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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 19 2017, @02:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the hardcore-henry dept.

Would you watch a virtual-reality Casablanca?

The question is ridiculous, but usefully so. VR will never be like the movies, culturally or aesthetically, and the best way to understand why may be to imagine you're experiencing the 1942 Warner Brothers classic not as a linear story viewed from a theater seat, but as an immersive world accessed by a digital headset.

Most of us would never leave Rick's Café Américain. We'd go behind the bar with Sascha, hover by Emil the croupier at the roulette table, hang out with Sam as he played "As Time Goes By" again. Me, I'd be following Peter Lorre's sniveling Ugarte. But the central drama of Rick's rekindled love and sacrifice for Ilsa Lund? We'd probably never get that far. Director Michael Curtiz and the Warner Brothers elves did such a brilliant job imagining the world of Casablanca that we'd be content to explore it until we bumped up against the walls, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

[...] VR will never become the new cinema. Instead, it will be a different thing. But what is that thing? And will audiences trained in passive linear narrative—where scene follows scene like beads on a string, and the string always pulls us forward—appreciate what the thing might be? Or will we only recognize it when the new medium has reached a certain maturity, the way audiences in 1903 sat up at The Great Train Robbery and recognized that, finally, here was a movie?

Movie critic Ty Burr goes on to review and discuss several VR productions and how they succeed or fail at using the new potential of virtual reality.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @11:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @11:14AM (#469234)

    Well, it says the word is in the beginning, doesn't it? Well, that's also true for movies: It starts with a script. The filming happens later. There obviously have been some alterations of the text, to make it fit better in a religious content, but if undo those minor changes, you get a pretty good description of film making:

    In the beginning were the words, and the words were in the script, and the words were the script. It was in the beginning in the script. All things came to be through it, and without it nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

    It all starts with a script, which them becomes life (i.e. gets filmed and ultimately shown in the cinema). And it is artificial light ("the light of the human race") that, in the form of a projector lamp, brings the film to life. But it only works if the projection is into a dark room ("the light shines in the darkness"), but of course the screen is not at all dark ("and the darkness has not overcome it").

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