how it is experienced, the choice of this case gave a lot of important insights for the phenomenological analysis. The second case that was chosen, The Displaced, was produced by Chris Milk, one of the exponents of the current virtual reality industry, and responsible for the big claim that virtual reality is an “empathy machine”. The third case, Reframe Iran, was chosen because it treats the use of virtual reality technology in a different way when compared to the others, not trying to completely hide the medium from the images that the viewers see (this is a key characteristic from virtual reality, as we will see in the following chapters). The initial state of a new technology is a crucial moment, one in which it can become integrated into existing practices, it can be modified, adapted or gain entirely new approaches. To investigate the audience reactions of virtual reality in such an initial stage provides unique insights about its potential as a new type of content experience, more specifically about its potential as a new way to experience non-fictional narratives. While new technologies gives new forms to existing practices, they also bring to light the skills that are required to deal with these technologies in a fluid way. When it comes to immersive documentaries, these skills are related not only the audience, but also the filmmakers and other people concerned in the production of a documentary. First, they 9

From cinema to virtual reality involve new types of cameras that allow stereoscopic filming and sound recording; secondly, they involve how the audience deals with a screen (by wearing it) and also how they perceive the scenes, as they are presented in 360-degree. This new medium shows up by the means of new equipment and also new forms of telling stories, that combined create a new type of experience for the audience and a new approach to documentary narratives. However, its initial stage also means that both technology and the use of it can still be redefined and improved, so the skills necessary to deal with it are applied in a reflexive way, in the sense that they can transform future experiences. While the industry side is developing theories about how virtual reality creates an empathy machine, I have focused especially on the viewer’s experiences with this new medium and on how they perceive the documentary narratives that are displayed. The impressions I had from the observations and participation in the festivals, allied to my own experience of immersive documentaries, lead me to a more specific investigation of the meanings of both the perceptions and reactions that one can have toward an immersive documentary narrative. While most of the participants of the festivals were surrounded by different types of immersive content, from games to social environments, and were, most of the times, exulted by the new technology, my position as a researcher of the specificities related to documentary immersive narratives lead me to focus my own experiences on this type of content. This allowed me to get acquainted with a wide range of content that I could compare in order to investigate better the perceptions involved in them. This rich background of experiences, allied to an already existing tradition in the phenomenological addressing of emotions in subjective film experiences, lead me to conduct the more specific investigation of this thesis with the use of phenomenology as a method and to adopt the ethnographic findings only as a tool for enlightenment when needed. 3.2. Phenomenology and the lived experience of immersive documentaries Virtual reality experiences involve a new way for the viewer to interact with the medium and to relate with the content that is presented, one in which the body actively defines what is seen but is also affected by this unexpected influence and by how the content is 10

From cinema to virtual reality displayed. The use of this technology to tell real stories have been guided by the promise of an empathy effect in the viewers, but it is only through the experience of this narratives (rather than the creation of them) that one can affectively respond to them, and it is through the phenomenological investigation of the perceptions and bodily activities in some of these experiences that this thesis proposes the reflection and insights about the emergence of emotions toward the world that is represented. Don Ihde (1990) characterizes existential phenomenology as a method that emphasizes interpretations of perceptions and bodily activities in human experiences, more specifically in those experiences of the world that are shaped by the mediation of new technologies. Although the focus of this thesis is on particular experiences, they are used in order to stimulate the comprehension of more general structures and meanings that enlighten the experience and give it a wider significance, making it easily inhabitable for others. In establishing phenomenology as a method for the investigation of experiences, Clark Moustakas, based on Husserl’s ideas, argued that individual perception is the beginning point for establishing the truth. He says: “however much we may want to know things with certainty and however much we may count on others’ experience to validate our own, in the end only self-evident knowledge enables us to communicate knowingly with each other (Moustakas, 1994, p. 58). For practical reasons, the experiences of three immersive documentary narratives were selected as representative, taking into account the different interactions with the technology that they provided, the specificities in the perceptions involved in them and the diversity of feelings that resulted from them. The different aspects present in the three selected experiences illustrate how diverse documentary immersive narratives can be, while, at the same time, they are all inviting the viewer to somehow get intimate with the stories and with the characters, not only by showing them (like in traditional film experiences) but by also including viewer’s bodily involvement and perceptions. In order to analyze my own experiences of these narratives in a way that they can be generalized, and following the rules of the use of phenomenology as a research method, which investigates human experience in its pre-reflective state, I had to put to the side all the pre-suppositions, theories and opinions about virtual reality and all the 11

From cinema to virtual reality feelings it can create in the audience that I previous acquired through the readings and through the observations of other experiences and focused on the experiences as they appeared. In phenomenology, this is called epoché or state of wonder, and refers to a state in which the researcher steps back from ordinary ways of looking at things and keeps a constant renewal of perception (see Moustakas, 1994; Van Manen, 2014; Ihde, 2012). Phenomenology has a setting of rules called reductions that aim to guide the researcher in the process of maintaining the focus on what appears, on the details of each experience, not on interpretations of them. These rules are summarized by Don Ihde (1990) in three steps: “(1) attend to phenomena as and how they show themselves, (2) describe (don’t explain) phenomena, and (3) horizontalize all phenomena initially” (p. 22). When faced to each one of the experiences, I put aside my role as a researcher and assumed the role of a viewer, of someone that is about to get in contact with an unknown story. As soon as the experiences were over, I wrote down everything that I had just experienced in the most possible detailed way, without trying to explain why I felt something for a character or perceived something in a specific way and without interpreting what was being written. Some questions guided the writing of these notes. They were: How did I perceive this experience? What did I feel toward these stories? And what did I feel toward the characters? How did my body react during the experience? Did I interact with the device? How did I perceive the environment around me? The focus was always on what was felt, what was seen, and what was done. These notes (not any other one that was made during the observations of others nor any content from presentations or conversations with directors, for example) were the foreground for the analysis of the experiences, thus for the investigation of the affective investments that one can have toward an immersive documentary narrative. These notes are used as the basis to every description of the experiences present in the following chapters, which help with the thematization of immersive documentaries, and with the analysis that will build the argument of this thesis. Just as the reductions that help phenomenologists in their personal experiences, there is also a setting of ‘themes’ that can help the researcher on the reflective inquiry process, which Max van Manen (2014) calls “existentials”. The existentials explores different aspects of how a phenomenon is lived. They are: (1) relationality, which 12

From cinema to virtual reality explores the way in which the self and others are experienced; (2) corporeality, which is the way the body is experienced in the phenomena; (3) spatiality, or how one experiences the space with respect to the phenomena; (4) temporality, focused on how time is experienced in the phenomena; and (5) materiality, which is how things are experienced. These existentals worked as a guide to the analysis of how immersive documentaries involve different types of relations between the viewers, the content and the technology. The spatial relation to the places that are displayed in a 360-degree video, for example, is the most evident novelty that this technology brings, but there are also the relation between the viewer and the characters, which can give us important insights about the feelings, emotions, sensibilities and responsibilities that can arise from these experiences. Corporeality, materiality and temporality are also key in the comprehension of the experiences as a phenomenon that affects the body. Inspired by Vivian Sobchack (2004) and her use of phenomenology in film studies, this thesis expects to arise not only questions concerning the lived experiences of immersive documentaries, but also an appreciation of how they can concretely contribute to our senses and feelings of the world and of others. The next three chapters will provide a combination of theories and descriptions of the selected experiences mentioned here that will help us to contextualize immersive documentaries as a new cinematic practice that uses virtual reality technology. This new practice has different ways of affecting the bodies from the viewers and of triggering emotions toward the world, and this relation between the self, the medium, and the world will be further analyzed from a phenomenological perspective.

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From cinema to virtual reality 4. From cinema to virtual reality: the technological transition 4.1. Immersion and illusion in the cinematic experience Film is a medium that affects the senses and emotional perception, and this characteristic has given to directors a sort of power over the feelings of the audience (Grau, 2003). Whenever a new cinematic technology arises, directors experiment with it to test the different emotions it can induce in the audience. For Oliver Grau, the emotional involvement increases as the audience gets more immersed in the experience. Immersion, for him, is a process that absorbs the mind; it is a passage from one mental state to another. In the development of cinema over the years, making the audience feel more immersed in the images that are displayed has always been a major goal. Technology has been used in different ways in order to make the images as realistic as possible, and in order to enhance the immersion in the experiences of movies. Siegfried Zielinksi describes the immersion experienced by the early audience of cinema: A darkened room, where the spectators, like Plato’s cavedwellers, are virtually held captive between the screen and the projection room, chained to their cinema seats positioned between the large-size rectangle on which the fleeting illusions of motion appear and the devices that produce the images of darkness and light. Cinema as an environment for the enjoyment of art, for immersion in traumatic experiences, for hallucination, for irritation of real experience. (quoted on Grau, 2003, p. 149) Immersion, in this sense, refers to the way in which the audience of cinema felt absorbed in the images, therefore in the stories that were presented; it refers to the way in which the audiences are kept inside the cinema, only paying attention to the movie, to its images and the stories that are presented in the screen. Grau (2003) states that cinema used its potential to replicate real experiences in order to establish itself as a potential medium. The first exhibitions of The arrival of a train at La Ciotat in 1985 by the Lumiere Brothers are a famous example of how the audience got immersed in the experience of cinema from its beginning. People felt so immersed in this new type of experience that they got scared and ran when the screen showed a train coming in their direction. This reaction was due to how the camera was 14

From cinema to virtual reality positioned in an angle that corresponded to the observer’s point of view, which created the illusion that the train would come out of the screen. For the first time the audience was experiencing such a thing, their perception was not prepared or habituated to this type of experience of the image. The similarity to the real world, or the momentary illusion of reality, was so big that the audience “got lost” in the experience, they were completely immersed in the virtual images – forgetting, for a brief moment, that what they were seeing was just an image, not a real train coming closer. Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) argues that the illusion of reality is a key factor in the process of getting completely immersed in an image, what makes immersion and illusion intrinsically related. Grau states that extreme reactions like the one from the first audiences of cinema occurs whenever a new medium of illusion is introduced, but that soon the audience gets habituated to it, the illusion vanishes and the reactions are not so extreme anymore. If during the exhibition of The arrival of a train at La Ciotat the audience believed the train would come out of the screen, soon they got used to images that refer to the observer’s point of view and the illusion that the image of the train is something real coming out of the screen was gone. The audience quickly got used to the experience of cinema, and stooped to react in such an extreme way, that is, they understood that the image was just an image and could not suddenly transform into reality. Although the complete illusion of reality was gone, the audience kept going to the cinema and they kept getting immersed in the stories presented in the screen, not in the sense of getting deluded by the images, but in the sense of momentarily forgetting the external world and paying attention only to what is being shown and being emotionally involved with the stories. While Ryan claims for a complete immersion in an image that is only possible if there is an illusion that the image is actually a reality, Grau shows that a complete illusion of reality is only possible if the audience is not used to the technology in question. As the audience got used to the initial experience of cinema, the filmmaking industry kept exploring new technologies in order to keep enhancing the immersion, and to keep affecting the emotions of the spectators. Some common examples are the 3D glasses that create spatial depth and gives to the audience the impression that the objects are outside of the screen, and more recently the IMAX rooms in movie theaters, which 15

From cinema to virtual reality consist in huge curved high quality screens and spatial sound, sometimes also accompanied by 3D glasses. These technological innovations adopted by the cinema impressed the audience in a first moment, like when people tried to reach for objects in the air when using 3D glasses, but again the surprise effect and the illusion of reality was gone as soon as they got used to the innovation. These innovations can be found in the majority of movie theaters nowadays and are quite popular, but they do not bring illusion of reality to the audience anymore. They also did not replace the traditional experience of cinema, as the audience also watches movies without these technologies, and they keep being captivated by the stories besides the technology involved in the presentation of the content. Sergei Eisenstein, in his essay “O Stereokino” (1947) stressed that the ultimate synthesis of cinema would be a stereoscopic version of it. Although no details about the technology were given, he argued that stereoscopic three-dimensional images combined to stereo sound would be able to pour the image from the screen into the auditorium, affecting the audience more than the traditional cinema does. Complementing Eisenstein’s theory, Grau (2003) argues that an increased proximity between the image and the audience can affect the viewers psychologically, which can result in more control over the affective investment from the audience. For him, the presentation of the content in 360-degree images creates an immersive image space that makes the experience more similar to real life. It is exactly this type of experience that the virtual reality devices we have nowadays propose: 360-degree images and sounds that are exhibited as closer as it is possible to the spectators through the use of head mounted displays that excludes the external world from the sight and from the audition. This transition from flat to 360-degree images and sounds follows Martin Lister (1995) and his statement that virtual reality “is frequently seen as part of a teleology of the cinema – a progressive technological fulfillment of the cinema’s illusionistic power” (p. 15). Although virtual reality technology has been developed for more than fifty years now, it is only with the recent popularization of virtual reality devices like the Samsung Gear VR or the Google Cardboard that the cinema industry started to invest in this new way of telling stories. Among researchers and professionals from the film industry and their debates in recent forums and events, the use of virtual reality technology in cinema 16

From cinema to virtual reality gives birth to a new type of movie: the immersive one. Virtual reality, as we will see, attempts to be a completely immersive and is considered to be an extreme variant of immersive media (Grau, 2003). Once again, the industry experiments a new technology in order to renew the illusionistic power of cinema, in order to enhance immersion in the experience, and in order to affect the emotions from the spectators more intensely. 4.2. Virtual Reality: How is it used by the cinema industry? Before presenting the ways in which virtual reality can enhance immersion and illusion in cinema, first it is necessary to understand how virtual reality technology is being used by the cinema industry, more specifically in the development of documentary narratives, once they are the focus of this thesis. Virtual reality technology involves many features, going from simple 360-degree head-mounted displays to complex experiences involving other devices, connected to different parts of the body, and that are used to create interaction with the virtual environments. Ryan (2001) explores textual narratives in virtual reality environments, and she does so by analyzing the technology with all its features, including possibilities for what would be the ultimate implementation of it: the Holodeck from the movie Star Treck1. She breaks down the scenario of this ultimate use of the technology in eight themes: 1. 2. 3. 4.

You enter (active embodiment) . . . into a picture (spatiality of the display) . . . that represents a complete environment (sensory diversity). Though the world of the picture is the product of a digital code, you cannot see the computer (transparency of the medium). 5. You can manipulate the objects of the virtual world and interact with its inhabitants just as you would in the real world (dream of a natural language). 6. You become a character in the virtual world (alternative embodiment and role-playing). 7. Out of your interaction with the virtual world arises a story (simulation as narrative).

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Micahel Heim defines the Holodeck as “a virtual room that transforms spoken commands into realistic landscapes populated with walking, talking humanoids and detailed artifacts appearing so life-like that they are indistinguishable from reality. The Holodeck is used by the crew of the starship Enterprise to visit faraway times and places such as medieval England and 1920s America.” (quoted in Ryan, 2001, p. 51).

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From cinema to virtual reality 8. Enacting this plot is a relaxing and pleasurable activity (VR as a form of art) (p. 51). These themes refer to the ultimate possible use of virtual reality technologies, one that is present only in the imaginary of people and on science fiction movies like Star Treck. The use of virtual reality technology to create a new type of cinema experience is reduced to only a few of these possibilities. Like Einsenstein (1947) and Grau (2003) envisioned, cinema would become the experience of watching closely 360-degree images and sounds, which can seem very simplistic when we consider all the possibilities offered by virtual reality technology even though it is still not completely developed. In Ryan’s definition of the themes she considers a virtual environment that allows a high level of interaction, a virtual environment that can be inhabited and modified by the users in order to create a narrative. In the experiences analyzed here, the narrative is already presented by the images and sounds, and the only possible manipulation refers to the choice of the angle through which the spectator can watch the scenes. Virtual reality in its advanced use is an interactive simulated environment, that is, it is constituted by computer-generated images that can be inhabited by, manipulated and modified by the users. In its current cinematic use, virtual reality refers mostly to the exploration of 360-degree images and sounds that cannot be modified. The documentary character of the experiences that are the focus of this thesis narrows down even more the use of virtual reality by cinema. In this case, the 360-degree images and sounds have their reference in the real world, so there is no creation of computer-generated environments that could be somehow manipulated2. Although it seems very limited, it is exactly this close exploration of 360-degree images and sounds that can influence a lot the emotional investment from the spectators in the stories that are presented, as argued by Einsenstein (1947), Grau (2003), and the current directors working with virtual reality in movies. From the list of eight technological aspects proposed by Ryan in the ultimate use of virtual reality, only four of them were observed in the experiences analyzed in this thesis: active embodiment, spatiality of the display, transparency of the medium, and

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The implications of this reference in the real world will be explored further in the next chapters.

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From cinema to virtual reality alternative embodiment. In order to understand how they influence the perceptions from the spectators, these aspects will be individually explored below. 4.2.1. Active embodiment “Embodiment” is a concept that can be used with different connotations. As a technological aspect of virtual reality experiences, active embodiment refers only to the physical body, and how its movements interact with the technology, affecting the representation of the world that is displayed (Ryan, 2001). In this sense, active embodiment is a result of the tracking capacity of the device, which processes physical movements of the head and reflects them into the 360-degree images and sounds that are displayed, allowing the viewer to explore the scene in different angles, giving the impression that the viewer is entering into the image, not only watching them. In this use of the concept of embodiment, the body is taken only as an empirical thing or analytical theme, an object among other objects, a text, or a machine, without taking existential aspects, like the intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body, into account (Csordas, 1994; Sobchack, 2004). The intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body are also crucial for the phenomenological analysis present in this thesis. It is through these aspects that we can understand the meanings behind the actions from the spectators. They also help us to understand how the spectators relate to the content that is being presented considering their historical background and relations to the world. The intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body will be further explored in the session dedicated to the sense of presence in the experiences of cinema and virtual reality. For some authors, virtual reality is actually a disembodying technology because it replaces the body with an image of it (Balsamo, 1996; Penny, 1994; Stone, 1991). In the case of the documentaries explored here, there is no creation of a body image that inhabits the virtual space. Instead, the images erase any reference to a body. In this case, virtual reality can be a disembodying technology in the sense that it completely excludes the image of the viewer’s body from the virtual world, but it is still through the actions taken by the viewer that the scenes can be seen and the sounds can be heard from different angles. It is only through this activation of the body that the viewer has the impression of being inside of the image that is presented. Taking The Displaced as an 19

From cinema to virtual reality example: the movie initiates with the image of an 11 year-old boy, Oleg, writing on the green board of a completely destroyed classroom. We watch this scene as if we were positioned in the middle of this room. If we look ahead, we see the boy. If we look to the sides or to the back, we see the empty spaces that constitute the room: windows, stones and broken walls. But if we look down, in the direction of our feet, we do not see a body, or anything that refers to a body. We only see the ground and the pieces of stones and dust that constitute it. There is not even a sign from the tripod that holds the camera that is shooting the scene. If we move our arms or our feet, nothing will change in the image, we will keep seeing the destroyed place and the young boy. But every movement from the head is tracked, so when we look around, our vision from the space changes according to our movements and we can see the whole space: the ruins of what was once a classroom and where the little boy we see used to study. It is the physical action of looking around that allows us to look around inside of the virtual world. The point of view taken is the point of view of the camera, and the movements from the head are echoed in the images captured by the lenses. It is like the viewer is a floating head in the middle of the scene, or an invisible body that sees everything, but that cannot be seen; this erasure of the body might seem like disembodiment, but it is only by activating the physical body that the film can be explored in its fullest capacity; it is by moving our heads that we can see the virtual space surrounding us, and that our body, although invisible, feels like it is present in the scene. The physical body is used as if it was an extension of the camera, as an interface. Going against the arguments toward the disembodiment created by virtual reality, Brenda Laurel (1993) argues that VR offers a rare opportunity to take our bodies with us into imaginary worlds. In the case of these documentaries we are only using our body to explore a real world that is presented by images, we are not taking our body to an imaginary world, but still this exploration is only possible if we move our physical body. For Ryan (2001), if we compare the exploration of a virtual world with a headset to a walk around town, then it may involve a significant loss of corporeal freedom, but still it allows more physical action than just sitting in front of a screen, like in the traditional experience of cinema. The body is activated in the experience when one uses the head-mounted device, and this activation gives the impression that the space showed by the images can be 20

From cinema to virtual reality explored, which leads us to the second technological aspect stated by Ryan: the spatiality of the display.

4.2.2. Spatiality of the display In this second theme, Ryan argues, a body only enters a picture if it is fully spatial, and there are three senses involved in the experience of this virtual space: the first is the sense of being surrounded, which is the result of how virtual reality technology allows the body to turn around and to inspect the image from different angles; the second sense is depth, which is created by the virtual reality displays and how they work with perspective; the third sense, the possession of a movable point of view, is necessary to acquire a full sense of depth as it allows objects to get bigger or smaller according to the distance from the eye of the viewer (effect known as motion parallax). The possession of a movable point of view is only possible because, in this type of experience, a computer tracks the movements of the viewer’s head and updates the image according to them. Ryan argues that virtual reality is the only medium that can combine the properties of 360-degree panoramic picture with a 3D display, and with a point of view controlled by the user. A virtual reality experience, in the words of the “father of VR”, Jaron Lanier, is described like this: When you put [the glasses] on you suddenly see a world that surrounds you – you see the virtual world. It’s fully three-dimensional and it surrounds you, and as you move your head to look around, the images that you see inside the eyeglasses are shifted in such a way that an illusion is created that while you’re moving around the virtual world is standing still (quoted in Zhai, 1999, p. 176) If we take The Displaced as an example again, this moment of discovering a world that surrounds us happens not only when we put on the glasses, but in every transition from one scene to another. Every new scene represents a new space to be observed. The transitions are done by the insertion of a fade to black that lasts for a few seconds before it slowly reveals the new scene. The angle through which we look at the space around us does not change as the scenes change, only as our head moves. If I am looking at the ground of the classroom in the first scene and I keep my head in the 21

From cinema to virtual reality same position during the few seconds of black screen, the next scene will start with a vision of the ground of a boat, and once again I will have to change the angle to explore the space around me by moving my physical head. In this case, this movement will reveal the rest of the boat, the river and Chuol, the African little boy who is conducting the boat like he did when he escaped with his family. The device displays a 360-degree image that I can explore through different angles and the proximity of the screen to our eyes, combined with the 3D depth that the device creates, allows the scene to be seen without any frame limiting it; the medium is visually absent in the experience. This is radically different from a traditional experience of cinema, in which the frames are delimited, making a clear division between the real world, which the spectator inhabits, and the world presented by the screen – which can also refer to a reality, not an imaginary world, in the case of documentaries. Besides the clear distinction between the world from the movie and the world from the spectator, there is also the fact that, although the images coming from the camera directly present the sight of the director, erasing the camera itself, the scenes can only be seen from this established point of view, no matter how the spectator moves in the real world. The spatiality from the display exists due to the transparency of the medium, which is taken to another level in virtual reality. Virtual reality aims to completely erase the medium from the perceptions of the spectators. 4.2.3. Transparency of the Medium For Ryan, the transparency of the medium is not just an end in itself; it is actually the precondition for a total immersion in a virtual world created by a display. She says: “for immersion to be complete, visual displays should occupy the entire field of the user’s vision rather than forming a world-within-a-world, separated from reality by the frame of the monitor” (p. 58). Ryan also explains that, in a final stage of the development of virtual reality, the disappearance of the medium would be achieved on two levels, a physical one and a metaphorical one. In the physical level, the computer would be made invisible to the user as she wears it on the surface of the skin; in the metaphorical level, the computer would turn into a space that encloses more than a desktop and a chat room: this space would become a world that the user can inhabit. Immersive 22

From cinema to virtual reality documentaries are far from achieving the metaphorical level, but in the physical level, the disappearance of the medium is already in an advanced stage. Jay David Bolter and Richard Gruisin, in their book Remediation (1999), recognize in our culture a desire for total immediacy, for total transparency in media experiences as they are developed. They say that “our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (p. 5). Some authors argue that virtual reality is the ultimate medium in the history of media, as it is a medium that remediates all other media existent until now, and it does while making itself transparent to the users (Zhai, 1999; Ryan, 2001). Traditional cinema was already considered to achieve a high level of transparency of the medium, as the images representing reality do not necessarily show the technological equipment responsible for recording the images (although the medium is not completely erased because there are still frames limiting the images and separating the sight from the viewer from the director’s sight). Walter Benjamin observed this disappearance of the equipment in his famous text “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility” (1936). He said: The representation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment (p. 116) Although this transparency of the medium is broadly adopted by documentary filmmakers, there are some directors who choose to make the equipment as apparent as possible, exactly to call the attention of the audience to the fact that the movie refers to a representation of reality, not reality itself. This format is also being reproduced in the creation of immersive documentaries. In Reframe Iran, for example, the medium is transparent in our unframed access to the scenes, but in some of them all the other equipment is revealed, like the microphones and other cameras, as well as the crew involved in the production of the movie. In these specific scenes, when we look around we not only see the studios where the artists presented by the movie work, or their daily activities. We see the directors from the movie sitting in front of these artists, or the cameraman shooting what will later be a traditional version of the documentary. The 23

From cinema to virtual reality transparent aspect of the medium still plays an important role in placing the viewer in the middle of the scene, in creating spatiality and immersion in the virtual environment, but in this case this transparency is questioned when the viewer sees the rest of the technological apparatus that identifies the scenes as representing the process of making a movie. The viewer has access both to the reality of the artists (when the scenes show nothing but the studios, sometimes also showing artists working on them) and to the reality of the filmmakers who are telling the stories of those artists. In both cases, the viewer assumes the role of an observer of the scenes. These scenes reveal places and characters from a reality distant from our own, a reality that cannot be accessed by the physical body. The transparency of the medium places the spectator in the middle of the scenes, and even though there is no reference of a body in the images, the spectator assumes the role of an observer, one that is not seeing the real world, but only the world from the images. This leads us to the final technological aspect of an experience of an immersive documentary: the alternative embodiment. 4.2.4. Alternative embodiment Alternative embodiment, in the ultimate use of virtual reality technology, refers to the possibility for users to redesign their bodies and become something or somebody else (by the assumption of an avatar) in virtual environments (Ryan, 2001). Ann LaskoHarvill, former collaborator with Jaron Lanier in the development of virtual reality technology, said that in virtual reality “we can, with disconcerting ease, exchange eyes with another person and see ourselves and the world from their vantage point” (1992, p. 227). Although there is no role-playing or assumption of an avatar as a body in the experiences of immersive documentaries, the concept of alternative embodiment is crucial for the discussion of emotions as something that can be enhanced by virtual reality technologies. In Ryan’s analysis of the use of virtual reality in narratives, alternative embodiment transforms the viewer into a character that can interact to the virtual world. In immersive documentaries, this transformation is only partial since there is no interaction with objects, characters or other users involved in the experience. The alternative embodiment, in this case, is primarily a result of the cinematic use of the technology to make the viewer look through the point of view of others. Bolter and 24

From cinema to virtual reality Gruisin (1999) argued that one way to understand virtual reality is as a remediation of the subjective style of film, and Vivian Sobchack (2004) explains how this “visual reflexivity in which we see ourselves seeing through other eyes” was, before cinema existed, “accomplished only indirectly” (p. 149). In her words, prior to cinema, We understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only through looking at – not through – the intentional light in their eyes and the investments of their objective behaviour. The cinema, however, uniquely materialized this visual reflexivity . . . In sum, the cinema provided – quite literally – objective insight into the subjective structure of vision and thus into oneself and others (p. 149). Cinema as a technology created the illusion of looking through other eyes. What virtual reality technology adds to this cinematic experience is the possibility to fully explore what these other eyes see, and the spatial illusion of being in the place where the other was when capturing the images; it transforms the point of view into something mutable that can be controlled by the movements of the viewer. In Witness 360: 7/7, the moments that precede the explosion are reconstructed in images that show the spaces visited and seen by the character (the witness who survived the bomb attack). Just like she saw on that day, we also see the street in front of King’s Cross station, the inside of the station with the trains passing by, the interior of the train and the people who are present there. The images make the viewer witness a reproduction of what the survivor witnessed on that day, this is how cinema makes us look through other eyes. But this is an immersive documentary, which means that we have the possibility to explore these images in 360 degrees and to hear the sounds accordingly. We don’t have to look at the interior of the train from only one perspective; we can explore this interior as if we were sitting on the bench with people surrounding us. The gaze is not fixed anymore as we can move our heads and look around, which gives the impression of being inside of the image, even though the camera is still in a fixed position and we can only explore the images from where it is standing. Virtual reality works here as an extension to the camera’s gaze, one that allows more than a fixed way to look at a scene. In the experience of Witness 360: 7/7, the possibility of looking around at a scene that represented what someone else was seeing during the day of the attack made me feel like I was not only looking through other eyes, it felt like I 25

From cinema to virtual reality was transporting myself to that day, to those places. Even though there is no reference to a body in the image, the process of looking around, combined to the aural real testimony of the events by the woman who witnessed everything, made me forget that I actually needed to see my body in order to feel present on the scene. For a few seconds, I imagined that I was not only there: I was the witness, on that tragic day. This example, like some older experiences made with virtual reality comparing the emotions that a viewer can have in the real world and in the virtual world3, shows that virtual reality can be a legitimate experience when it remediates other point-of-view technologies, especially film (Bolter and Gruisin, 1999). The body disappears from my sight, but I still use it to look around, I still feel the heartbeats getting faster as the moment of the attack approaches. In Witness 360: 7/7, the camera is used to show the point of view from the witness on that day, it is not used to show her figure and her actions, strategy taken by the director to place us on the body of the other. With the implementation of virtual reality and the possibility to explore these images without actually seeing the medium, this can create the illusion that we are not only seeing what other eyes saw, but that we are actually present on the places that we see. In the case of Witness 360: 7/7, it worked also to make me feel like I was assuming the position of the witness. When we consider the three experiences analyzed in this thesis, Witness 360: 7/7 was the only one that created an alternative embodiment related to the character from the movie. The sense of being part of the scene, of being with the characters, also existed on the other experiences, but in every situation the feeling was of being a ghost that can observe the reality that is presented, not of being one of the characters who is actually living the situations. Both in The Displaced and Reframe Iran the camera worked to show how other people were living their lives, or to show them telling us how their lives are. There was no use of the camera in order to imitate the point of view of the character on these other movies. But the different strategies taken by the directors did not change the fact that I could still explore the places surrounding me and feel present in the scene, even if it was like a ghost instead of like a character. The 3

Bolter and Gruisin (1999) mentions experiences made with clinical acrophobic patients in which they are tested in virtual environments. The symptoms they exhibit are the same as they do in real life, showing that virtual reality feels real enough to frighten them.

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From cinema to virtual reality alternative embodiment was present in all of the experiences, with a differentiation on what the other body would be. The change in the sense of presence is a key difference between a traditional experience of cinema and an immersive one. The sense of presence is also very important in the understanding of how we relate to what we see in the images, of how our living body experiences the virtual world that is presented. Because of the relevance and complexity of this theme, it will be further elaborated in the next chapter. But before we move to this discussion it is necessary conclude this chapter by defining the ways in which virtual reality technology works when combined to cinema in the creation of the experiences of immersive movies. 4.3. Immersion, interactivity and illusion of reality in the experience of immersive movies For Ryan (2001), the technological aspects of virtual reality technology work in order to create a completely immersive experience that is different from the experiences provided by other media. From the eight initially proposed technological aspects proposed by her, we can narrow down the experience of an immersive documentary to four: 1. You enter (active embodiment) . . . 2. into a picture (spatiality of the display). 3. Though the world of the picture is the product of a digital code, you cannot see the computer (transparency of the medium). 4. You can become a character in the virtual world (alternative embodiment). The combination of these aspects gives to the spectator another dimension to the experience of being immersed in a movie. It transforms the experience of immersion, which in virtual reality becomes an experience “of being ‘in’ rather then before an image” (Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., Kelly, K., 2009, p. 114). Lister et al. foreground this character of immersion in virtual reality in Margaret Morse (1998) and how she explains the difference from being immersed in a film experience and being immersed in virtual reality. In her words: VR is like passing through the movie screen to enter the fictional world of the “film”, and entering a virtual environment is like ‘being able to walk through one’s TV or computer, through the vanishing point or vortex and 27

From cinema to virtual reality into a three-dimensional field of symbols . . . The VR user is a spectator whose ‘station point is inside the projection of an image, transformed from a monocular and stationary point of view into mobile agency in threedimensional space (quoted in Lister et al, 2009, p. 114-115). Being immersed in virtual reality means that the spectators feel like they are inside of the scenes, not only watching them. This immersion is dependent on the illusion of being somewhere else, on the illusion that what is seen and heard through the device can be experienced like it was part of the real world. As explained before, this immersion exists because the virtual reality devices exclude the external world from the experience, and makes the spectators feel like they are somewhere else. This is the illusion of reality that Ryan (2001) claimed to be a key component for a complete immersive experience, and that Grau (2003) argued that only exists if the audience is not used to the technology in question. Besides the illusion of reality, Ryan (2001) stated that the immersion in virtual reality is also dependent on the interactivity present in the experience. Interactivity is a problematic term, as each author uses it according to a different logic. Manovich (2001), for example, criticizes the very notion of interactivity. For him, “once an object is represented in a computer, it automatically becomes interactive” (p. 71), which can mean that any interaction between a human and a computer is an interactive process. In this sense, the experience of an immersive documentary can be considered interactive for the simple reason that it involves a relationship between humans, images, and a computer through which the content is presented. Different than Manovich, McMillan and Hwang (2002) states that interactivity not necessarily involves a computer. For him, interactivity is a concept that remains insufficiently defined, as it can be approached in many ways, depending on how we see it. He stands for a broader understanding of the concept that does not reduces it to something specific to new media. McMillan and Hwang suggests three different types of interactivity: the first is the one in which the user interacts with another user, the second one involves an interaction with a document and only the third one refers to the interaction to a computer. The first type of interaction (user-to-user) existed before the advent of media and refers to communication between users in general – dialogues, feedbacks etc. Media, in this case, give new possibilities to this type of interaction. The second type, 28

From cinema to virtual reality the user-to-document interactivity, started as a one-way communication process in which the content is delivered to a more or less passive audience and, with the advent of new media technologies, evolved into an interactivity that allows content exchange and co-production, for example. Only the third type refers to user-to-system interactivity and refers to the interaction between humans and computers. This type of interactivity can be controlled by the computer, so the content is presented to a more or less passive user, or it can be controlled by an active user. The last type of interactivity is the one we can observe in the experience of immersive documentaries. The spectators, in this case, are not just passively watching a content presented by a computer. They become users, in the sense that they are also interacting with the content through the head-mounted device. The interaction starts in the process of choosing the content that will be presented, and it evolves into an interaction with the content as it changes according to the movements from the head of the user. In this context, the definition from Lister et al. (2009) of “being interactive” is the one that explains in the simplest way what happens in the experience of an immersive documentary. In their words: “being interactive signifies the users’ (the individual members of the new media audience) ability to directly intervene in and change the images and texts that they access” (p. 22). Jonathan Steuer (1992) argues that, in order to create complete immersion of the viewer in the experience of virtual reality, there are some technological requirements related to the interaction with the device: Speed, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment; range, which refers to the number of possibilities for action at any given time; and mapping, which refers to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner (p. 86) The first requirement, speed, is what guarantees the real time response of the system to the user’s actions (the head movements in this case). When we move our heads in order to explore the 360-degree spatiality of the image, the computer must respond quickly to our movements in order to make the angles change according to our movement. If the system is not fast enough, it will create a delay in the change of the images and the illusion that we are looking at something real will be gone. The second factor, range, arises as a consequence of the first, since faster feedback leads to more 29

From cinema to virtual reality actions, and more actions leads to more changes. The range, or the number of possibilities for action, must be as close as possible from a real experience. When we are exploring a space, we must be able to look in every possible direction, in the speed that we think is more appropriate. When presenting the images, the computer must give to us as many options as in a real experience of looking around, and it must be fast enough to follow our actions as we change them. The third requirement, mapping, must guarantee the match between the user’s action and how they change the images. If we look to the left, the system must change the images and sounds accordingly. If the computer does not have a good mapping and does not react according to our movements, the immersion in the experience will be broken. Each one of these requirements exists in order to guarantee that the users will have an experience as similar to real life as possible. In order to create a complete immersive experience, the interaction with the content through the device must not only exist, it must also occur as if there was no computer mediating the images, that is, the computer must work perfectly in order to give the impression that it does not exist. The immersion in the experience is dependent on the proper responses from the technology, and if everything works as it should, the users will have the illusion that what is being seen and heard is part of the real world. In the transition from traditional cinema to immersive cinema (here understood as the one which adds virtual reality technology to the experience), the way in which the images are presented to the viewers change dramatically. If once the images were seen from a certain distance and framed, in virtual reality they are seen as if there was nothing mediating them, and the technology creates the possibility of interacting to these images by choosing the angles through which the scenes will be seen. Being immersed in a virtual reality experience refers not only to the possibility of interacting with the images by moving our heads. In this case, being immersed in the experience of a movie means that the viewers will feel like they are part of the scenes that are exhibited. Virtual reality technology works to enhance a sense of presence in the world presented by the movie. Ryan (2001) explains the relation between immersion and the sense of presence:

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From cinema to virtual reality Immersion . . . describes the world as a living space and sustaining environment for the embodied subject while presence confronts the perceiving subject with individual objects. But we could not feel immersed in a world without a sense of the presence of the objects that furnish it, and objects could not be present to us if they weren’t part of the same space as our bodies (p. 68). Lister et al. (2009) complements this explanation. For them, the immersive interaction provided by virtual reality includes “the potential to explore and navigate in visually represented screen spaces . . . [and] the goals of the immersed user will include the visual and sensory pleasures of spatial exploration” (p.22). When we go back to how authors like Sergei Einsenstein and Oliver Grau envisioned the future of cinema, it is this possibility of exploring the immersive space created by 360-degree images and sounds would bring the audience closer to the content that is presented, affecting the emotions in a more effective way. In this sense, the advanced technology would be the only responsible for the changes on our experiences of cinema and on how they can influence our relations to the world. But this is a determinist approach that is not sufficient for the phenomenological inquiry of this thesis, which follows Don Ihde’s (1990) ideas of how the technology shapes our experience as much as the perceiving body does. This chapter has shown the ways in which virtual reality technology has changed the experience of cinema, and some of the ways that the audience is affected by this change. In one side, cinema continues to play its role as a technology that presents stories from the perspectives chosen by the filmmakers, which can, sometimes, simulate the points of view of the character from the story. Meanwhile, virtual reality technology excludes the external world from the senses of sight and audition, and it transforms the flat space of the image into a space that can be explored by the viewers, which creates a sense in the viewers of being present inside of the scenes that are presented instead of looking at them from a distance. On the side of the viewer that experiences the immersive movie, the body is activated when it enters into a scene instead of watching it from a distance, and the body is lived as an alternative body during the experience (sometimes an inexistent body, like a ghost that only observes, and sometimes like one of the characters). Meanwhile, the consciousness is tricked by the transparency of the medium, which can make people think that what they are seeing 31

From cinema to virtual reality through the device is actually real and that they can even touch it. For Ryan (2001), one way to understand the relationship between the self and the technology in a virtual reality experience is to call for a phenomenological analysis of the sense of presence through which the user feels corporeally and consciously connected to the virtual world. This line of thought will be followed in the next chapter. Now that the role of the technology in the experience of immersive movies is known, I will move to the theories and experiences that help us to comprehend the ways in which the body perceives and shapes the relationship between the self, the media, and the world. The next chapter will show how the sense of presence is felt in the experiences of cinema and of virtual reality, and how the combination of these two perspectives constitute the sense of presence that is experienced by the body in immersive movies.

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From cinema to virtual reality

5. The perceptional differences between the experiences of cinema and virtual reality 5.1. The sense of presence in cinematic experiences When someone is watching a movie, in its traditional form, there are two types of vision involved in the experience: the vision of the subject who is looking at the screen and the vision of the camera of a certain scene. Vivian Sobchack (2004) defines the cinematic sense of presence as an existential presence that is always subjective. The subject is always divided between the subjective vision and the vision of other (or the vision of the observer/viewer and the vision of the camera). When we watch a documentary about terrorist attacks, for example, we will watch it considering our previous knowledge about the theme in general, about the movie itself, about the characters, the director etc., and we will also look at the parts of the scene that interests us the most, like a character talking about her experience, or sometimes paying attention to a detail on the corner of the screen. Meanwhile, the scenes that we see are all the results of how the director chose to tell the story about the attack, what scenes were chosen to be exhibited, how they were framed etc. The first vision, the vision of the observer, is subjective because it is influenced by everything that constitutes the observer’s self. Furthermore, the subjective vision is also selective as it only appropriates part of the scene – and never sees itself entirely. The second vision, the one from the camera, is subjective in the sense that it is the result of the director’s choices of what to register and how to register it. Sobchack also says that, besides of being subjective, the cinematic sense of presence is also influenced by the temporal perception that is multiply located in the images and where the physical body is present. When we watch a movie, we perceive time objectively as it passes where we are physically (like the two hours that a movie can last), and we also perceive the time subjectively as we imagine, remember and 33

From cinema to virtual reality project forward the events presented by the images. Part of the experience of watching a movie is to imagine what is going to happen in the narrative, and we do so by remembering the previous scenes and relating them to the events that we see in the present scenes. The viewer needs to, simultaneously, orientate the subjective perception of time from the objective perception that refers to the here where the body is at present. Vivian Sobchack concludes that the lived body understands the coexistence of these two structures in their discontinuous state, and takes them as coherent in a specific cinematic experience. We perceive and relate to the stories presented in the movies knowing that they are present in a different place and in a different time than our own, and knowing that the images are the result of the subjective view from a director about a certain event – which we will absorb according to our own perspective about the theme of the movie. The significance of these characteristics of time and space in cinema is that it is intimately bound to a structure of “accumulation, ephemerality, presentness, and anticipation – to a presence in the present informed by its connection to a collective past and an expansive future” (p. 151). Sobchack argues that this sense of presence change with the advent of electronic media, like TV and computers. In this case, the sense of presence becomes focused on the present, on the instant stimulation and impatient desire, differently than the cinematic anticipation of a future. When we are watching television, we can change the channels whenever we want (if we do not feel satisfied by the content that is presented or when it ends, for example). When using computers, we can not only change the channels to watch something else, we can also change the type of activity, like going from watching a movie to reading a text that will give us more information about the theme of the movie, about the casting etc. We can also easily change to activities that are not related to the movie at all, leaving the experience of the movie unfinished or postponed. When experiencing these electronic media, our sense of presence is related to different screens, or to different - and simultaneous – activities. This is different from the traditional experience of cinema in which we are completely focused on the content: we are immersed in one experience only. The traditional experience of cinema is to actually go to the movie theater and to absorb the content that is presented on the screen from the beginning until the end. Naturally, we are not obliged to stay in the 34

From cinema to virtual reality room until the end of the movie if we don’t like the content and feel like leaving, but this is a physical act of leaving a place, of leaving the experience, of deciding not to be immersed in the story anymore. Sobchack explains that electronic media constitute an alternative electronic world of immaterialized (although materially consequential) experience, a world in which the spectator is incorporated in a “spatially decentered, weakly temporalized and quasi-disembodied (or diffusely embodied) state” (p. 153). In this sense, the viewers are not divided between the “here and now” and the “there and then” that is characteristic from the cinematic experience. Instead, the “here and now” is divided with other multiple “there and then”, the viewers perceive different times and spaces simultaneously, and this homogeneous discontinuity constitutes an absolute presence. The change in the temporality transforms the qualities and the nature of the occupied space, which becomes “correlatively experienced as abstract, ungrounded, and flat”, or “a screen for play and display rather than an invested situation in which action counts rather than computes” (p. 158). The occupied space turns into something flat that needs to somehow gather the interest of the spectator, otherwise it will be easily exchanged by another activity. The viewers, when faced with the possibility to explore different screens (or different channels, in the case of TV), divide themselves in multiple experiences – and the attention that was once completely focused on one content now is diffused and superficial. In the combination of constant bodily action and multiple screens, electronic media experiences become a purely spectacular sense of bodily freedom (and freedom of the body), and our emotional and ethical investments become diffused just like our attention. When watching a movie at the cinema, our emotions are all directed toward the content that comes from the images, and so does the ethical investments that come from these emotions. In the words of Sobchack: Along with this transformation of aesthetic characteristics and sensibility emerges a significant transformation of ethical investments. Whether negative or positive in effect, the dominant cultural technologic of the electronic and its attendant sense of electronic “freedom” have a tendency to diffuse and/or disembody the lived body’s material and moral gravity (p. 158). The author mentions some questionings about how virtual reality fits in this argument, particularly as it tries to mobilize the human sensorium in electronic space, “re35

From cinema to virtual reality embodying” rather than “disembodying” the viewer (actively and alternatively embodying instead of disembodying the viewer, as argued in the previous chapter). For this, Sobchack answers that the general logic elides or devalues our bodies in the physical space as they ground such fantasies of reembodiment. For her, electronic presence does not have the point of view and the visual situation that is characterized by the cinema, and no bodily dimension is inscribed since this is a characteristic only of centered and intentional projection. Frederic Jameson explains the consequences of the disembodied state of being mentioned by Sobchack: The liberation . . . from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are the utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings – which it might be better and more accurate to call “intensities” – are now freefloating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria (quoted on Sobchack, 2004, p. 159) Sobchack suggests that this euphoric presence, lacking in interest and investment in the human body and in “enworlded action”, can be dangerous. This crisis of the lived body in electronic media is reflected by people who prefer to live in the virtual world with a simulated body – with an insubstantial presence in which they can ignore the problems from the real world. By ignoring the lived body, these people ignore their own story. But immersive movies, although being one of the results of the evolution of electronic media, are also an evolution of the cinematic experience. As argued before, this new type of movie experience physically activate our bodies and make them more active than in the traditional experience of cinema, once we must move our heads in order to experience the movie with its full capacities. In this sense the body is, at least physically, the center of the experience. But immersive documentaries also disembody the self as they completely delete the real world from the sight of the viewer. They erase any reference of a body from the images, making us observe the events like floating heads placed in the middle of the scenes. We become invisible observers that can see everything directly from the perspective of the director/the camera (which sometimes simulates the perspective of the characters), but we are observers that cannot be observed. In the experience of The Displaced, for 36

From cinema to virtual reality example, some characters sometimes seemed to be looking at “my” direction, but they could not see me, as they did not know I was watching them. They were looking at a camera in a tripod, and some of them would even show curiosity about this strange apparatus in the middle of their environment, but they did not know that somewhere far away, in another time, another person was looking right into their eyes and exploring those environments as if she was there with them. Cinema already had the capacity to show us other stories, other times and places, but we would watch and observe everything clearly dividing our point of view from the point of view of the director, the screen would separate our time and space from the one we were watching, separating our sight from the sight of the camera. In this case, whenever we feel something while watching a movie, we still have our own bodies as a reference of who we are in the experience and where we are. By making the frame invisible and making the sight of the lenses of the camera coincide with our own eyes, virtual reality technology brought the sensation of being in the position of the director, of being part of other times and spaces instead of our own, but not as living bodies: it transformed us into ghosts that can observe everything closely, but that still cannot interact with the characters, neither actively participate on another reality like the directors did when they were shooting. For Sobchack, this disembodiment makes us ignore ourselves, our own story, and our own responsibility toward what we see, it takes away our emotional investment in the experience. Differently than other experiences of electronic media, and going against Sobchack’s argument, immersive movies work just like cinema when it comes to the existence of the point of view and the visual situation. The difference is that, in this case, the point of view and the vision from the viewer mixes with the point of view and the vision from the camera. Just like traditional cinema, immersive movies are also centered and intentional projections as the devices are directed to only one spectator at the time, in an experience that goes further and isolates the external world and places the viewer in the middle of the images. Instead of taking away the focus of the audience with multiple options of activity, the use of virtual reality technology in movies aims to provide an even more immersive experience of cinema, one in which the attention is completely focused on the content that is presented, without any interference from the external 37

From cinema to virtual reality world; an experience in which the viewer is not looking at a scene from one fixed perspective anymore, she can explore the scene spatially, with the impression that she is placed in the middle of it. Specifically in the case of immersive documentaries, rather than taking away the emotional investments toward the content by disembodying the viewer, the use of virtual reality technology aims to provide the possibility of feeling embodied in another space – a real one – in order to make the viewer feel more intensely what it is like to be in the distant realities that are represented. 5.2. The sense of presence in virtual reality experiences For Ryan (2001), in order to understand the phenomenological dimension of being immersed in virtual reality experiences we must comprehend the experience of “belonging to a world” in real environments. For that, she refers to Marleau-Ponty’s work, The Phenomenology of Perception, in which he attempts to “capture the being of things independently of the observer and a subjectivist stance by which my perception creates objects and endows them with properties” (quoted in Ryan, p. 69). MarleauPonty focuses on how the world and consciousness are put together and mutually determined. Ryan explains: For the perceiving subject, the world is phenomenal; consciousness assumes its existence because it appears to the senses. Moreover, since consciousness is intentional, it apprehends itself as directed toward the world; self-consciousness is thus inseparable from consciousness of the world. (p. 69) Ryan argues that Marleau-Ponty’s work is particularly relevant to the experiences of virtual reality because he emphasizes on the embodied nature of consciousness, going against the doctrines that treat perception as a mere result of how things act on our body, and also against theories of the autonomy of consciousness. For him, these philosophies aim to a pure exteriority or a pure interiority, and they do not consider the insertion of the mind in corporeality. In his theory, consciousness is both incarnate and directly related to the world, what gives to the body the function of a point-of-view of the world, and makes of the body our medium to have a world. A parallel can be traced to Don Ihde (1990) and his phenomenology, which also does not believe in perception as the mere result of how things (technology, in his case) act on our body, neither believe 38

From cinema to virtual reality in perception as something that is not affected by things at all. The main difference, in this case, is that Ihde developed a phenomenology that takes new media and technology as something that mediates our experience of the world. The relationships involving the self, the media, and the world, are dynamic and each one of the elements shape and are shaped by the experience. In order to understand how people relate to the world during the experience of immersive documentaries, and the feelings that appear from this relation, both phenomenological approaches can be used. To support this idea, I will take the experience of Witness 360: 7/7 as an example: this documentary was created in order to show to the audience what it is like to survive a terrorist attack. In this sense, technological devices like cameras, microphones, and computers work together to mediate a relation between people and an event that occurred in the real world, an event that had serious and physical consequences that affected different parts of the world. Besides the people who were physically present in the event, no one else would know what it was like if it was not through some kind of mediation. In this case, the mediation was done through the cinematic technology (with the adoption of virtual reality elements), but it could also be done through the simple act of telling a story to a friend, or through writing a text, or even through the images of a camera, which could be shooting the place on that specific time. In this technological mediation of an event that occurred in the real world to a broader audience that can be anywhere, not necessarily close to the place where the event occurred, each one of the elements influence are influenced by the mediated experience. The self (the individuals from the audience) acquires knowledge about the world and about an experience that was not lived by it. At the same time, the individual informs the reception of this knowledge with a personal background about terrorist attacks, about the city of London, or about anything that can be related to the content, making this individual experience an unique one. The media shapes the experience when it presents the content in a specific way, in this case by showing 360-degree images and sounds that reconstruct the experience of one of the survivors from the attack. Simultaneously, media is also shaped by the different ways through which the directors decide to use it in order to tell a story, or by how the audience can use the device during the experience. The world shapes the experience 39

From cinema to virtual reality as the content comes from a real event, but it is also shaped when technology creates representations of the event that can give new perspectives to the events, or when people who are influenced by the content presented decide to transform part of their realities. These are only some ways through which the elements from the I-media-world relationships can shape and be shaped by mediated experiences, used here to exemplify how Don Ihde’s ideas apply to the experience of an immersive documentary. But there is one specific characteristic from virtual reality technology that makes us also relate the experience of it to Marleau-Ponty’s ideas: virtual reality aims to be a transparent media, it tries to make people relate directly to the world without noticing the mediation. This world could be a completely simulated one or it could have its reference in the real world, like in the case of the immersive documentaries explored here (the implications of this reference in the real world will be further explored in the next chapter). In this sense, and taking again the example of Witness 360: 7/7, when people experience the day of the attack through this immersive documentary, they will naturally use technology in order to have access to the content, but once the device is functioning, it will work in order to make the viewer forget that there is anything between the eyes and the images that are seen. In the first minutes of the experience of Witness 360: 7/7, my attention was divided between the exploration of the images in every possible angle and the search for signs of the tripod and the camera, so my relation to what was being presented was very much influenced by the technology. I wanted to understand exactly what was going on around me, how it was possible to see and to hear everything in 360-degree. Slowly the images and sounds felt more natural, and the feeling of being placed in the middle of the scenes grew. My physical presence was momentarily forgotten and the feeling was that I was experiencing the day of the survivor just like she did on that day. My consciousness knew that those images were not the same that she saw (once this was a reconstruction of the day), but the feeling was that everything that she described in my ears were actually in front of me, and I was about to see exactly what she saw. Even though momentarily, the media was forgotten, and I was somehow connected to those people and spaces that were appearing in front of me. Obviously the media was not completely excluded and the 40

From cinema to virtual reality relationship was still an I-media-world one, but for a few seconds my presence was not being felt according to where my body was physically, it was felt as if those people were actually close to me, sitting inside of a train that only I knew that would soon be reached by a bomb. The sense of presence of things, if considered by Marleau-Ponty’s theory, is acquired when we imagine ourselves physically reaching out to them. He says that “our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space” (quoted on Ryan, 2001, p. 70) and Ryan explains that this difference between ‘being in space’, and ‘inhabiting’ or ‘haunting space’ is a matter of both mobility and virtuality. She says: “Whereas inert objects, entirely contained in their material bodies, are bound to a fixed location, consciousness can occupy multiple points and points of view, either through the actual movements of its corporeal support or by projecting itself into virtual bodies” (p. 71). If an actual body cannot touch an object, the knowledge that the virtual body could do that already gives a sense of the shape, volume and materiality of the object, making it present because it seems that there is a possibility of interaction. On an image, it is the effect of texture and shading that makes the viewer feel like the three-dimensional object is part of her world, and it is the interaction with the image that gives to the viewer the impression that she is present in another space that is not the one inhabited by the physical body. About this aspect, Marleau-Ponty says: “Successfully supported action in the environment is a necessary and sufficient condition for presence” (quoted on Ryan, 2001, p.71). During the experience of Witness 360: 7/7, the sense of presence was not always felt directly related to the virtual world that was represented, this was only a momentary feeling. The presence was divided again as soon as I imagined the attack that was about to happen, feeling the anticipation that is characteristic from the cinematic experience and that Sobchack said that was not present in the experience of electronic media, including virtual reality. The same process occurs during the experience of the other immersive documentaries such as The Displaced and Reframe Iran. The sense of presence is also divided when we touch something unexpected with the feet while turning on the chair (this movements is necessary in the physical world in order to see in 360-degrees in the virtual world), and the images does not correspond to what we 41

From cinema to virtual reality physically feel. In these moments, the mediated character of the experience is very clear and the consciousness is not being triggered by the invisibility of the medium from our sight. But there are other moments in which the division between the real and the virtual world gets blurred, moments like when my heartbeats considerably increased while the images showed the seconds after the bombing attack in Witness 360: 7/7, and I felt like I was momentarily experiencing someone else’s life; or when I felt physically sick because I felt that I was inside of a boat with Chuol, the little boy who escaped his home sailing and that is showed in The Displaced; or even when I felt like I had to move from where I was standing because I was in front of the character that was giving an interview in Reframe Iran, and standing where I was would make it impossible for the camera to directly capture him, interrupting the flow of the movie. This chapter has shown that, differently than what was argued by Sobchack (2004), the sense of presence in the experiences of immersive documentaries explored here is not the same as in the experiences of other electronic media such as television. In this case, the sense of presence is not multiply divided among different activities and screens, and there is not a complete disembodiment or a devalue of the body, once the physical body acts and reacts significantly during the experiences, influencing (and being influenced by) our consciousness of the world. The sense of presence that is characteristic from cinema can be momentarily transformed by the possibility of not only having one’s point of view of an experience, but actually being able to explore this point of view as part of a spatial illusion, as part of an experience of being inside of the image. For Sobchack, another issue of electronic media is that it focuses on presenting representations, so the aesthetic value and ethical investment are located in the representation-in-itself, in the simulation. What is not considered is that immersive documentaries, although examples of experiences of electronic media, are mostly an evolution of the cinematic form, and they represent the world according to this logic. This representation can be fictional or it can be documental, and they can even be a representation of another representation. In the specific case of immersive documentaries, the representation is documental, that is, it is referenced in the real world, with its real places, characters and consequences. When the sense of presence becomes momentarily focused only in the virtual world during the experience of 42

From cinema to virtual reality immersive documentaries, it is felt in relation to a virtual image that represents real people, real places and real events. Whatever the feelings that grow from such an experience, they are felt toward a reality that is being represented, not toward a complete simulated world. In this point, Sobchack’s use of phenomenology in order to analyze film experiences become crucial, mostly her thoughts about the role of the perceiving and affected body in the experience of documental narratives. The next chapter will approach the complex and broadly discussed relations between the real, the virtual, and how we perceive them. The understanding of these relations is the last necessary piece that will help us to build the conclusions about how emotions result from this dynamic relationship between the self, the media and the world, not from an exclusive influence from the technology in our experiences.

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From cinema to virtual reality

6. The real and the virtual in the transition from cinema to virtual reality Since Internet was created, the term “virtual” is almost naturally related to the realm of digital technology, and it is usually taken as a synonymous of “simulation”. For Lister et al. (2009), authors of new media studies have not agreed with a proper definition of the term “simulation”, although the understanding of it is crucial for us to comprehension and study of virtual reality. In their words: Looser current uses of the term are immediately evident, even in new media studies, where it tends to carry more general connotations of the illusory, the false, the artificial, so that a simulation is cast as an insubstantial or hollow copy of something original or authentic. It is important to invert these assumptions. A simulation is certainly artificial, synthetic and fabricated, but it is not ‘false’ or ‘illusory’. Processes of fabrication, synthesis and artifice are real and all produce new real objects. A videogame world does not necessarily imitate an original space or existing creatures, but it exists. Since not all simulations are imitations, it becomes much easier to see simulations as things, rather than as representations of things (p.38). In this sense, simulations are always real things created by real processes, and their content can derive from representations, but not necessarily do so. The use of the term “virtual” as a reference to simulation has led to different philosophical accounts of the term. Lister et al. mention Gilles Deleuze, whose thoughts lead the authors to see that “the virtual is not the opposite of the real but is itself a kind of reality and is properly opposed to what is ‘actually’ real” (p. 37). Another philosopher that is broadly mentioned in discussions about simulations is Jean Baudrillard, who criticizes our society for living in a hyperreality. For Baudrillard (1994), the essence of simulation is the deception of reality: “To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (p.3). Baudrillard (1994) defines hyperreality as a state in which the society can no longer tell the difference between the real and the virtual (or the simulations of the real) as it becomes technologically mediated. In Baudrillard’s theory, these simulations of the real become a simulacrum, which means that the image goes through four different 44

From cinema to virtual reality evolutional stages: in the first one, “it is the reflection of a profound reality”, then “it masks and denatures a profound reality”; in the third stage, “it masks the absence of a profound reality” until it reaches the final stage, when “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (p.6). In other words, as our society becomes saturated by spectacular mediated images (through television and publicity, for example), the connection to the real world is lost and we start to live in a completely simulated world: the hyperreality in which we experience the artificial as real. Lister et al. (2009) also explains this transformation in our society: Representation, the relationship (however mediated) between the real world and its referents in the images and narratives of popular media and art, withers away. The simulations that take its place also replace reality with spectacular fictions whose lures we must resist (p. 40). Many authors criticize Baudrillard and his ideas about how the real is completely covered by simulations, resulting in an absolute disappearance of the real. Marie-Laure Ryan is one of the authors who criticize Baudrillard’s ideas, and so is Bill Nichols in his studies about the documentary tradition of cinema. 6.1. Cinema and the documentary representation of reality Bill Nichols (1991), known for pioneering the contemporary study of documentary film, states that Baudrillard carries things to an extreme and does not consider in his criticism how media, more specifically the documentaries, can sometimes be our only meaning to access realities beyond our own. The simulation, in this case, exists as something that represents reality, and for Nichols the existence of this simulation does not mean the deception of reality. For Nichols, the difference between the image and what it refers to is of extreme importance. He exemplifies: Lives continue to be lost in events such as the invasion of Grenada even if such a ‘war’ is reported and perceived far more as a simulation of war than war itself. The reality of pain and loss that is not part of any simulation, in fact, is what makes the difference between representation and historical reality of crucial importance. It is not beyond the power of documentary to make this difference available for consideration. (p. 7) 45

From cinema to virtual reality While Baudrillard (1987) argues that simulations and simulacrum became intrinsic in our lives, Nichols (1991) states that there is still the reality beyond them, the reality that exists aside from any representation. What Nichols’s argument implies is that if this reality needs to be considered or questioned, documentaries can be the tool to do that. They can bring the attention of the viewers to issues that would not be accessible by other means, creating the possibility for critical debate, encouraging response, shaping attitudes and assumptions (p. x). Naturally, there are different ways of representing reality (and there are even ways of simulating reality without representing it). Bill Nichols categorized five different modes of representation of reality that are present in the documentary tradition: the expository, the observational, the interactive, the reflexive and the performative. The expository mode refers to documentaries that “unfold the world in terms of the establishment of a logical, causal/effect linkage between sequences and events”, and that usually present an argument to be followed by the viewers (pp. 37-38). The second mode, the observational one, stresses the least intervention of the filmmaker as possible, the disappearance of the camera, and it provides to the viewer the possibility to look and to overhear the lived experience of others, “to gain some sense of the distinct rhythms of everyday life” (p. 42). The third mode is called interactive4 because it presents the text as conversations with the filmmakers, interviewers, and sometimes the stories are told directly to the camera. In this mode, the historical world is presented to the viewers by the people who inhabit it. The fourth mode, which Nichols describes as reflexive, makes the representation of reality the topic of cinematic meditation, not the reality itself. The performative mode does not create an argument about the historical world, it “makes the viewer rather than the historical world a primary referent” (p. 94). These modes may coexist within one documentary, according to the interests of the filmmakers and how they want the audience to perceive the reality that is represented. In the case of reflexive documentaries, for example, which aim to create reflection upon the style or language used to represent reality, Baudrillard’s argument can be applied perfectly, and the representation of reality (simulation) becomes a reality of its 4

The term “interactive”, in this context, refers to the human interaction between two people (filmmaker and character, for example). As discussed in the first chapter, the term has other meanings in the context of digital media.  

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From cinema to virtual reality own, with no reference to what was represented in the first instance (simulacrum). But in the case of documentaries which the main goal is to make an issue from the real world available for consideration and change (and this issue would not be accessible otherwise), it is important to consider that they might be representations that are taken as if they were real, and that can affect reality as people start discussions about their issues or as they decide to act upon them (which characterizes a hyperreality), but it is only because of these representations that some situations that need intervention can be changed. This logic echoes in the making of immersive documentaries, as there are different types of productions and different ways of representing reality by using this type of technology. Some of them aim to create reflection upon the use of the new technology in order to tell a story, like Reframe Iran, in which the camera is positioned between interviewers and interviewees, allowing the viewers to observe both sides as they interact to each other. There are also examples of documentaries which aim is to interfere in reality by representing it with the help of virtual reality technology. The Displaced is one of them. This immersive documentary was produced by Chris Milk in partnership with The New York Times and Google Cardboard, and sent to millions of subscribers of the newspaper in the United States. Chris Milk (2016) explained during a presentation that his intention was to show the American population the effects of the refugee crisis in the lives of children who have to leave their homes in war situations. More than showing the reality of these children, Milk aimed to make the audience feel like this is a local problem, not an external one. His aim was to increase the feeling of empathy in the audience toward the refugees. Documentaries allow people to have access to different views of the world, to its social issues, cultural values, problems, solutions and diverse situations (Nichols, 1991). As Nichols explains, “the linkage between documentary and the historical world is the most distinctive feature of this tradition . . . It proposes perspectives and interpretations of historic issues, processes and events” (p. ix). There is a sort of agreement between the audience and the documentary filmmakers, a bond of trust that these representations are based on the actual socio-historical world, not on a fictional world imaginatively conceived (Beattie, 2004; Nichols, 1991; Warren 1996). Nichols 47

From cinema to virtual reality (1991) explains how viewers comprehend and interpret documentaries in order to make sense of it: Cues within the text and assumptions based on past experience prompt us to infer that the images we see (and many of the sounds we hear) had their origin in the historical world . . . In documentary we often begin by assuming that the intermediary stage – that which occurred in front of the camera – remains identical to the actual event that we could have ourselves witnessed in the historical world (p. 25). Nichols argues that it is possible, then, to accept Baudrillard’s theory about the influence of images in our lives without assuming his nihilistic position. Different from watching a fictional representation of reality that has no reference in the historical world and is pure simulacrum, in documentaries the viewers prepare themselves to grasp an argument about a certain issue, not to just comprehend a story, and they do so because the sounds and images that are shown bond to the world they all share, they refer to a reality that needs to be considered. For Nichols, viewers are less engaged by fictional characters and their destiny than by social actors and destiny itself. In a phenomenological approach of the viewer’s experience of cinema, Vivian Sobchack (2004) argues that what is experienced in fiction is taken as abstract, while in documentary it is experienced as real. In her argument, the differentiation between fictional and nonfictional representations is not solely dependent on cinematic cues: it is mostly dependent on the subjective relations between the viewers, with their extratextual and cultural knowledge, and the images on the screen, which are the result of the filmmaker’s choices. When it comes to documentaries, the filmmaker’s gaze at a certain event or character, although inscribed as objective, is also subjectively and ethically influenced, and so is the viewer’s gaze at the images that result from the filmmaker’s choices. This conjunction of the viewer’s lifeworld and the image that is the result of the filmmaker’s gaze of a certain reality is what Sobchack calls the “documentary space”. In The Displaced, for example, the director decided to portray parts of the children’s daily lives after they escaped the war. The movie aims to show their new lives in a transparent way, as if there was no interference in the events, but behind this objective gaze is the subjective choice of presenting reality in this way – another option would be to show children in the process of moving out of their homes, for example. The way in 48

From cinema to virtual reality which the viewers process these images depend on their background knowledge about the refugee crisis, on the way they relate to issues involving children, or even their acknowledgement of the documentary character of this movie – in this case, the titles in the beginning make clear that the images refer to reality. By knowingly watching a documentary, the viewers automatically inform the images with their previous experiences and ethical concerns, and they take these images from the realm of the virtual – the simulation that is also a representation of reality - to the realm of the real, that is, their reactions and feelings will arise related to the real characters and stories, not to the representation itself. For Sobchack, documentaries work to present a reality to the viewers, not only to represent it. She uses the term “documentary consciousness” to refer to this “embodied and ethical spectatorship that informs and transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real” (p. 261). The documentary consciousness refers not only to the experience of traditional cinema, it can also be applied in the experience of immersive documentaries, since the essence of their images is also the reference in real events, characters and places. In the experience of The Displaced, the presentation of the reality of refugee children to the audience is not taken only in itself, the viewers inform their experience with their own background about the refugee crisis. When Chris Milk produced this movie, the aim was to evoke emotions toward the children and their real stories, not to the film or to the experience itself. Milk (2015) argues that virtual reality technology is an “empathy machine” that is capable of creating empathy in the audience toward real people from the real life. In his speech, the main factor that would contribute to this type of reaction is how virtual reality technology creates the illusion of being part of the spaces inhabited by the characters, so the audience would feel like what they are seeing in the virtual environment is part of their real world. But this is a determinist point of view, as it believes that only the technology is responsible for influencing the experience of the movie. If we consider the phenomenological perspective in which the technology of mediation informs the experience as much as the body and the world does, the experiences of immersive documentaries, in this sense, are informed by the combination of: (1) technology/media: the virtual reality capacity of creating the illusion of a real experience and the documentary ability to connect the audience’s lifeworld and 49

From cinema to virtual reality emotions to what is being represented in the images; (2) body: the ways in which the body relate and react to this technology and to the world it represents; (3) world: how the reality presents itself in the experience and how it is affected by it. From this perspective, the emotional bonding between the viewers and the real characters presented in the documentary results from dynamic relation between the self, the media and the world, not only from the use of virtual reality technology and the illusion of reality it offers. For being the experience of a documentary, the reference of the images in the real world are very significant for the experience as a whole, once they trigger a documentary consciousness that connects the audience to the real world, not to a mere simulation. What virtual reality technology adds to the experience, and that is also very significant, is the exclusion of the physical space between the eyes and the screen, creating an illusion in the viewers that they are present in the real places that are presented by the virtual images. 6.2. Virtual reality and the illusion of reality Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) suggests three distinct “senses of the virtual” that are involved in virtual reality experiences. One of these senses, which she calls “the optical one”5, implies the significance of the virtual as illusion, and is a premise for the immersive dimension of the virtual reality experience. Immersion, for her, depends on the “reading of the virtual world as autonomous reality, a reading facilitated by the illusionist quality of the display” (p. 13). For Ryan, the duplicity is what characterizes a virtual image, like a reflection in a mirror; the virtual image is not legitimate but is identical, and it can be so close to the real that it creates an illusion of reality. This illusion of reality, as argued in the last chapter, is the one responsible for making the viewers feel completely immersed in the experience of immersive documentaries in a way that the medium becomes really transparent, even if momentarily.

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Marie-Laure Ryan defines the other two senses as the “scholastic”, which uses the virtual as potentiality, and the “informal technological”, which takes the virtual as the computer-mediated. These two senses are related to the VR experience in a computational and an interactive addressing that will not be explored in this thesis. See more on Narrative as Virtual Reality, 2001, p. 13.  

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From cinema to virtual reality Like Bill Nichols in his theories about documentaries, Ryan also builds her argument of the sense of the virtual as illusion opposing it to the ideas of the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard (1994), the transparency of the medium increases the existence of simulacrum and excludes the real from people’s lives. He considers virtual reality as the concretization of the hyperreality and argues that it leads us to the end of the illusion (his use of the term “illusion” has a different connotation than Ryan’s): Artificial intelligence, tele-sensoriality, virtual reality and so on – all this is the end of illusion. The illusion of the world – not its analytical countdown – the wild illusion of passion, of thinking, the aesthetic illusion of the scene, the psychic and moral illusion of the other, of good and evil (of evil especially, perhaps), of true and false, the wild illusion of death, or of living at any price – all this is volatilized in psychosensorial telereality, in all these sophisticated technologies which transfer us to the virtual, to the contrary of illusion: to radical disillusion (p. 27). Ryan (2001) puts under questioning this black-or-white vision as she argues that it creates an impression that there is no way back to the real once people get immersed in virtual worlds (p. 32). It is as if there was no choice: people either live in the real or in the hyperreal, and the simulacrum is so fascinatingly real that seduces people to make the “wrong” choice. The transparency of the medium present in virtual reality experiences can create such an illusion of reality that the viewers feel like they can even reach out the imaginary objects, but they are brought back to reality as soon as they realize that it is not possible. This is the moment in which the sense of presence is not completely felt toward the virtual world anymore and becomes divided between the physical space and the virtual space. In different occasions, while observing people experiencing immersive documentaries, it was possible to notice the moments in which they believed that what they were seeing was part of a tangible reality. In one side are the children, who tried to reach the virtual objects or to walk through the virtual environment. Once they realized that they were not able to feel the touch of the virtual objects, they immediately took off the glasses, looked around for their parents and then put the glasses again to go back to the experience. Adults would try to reach an imaginary object or an imaginary person, but they would laugh at themselves seconds later for trying to do such a thing, sometimes making comments about how they were feeling foolish for believing in the 51

From cinema to virtual reality illusion created by the image. Ryan argues that the sense of touch is a fundamental condition of a complete sense of the real, and the absence of it is what keeps the viewer still connected to the real world, away from getting lost in the virtual image. Besides the sense of touch, the consciousness of the viewers also do not get completely fooled by the virtual reality experience even when the sense of presence is toward the virtual world instead of the physical world. The viewers know that this is a mediated experience of the world even when the medium achieves its maximum transparency. Ryan states that the illusion created by virtual reality technology is something momentary, and does not have permanent effects on society like in Baudrillard’s predicament. In the experience of immersive documentaries, this momentary illusion is always referenced in the real world as the viewers feel like they are present in other real spaces and relating to characters from the real world. For Baudrillard (1994), simulations lose their reference in the real world and become pure simulacrum, what makes of our world a completely simulated one as people start to live the artificial as the real, as the illusion become a permanent state. But as argued in the previous session, the documentary consciousness triggered by the reference of the documentaries in the real world makes the viewers immediately relate their experience to reality, to other real people, and to real events. This chapter has shown that simulations, when referenced in the real world, bring the viewers back to reality. The consciousness does not let the viewers be completely fooled by the medium. The artificial, in this case, is not lived as real: it is consciously lived as a representation of the real world. But even when the viewer is conscious about the representational character of the experience, the documentary consciousness also directs the reactions triggered by the experience to a reality that, although represented, actually exists. As stated by Sobchack (2004), the documentary consciousness also brings an embodied and ethical spectatorship that transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real, which results in an increased emotional bonding between the viewer and the content that is presented. In the last three chapters I have described and contextualized the experiences of immersive documentaries as dynamic experiences that involve subjective and objective relations between the viewers (the self), the technology (the media), and the world. Each element from this relation equally affects and is affected by the experience. 52

From cinema to virtual reality Technology evolved and the use of it created a new level of immersion in the experience of cinema, the body and the consciousness were affected by the difference in the sense of presence, while also becoming more active in the process of making sense of this more immersive experience, and the world gained a new form of representation of it, one that also creates new relations between the viewers and the realities that are far from them. Now the analysis is taken one step further in order to enlighten the comprehension about the significance of the experiences of immersive documentaries for the viewers. As Vivian Sobchack (2004) puts, the phenomenological analysis “aims also for an interpretation of the phenomenon that discloses, however partially, the lived meaning, significance, and nonneutral value it has for those who engage it” (p. 160). In the next chapter I will argue that the existential meanings that result from the experience of immersive documentaries are influenced by all the elements present in this mediated relation between the self and the real world, not exclusively by the technological element.

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7. The subjective meanings of the experiences of immersive documentaries Experiences of immersive documentaries are one way through which individuals can relate to distant realities that would not be accessible if it was not through mediation. As argued through the last chapters, and following the phenomenological tradition from Don Ihde, this is a dynamic I-media-world relationship, which means that each one of the elements involved shape the experience as it is lived and are also shaped by it. The subjective meanings and emotions triggered by these experiences are influenced by this dynamic relation, in which the roles of the body and consciousness are as significant as the technological aspects that define the experiences, and as the world that is represented. Don Ihde developed an existential phenomenology that deals exactly with our experiences of the world and of each other when they are mediated by technology. In the analysis of the experience of immersive documentaries present in the last chapters, descriptions of parts of some experiences helped us to understand the dynamic relationship between the body, the technology and the world. In Don Ihde’s phenomenology, the description and interpretation of the individual experiences in order to find subjective meanings does not reduce the investigation and the reflective process to something personal or individual. Instead, “it provides the very intersubjective basis for further investigation of more general forms and structural variants of lived experience” (Sobchack, 2012, p. 14). Before we move to the interpretation of the existential meanings of how our body and conscious behave in the experience of immersive documentaries, a more detailed description of the three selected experiences will provide insights about what exactly were the feelings triggered. The experiences will be described following a chronological order, so it will provide insights also about how the familiarity with a new technology influenced the way in which I experienced the stories that were presented. In the last part of this chapter I will relate these experiences to the theories approached in the previous chapters, and finish

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From cinema to virtual reality the argument of how the emotions triggered by the experiences are resulted from the complex relations between the body, the technology and the world.

7.1. Case Study 1 – Witness 360:7/7 My first experience of an immersive documentary took place at the Kaleidoscope festival, in Amsterdam. When I sat on one of the chairs (which turned 360-degrees) and put the glasses and the headphones on, the huge open room was gone from my sight and I could barely hear the external sounds. All of my attention was suddenly toward what I was seeing in front of me, and my only reference to the real world was the voice of the instructor explaining to me what I should do to start the movie and how I could adjust the focus if I felt it was necessary. Once the documentary started, all I could see and hear came from the device I was using. I had a brief idea, given by the booklet, of what Witness 360: 7/7 was about: it was the story of a woman who survived a bomb attack in the subway of London in 2005, and the proposal of the documentary was to combine her personal testimony to the 360degrees reconstructed and abstract imagery in order to take the viewers to the heart of her experience on that day. The images started to appear and I was suddenly seeing the King’s Cross station in front me, and a lot of people were passing by, some of them looking at my direction with curiosity in their eyes. I could hear their voices getting louder as they got closer to me, and fading away as they continued walking in another direction. I could listen to the sounds of the city, of the cars, everything just as if I was actually standing there, in front of that station. I explored the whole environment around me, looking for some recognizable signs from London, remembering that I was there only a few months before this experience, but not on that specific place. I was amused by the sensation of being there, of being able to look at the sky. I looked down, in the direction of my feet, searching for signs of the tripod holding the camera, but there was nothing there, just the sidewalk. A tiny distortion in the image showed me that there was an image of the tripod there, but it was erased in the post-production process. In the first minutes of the film I divided my attention between the exploration of the images in every possible angle and the search for signs of the tripod and the camera. I wanted to 55

From cinema to virtual reality understand exactly what was going on around me, how it was possible to see everything like that. I wanted to understand who were the people I was seeing and who I was in this experience. These people could not see me, the only thing they could see were a tripod and a camera. All I could see was them, and everything that was surrounding us. I felt like being a ghost that can observe everything, but that cannot be observed, a ghost that does not even see its own body, a ghost that is an invisible floating head watching everything. In these first scenes, little attention was paid to the sounds or to the voice that was narrating the story. I knew that the woman was telling me the events of that day, but the images were so impressive that I had to explore them and enjoy the feeling of being somewhere I have never been before first. Slowly I started to connect what she was saying to the scenes, and what she was describing matched the images what I was seeing. When she mentioned a man that was standing close to her on the train, I immediately looked for him, but did not see anyone who would match her description. This experience was, after all, a reconstruction of her day, the images presented were not from the exact day of the attack, and what I was seeing was not exactly what she saw. But even being conscious about this aspect of the movie, I was also conscious that those were the real places in which she went, and that the story she was narrating to me was also a real one. Without noticing, I caught myself feeling as if I was seeing through this woman’s eyes, as if I was exactly in her body during the day of the attack. When the moment of the explosion finally came, the only thing I could see was the dark, with some momentary lightening, and my audition was muffled. This moment of the experience felt so real that, for a while, I completely forgot that I could not see any reference of a body, or that the voice of the woman in my ear was the narration of the story, not my own thoughts. All I could focus on was the images in front of me, so I would not move my head to look around me. My heart was beating faster, and my hands getting sweaty. I had to catch up the breath slowly, while the voice in my ear talked about how she would not be able to say goodbye to her daughter, and my thoughts were only about how it would be like to not be able to say goodbye to your beloved ones when you are about to die. She described the other people who were around her, some of them dead, some of them alive and saying that everything would 56

From cinema to virtual reality be fine, that she was alive, and that she would see her daughter soon. My breath gradually went back to normal, as I started to remember my own reality again, realizing that what I saw was just an illusionary explosion and that I was only watching a reproduction of it. This complete illusion of reality lasted for just a few seconds, maybe a minute, but it was enough to make my whole body react as if I was actually living it. Post-attack images of the places started to appear in front of me, and I was no longer feeling like the woman who survived the bombing. Once again, I was only a bodiless observer and my attention was only toward the places and how they looked like. The image of the outside of King’s Cross station appeared again, but this time there was a woman walking in my direction, the woman who survived the attack. She walked with no hurry, looking at me. It was like she knew that I was there, and that I had just experienced her life for a brief moment. We were accomplices in this experience, witnesses of what just happened before our eyes. I took off the glasses and saw the real world again, but it took me a few seconds to understand the place in which I was again. Like when we wake up from a vivid dream, my vision was blurred for a few seconds, and I could still feel my body readjusting itself to the real world, my heart getting calmer again. I was at the Kaleidoscope festival again, but the feeling was that I had just arrived from a very impressive trip to London in which I saw something that I never thought I would see in my life. 7.2. Case Study 2 – The Displaced When I got in contact with The Displaced, I had already a few experiences of immersive documentaries and was no longer unused to it. The documentary is about the stories of three refugee children, about the process they went through of being displaced from their home countries, and about how they feel in their current situation. Oleg, 11 years old, is a Ukrainian boy who left Ukraine when the bombings there started and that went back home after the situation was stable again. Chuol, 9 years old, is a boy from South Sudan who escaped with his mother – who got lost during the escape – and his grandmother into a swamp when fighters swept into his village. Hana, a 12-years-old Syrian girl, now lives in Lebanon with her family but dreams of going back home one day. These children narrate their stories in their mother languages in this short 57

From cinema to virtual reality documentary of eight minutes, while we see images of their current living places and daily situations in a narrative that guides us through the three stories with no specified order or linearity. The film starts with titles in a black screen, which serves to contextualize the stories that are about to be presented: from around 60 million of people displaced from their home countries, half of them are children. As the image of a young boy writing on a blackboard faded in, I listened to the sound of the chalk in friction with the blackboard, and, as I moved my head, I noticed that I was seeing the ruins of what used to be a school. Although I was already used to watch documentaries in an immersive setting, I could not help the feeling of suddenly being in the middle of the destroyed classroom, and as if the boy was right in front of me. I looked around, driven by the curiosity about that place that was completely destroyed by a bomb, wondering how it was before. After a few seconds of amusement with the environment around me, I looked down, in the direction of my feet, but there was nothing there besides the ground and the stones. Just like in other experiences, although I had the impression that I was in the middle of the place because I could look at any direction without any frame restriction, I could not see any reference to a body, not even the tripod of the camera, which made me feel like floating head that could see everything but not it’s own body. This feeling grew as other scenes came in, some of them with people looking at “my” direction, but they could not see me, as they did not know I was watching them. During the eight minutes spent immersed in the lives of Oleg, Chuol and Hana, in different moments I wanted to be physically present in their realities because then I would be able to help them somehow. In a scene when I was seeing Chuol enjoying his time with his family, and listening to his voice saying that he wish he was a lion so he could fight all his enemies and protect his family, my own wish was that I was there to help this 9-years-old boy to protect his family and make sure that they would never have to face an attack again. The same happened when I saw Hana and other children working in the plantation of cucumbers, and heard her saying that she has to wake up at five in the morning to work all day and help her family. Her dream was that she would leave Lebanon and go back home, where she could be just a kid again. The need to help these children came back when Oleg said that he would never choose to leave his 58

From cinema to virtual reality country again, no matter if it is under attack or not. In these moments, being an invisible observer that can explore everything around became something secondary. My head was fixed, and I was looking at only one thing: these real children standing in front of me. My focus was on the fact that I was seeing real people and listening to their own voices telling me their stories, but there was nothing I could do to help them. There was no curiosity about the places in which I felt I was anymore, only a disappointment for being able to see, but not to act upon that reality. 7.3. Case Study 3 – Reframe Iran The experience of Reframe Iran was one of my last experiences of an immersive documentary, and it took place during the World Virtual Reality Forum. The film was directed by João Inada and Matteo Lonardi. Before experiencing it I already knew some important information about the choices from the directors that might have influenced the experience as a whole. The directors proposed a different perspective about Iran, so the movie was about Iranian artists (not about the political situation that is always on the western newspapers). I also knew that João Inada wanted to clearly show the process of making the documentary, so the images would show all the equipment and the staff involved in the production. The experience started before I put the Samsung Gear VR, as I entered a room that was completely dedicated to this particular experience, with posters on the walls showing pictures of the characters and technical information. When I finally put the device and pressed play, I saw the image of a man sitting in front of me, reading a book. The image was the same that I saw outside, in one of the posters. As I look around, I notice that we are inside of a studio, probably his studio. A voice starts to speak and I recognize it as the voice of one of the directors, João. He talks about the revolution in Iran, about how the country is closed and about how the western world has a limited vision of it. As the images pass by, I see different studios, different artists working, and sometimes the crew from the movie interviewing one of these artists. In one particular moment, I see one of the artists painting a huge frame in front of me. I look around for the crew, but there is no one else but the artist with me in the room. For the few seconds that this scene lasts, I feel like I can smell the ink that the artist is using. I 59

From cinema to virtual reality immediately wonder if I am mistaking the smell of the room in which I am physically in by the imaginary smell of ink, or if this the smell of some actual ink put inside of the room to enhance the experience (as the room was completely dedicated to it). During those seconds, I think about all the possibilities, and even though I know that I am not really placed on that studio, I can’t fight the smell I am sensing. During one of the interviews, the artist looked at my direction, but as I looked to the back, I realized that he was looking at João and Matteo while talking to them, and I was in the middle of this conversation, interrupting it. I was not only seeing these artists working in their studios, I was also witnessing the interviews that were being conducted for the documentary. When the experience was over, I looked for any hint of the existence of ink inside of the room, but there was nothing. The overall feeling, in the end, was that I was tricked again by the technology even though I was supposed to be used to it after so many experiences. 7.4. The feelings triggered in the experience of immersive documentaries In the descriptions presented above, it is possible to see that some feelings are common for all the experiences. The sense of being present in the virtual images, for example, is significant even after a few experiences, when we are already used to the technology. The virtual reality proposal to completely immerse the viewers in the experience, by creating a spatial illusion, keeps working, even when we are conscious about the effects of the technology in our sight. In a first moment, this sense of being somewhere else makes us feel amused by the possibility to explore the spaces around us, and it even makes us feel surprised when we see someone looking at our direction, for example. As we get used to the 360-degree images and sounds, this amusement and surprise disappears, but we are still captivated by the possibility to explore the different realities from a perspective that puts us in the middle of the scene. The immersive character of virtual reality technology keeps working. When a new element is added to the experience (like the room completely dedicated to Reframe Iran), again we can feel surprised by the experience. The exclusive room created the possibility of someone (the instructor of the experience or the designer of the room) adding a different smell to the experience without the viewer noticing it (as the device completely 60

From cinema to virtual reality excludes the sight from the external world). The mere existence of this possibility was enough to make me wonder if the smell I was feeling was something real or just something created in my mind. The amusement with the sense of the smell was only gone once the experience ended and I realized that there was in the room that could possibly smell like ink: my mind was fooled by the immersion in the experience. Different than the sense of being present in the images that is always characteristic from the experiences of virtual reality, one aspect that changes from one experience to another even as we get used to the technology is how we perceive our bodies. In a first moment, we search for signs of a body, but soon we realize that they do not exist and we accept our condition of merely ghosts in the middle of the scenes. But even as invisible bodies, each experience positions the viewer in a different perspective, according to the intentions from the directors and how they want the scenes to be seen. In Witness 360: 7/7, the images reproduced the point of view of the main character. In The Displaced, the viewer is positioned in order to see the characters and how they live. In Reframe Iran, the viewer sometimes is positioned in the middle of a conversation. These different points of view that can be assumed by the viewer influence the role that the viewer plays during the experience. Even though the body is invisible in the images, the physical body still reacts according to what the eyes see and how they see it. When placed in the perspective of the main character, for example, my body reacted accordingly – it even increased the heartbeats during the simulation of the explosion. Differently, when placed in the position of a mere observer, the role that was assumed was of someone who is watching the other tell a story, there was no assumption of the other’s place. The alternative embodiment works according to how the camera is used to frame the scene. The immersive aspect of the technology is not sufficient for placing ourselves in someone else’s body. It is the intentional use of the camera by the directors that affect the role that the viewers will assume during the experiences. Still, the mere positioning of the camera is not completely responsible for how our bodies react to the experience. The content that is presented by the images and how we relate to it is as relevant as any other aspect that constitutes the experience of an immersive documentary as a whole.

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From cinema to virtual reality The reference in the real world that is characteristic from the documentary representations is a key aspect in the constitution of the immersive documentaries. Particularly in the experiences of Witness 360: 7/7 and of The Displaced, the realities presented are cruel. These experiences refer to difficult situations lived by the characters, different than the reality presented by Reframe Iran. In this case, the reality presented is focused more on the artistic work that comes from Iranian people, not so much on how they survive the political situation from their country. In the experience of Reframe Iran, there was no significant emotion felt toward the characters or their stories, different than what occurred during the other two experiences. In Witness 360: 7/7, the consciousness about the reality of the testimony that was given by the witness was more significant than the simulated aspect of the images. Her voice guided the experience and the perceptions of the images, and as the moment of the attack approached, the body started to react as if it was actually about to suffer. I was consciously aware of the representational character of the experience, but my body reacted as if it was living something real. The illusionistic aspect of the technology was empowered by the embodied and ethical spectatorship brought by the documentary consciousness. In the case of The Displaced, there was no feeling of being one of the characters, as the point of view given by the camera put me in the position of an observer. But, in this case, the documentary consciousness made me feel sad when confronted with the situations from those children, and it made me feel disappointed for not being actually there to help them. The documentary consciousness in this case, instead of enhancing the illusion of reality, did the opposite: it made me even more aware of the virtuality of the experience. In these two experiences, death was not shown in the images, but it was mentioned by the characters as part of their lived experience, the lived experience that I was sharing with them through the immersive representation. My vision of their realities was inscribed by the moral insight that is characteristic from the cinematic visible representation of vision (Sobchack, 2004). Summarizing, the experience of immersive documentaries triggers different types of feelings in the audience, some of them related to the experience itself, some of them related to their bodies, and some of them related to the world that is represented. In this process, virtual reality technology is responsible for creating a spatial and immersive 62

From cinema to virtual reality dimension in the experience of film that involves the body in different manners. One of them is the sense of being present inside of the image instead of in front of it. The body is also experienced differently when the images (which are experienced as the viewer’s own vision) delete any reference of a body, creating the possibility for alternative embodiments during the experience. This virtual alternative embodiment has effects on how the physical body relates to the experience, and so does the content that is represented. When the viewers are conscious about the reference of the images in the real world, the reactions and emotions triggered become not only related to the experience itself, but also to the real world. The documentary consciousness can enhance the illusion of reality created by virtual reality, but it can also make the viewers even more aware of the virtual aspect of the experience. From this summary, it is possible to argue that, in the dynamic I-media-world relationship that characterizes the experiences of immersive documentaries, all the elements involved have important roles in the subjective meanings and emotions triggered by these experiences. When it comes specifically to the emotions felt toward the real world that is represented, the documentary consciousness involved in the experience plays a decisive role, as it is the responsible for connecting the viewers to the real world. The way in which the body relates to the technology is deeply influenced by this documentary consciousness, which means that the relationships between the viewers and the world will inform (and be informed by) the experience significantly. The virtual reality technology, in this sense, is far from being the machine capable of triggering emotions in the audience, as some expected it would be. In this process, technology is only one of the factors that influence the triggering of emotions, and it is deeply dependent on the other elements from the I-media-world relationship.

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8. Conclusion Immersive documentaries are a new approach to the traditional cinematic experience of documentaries, one that uses virtual reality technology in order to enhance the immersion of the viewers in the experience. As this new experience of cinema tries to establish itself among the viewers as a unique experience of another reality, some researchers and filmmakers draw conclusions about the possible effects of the use of virtual reality technology in the feelings triggered in the audience. But these conclusions evidence a technological determinism that does not consider the important role of the body in the experiences, a role that is as crucial as the role played by the technology and by the world in the I-media-world relation that characterizes the experiences of immersive documentaries. Taking into account a phenomenological tradition that puts under questioning determinist points of view, this research has aimed to answer the following questions: What are the experiences of immersive documentaries like? And how does virtual reality technology influences the emotions in the audience in the experience of immersive documentaries? The last chapters have described and contextualized the different aspects that constitute the experiences of immersive documentaries, showing that they are an immersive alternative to the documentary tradition. In these immersive experiences, the medium is deleted from the sight of the viewers, transforming their vision into the vision of the filmmakers. The viewers can explore the angles of this vision in 360-degrees spatial images that create a sense in the viewers of being present in the scenes, instead of watching them from a distance. The role of the body changes with this new sense of presence that is enhanced in the experience of immersive documentaries: besides being an active body that interacts with the images, there is also an alternative embodiment that can be experienced depending on how the viewer is positioned in the experience by the sight of the camera. As representations of the real world, the 64

From cinema to virtual reality experiences are deeply affected by how the viewers perceive the reality that is presented, process that takes into account the viewer’s previous knowledge about the world and how they relate to it. Put shortly, these aspects answer the first research question presented by this thesis. To answer the second question, phenomenology worked as a research method that helped the comprehension of the meanings of the experience as we live it. Through this approach it was possible to conclude that the experience of immersive documentaries triggers different types of feelings in the audience, some of them related to the experience itself, some of them related to their bodies, and some of them related to the world that is represented. These emotions are the result from a complex and dynamic relation between the body, the technology and the world, in which technology can even play a secondary role as it is deeply influenced by the documentary consciousness involving the body and the reference in the real world that is characteristic from these experiences. The virtual reality technology, in this sense, is far from being the machine capable of triggering by itself emotions in the audience, as stated in some initial predicaments. Whenever a new medium appears, it does so with claims and hopes attached to it (Lister et al. 2009). Researchers of new media practices must be careful not to completely ignore the existential grounds that are essential for the experiences and for the way in which the individuals make sense of it. This research aimed to contribute to the discussion about the effects of virtual reality technology in the audience by taking a phenomenological approach that strongly considered the role of the body and how it affected (and was affected by) the experience. The selection of significant, but completely different, experiences helped in the definition of the common aspects that can be related to the experiences of immersive documentaries in general. Phenomenological approaches do not give solutions to problems or general theories, but they work in order to make us more thoughtful about the meaning and significance of a phenomenon in our lives (van Manen, 1990). Although based in a few personal experiences, the subjective meanings explored by this research provided the grounds for a more general perspective to the lived experience of the immersive documentaries that can enlighten further studies about this phenomenon. 65

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