The Virtual Worlds of Cinema

The Virtual Worlds of Cinema Visual Effects, Simulation, and the Aesthetics of Cinematic Immersion Paul Sunderland A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. University of Sydney. 2019 1 I hereby declare that, except where indicated in the notes, this thesis contains only my own original work. Some of Chapter 2 was previously published as ‘The Autonomous Camera in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,’ in Sydney Studies in English 39, (2013): 58-85. 2 Abstract This thesis develops a phenomenology of immersive cinematic spectatorship. During an immersive experience in the cinema, the images, sounds, events, emotions, and characters that form a fictional diegesis become so compelling that our conscious experience of the real world is displaced by a virtual world. Theorists and audiences have long recognized cinema’s ability to momentarily substitute for the lived experience of reality, but it remains an under-theorized aspect of cinematic spectatorship. The first aim of this thesis is therefore to examine these immersive responses to cinema from three perspectives – the formal, the technological, and the neuroscientific – to describe the exact mechanisms through which a spectator’s immersion in a cinematic world is achieved. A second aim is to examine the historical development of the technologies of visual simulation that are used to create these immersive diegetic worlds. My analysis shows a consistent increase in the vividness and transparency of simulative technologies, two factors that are crucial determinants in a spectator’s immersion. In contrast to the cultural anxiety that often surrounds immersive responses to simulative technologies, I examine immersive spectatorship as an aesthetic phenomenon that is central to our engagement with cinema. The ubiquity of narrative – written, verbal, cinematic – shows that the ability to achieve immersion is a fundamental property of the human mind found in cultures diverse in both time and place. This thesis is thus an attempt to illuminate this unique human ability and examine the technologies that allow it to flourish. 3 Acknowledgements Thanks firstly to Bruce. You’re an incredible mentor and have been such an amazing support over the past few years. I cannot thank you enough for all your advice and encouragement, and I’ll always be grateful for your enthusiasm about my early writing on Stanley Kubrick. Thanks also to my family. Your academic and professional achievements have always inspired me, and I’m so grateful for your constant support and encouragement. There are too many of you to mention individually, but you know who you are. I love you all. And finally, thanks to Monique. You’re amazing, and I love you. And I can’t wait for December! 4 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Contents 5 Introduction 6 Visual Effects, Diegetic Immersion, and Hollywood Cinema 9 The Phenomenology of Immersion 12 Immersion Through History 17 Perceptual Immersion 27 Narrative Immersion 32 Visual Effects: Technologies of Illusion 37 Cinema’s Virtual Spaces 42 Chapter 1 – Spatial Immersion and Hollywood Storyworlds 47 Medium Transparency 51 Visual Effects Compositing 53 Synthetic Images and Realism 57 Compositing in Early Cinema 68 Rear Projection and Hitchcockian Modernism 75 Compositing in the Digital Era 85 Chapter 2 – Camera Movement and the Immersive Long Take 91 Spatio-Temporal Immersion 95 Proprioceptive Aesthetics 100 Aesthetic Immersion and Distanciation 106 The Shining and the Aesthetics of the Steadicam 112 The Steadicam and Diegetic Presence 117 Moving Through Virtual Spaces 126 Digital Movement 130 Gravity: Virtual Reality Cinema 137 Chapter 3 – Emotional Immersion: The Response to Character 144 The Varieties of Aesthetic Immersion 150 Other-Directed Emotions 153 The Neurophenomenology of Emotional Immersion 156 Simulation and its Discontents 167 The Uncanny Valley 174 Conclusion – The Future of Digital Immersion 183 References 188 5 Introduction All of us have experienced the unique pleasure of being immersed in a fictional world. During such experiences, the images, sounds, events, emotions, and characters that form a fictional diegesis become so compelling that our immediate surroundings disappear, and the drama of the diegetic world becomes more immediate to us than the real world of our everyday lives. Such responses to fictional worlds can be found in a variety of media, including novels, cinema, virtual reality, poetry, music, and even non-fictional accounts of real events, such as immersive journalism. These immersed responses to media can be found in a variety of historical eras, and in diverse cultural traditions. My concern in this thesis is with the immersive worlds of popular cinema, with a focus on the form of cinema outlined by Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema.1 This is a form that uses the elements of cinematic style to maximize the credibility and coherence of the virtual world that exists beyond the screen. It is a form that uses the technologies of visual simulation – the camera, and increasingly, visual effects – to construct a tangible space in order to elicit a specific spectator response. It is a response characterized by the spectator’s relocation away from their immediate environment, and into the diegetic world of the cinema. This thesis has two main aims. The first is to describe the exact mechanisms through which a spectator’s immersion in a cinematic world is achieved. This aim can be further broken down into three broad approaches: a formalist analysis of the cinematic techniques used by filmmakers to create diegetic worlds; a technological analysis of both the apparatus and the visual effects techniques used to capture and edit the images that make up such worlds; and finally, the application of research from the sciences of the human mind and brain to cinematic phenomena to help explain the cognitive and neuro-physiological responses that occur during immersive experiences. The hope is that by examining immersion from these three perspectives – the formal, the technological, and the neuroscientific – a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon can be achieved. 1 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 2004). 6 A second aim of this thesis is to examine the historical development of the technologies of visual simulation that are used to create these immersive diegetic worlds. My analysis shows a consistent increase in the vividness and transparency of simulative technologies, two factors that are crucial determinants in a spectator’s immersion. This increase in the power of simulative technologies has been the source of much recent cultural anxiety, much of which focuses on the relationship between representation and reality and the threat posed to this relationship by these technologies. This anxiety generally aligns with particular technological developments, but this concern with the relationship between a representation and the reality it ostensibly represents goes back at least as far as Plato, for whom all representations were acts of deception: The art of representation is therefore a long way removed from truth, and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp of anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance. For example, a painter can paint a portrait of a shoemaker or a carpenter or any other craftsman without understanding any of their crafts; yet, if he is skilled enough, his portrait of a carpenter may, at a distance, deceive children or simple people into thinking it is a real carpenter.2 The deceptive power of simulative technologies has been the focus of more recent fictional explorations. For example, the dangers of a perfectly immersive technology appear in Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley’s depiction of a dystopian society in which an individual’s every want and desire is immediately satisfied. In this novel, the citizens of the futuristic World State are amused by a sophisticated form of entertainment that has added a range of sensory modalities to cinema’s more conventional visual and auditory aspects. This latest iteration in cinema’s technological evolution is so sensorially engaging that it dulls the ability for critical engagement and rational thought, which, Huxley concludes, helps deprive the citizens of the World State of any kind of meaning or agency in their real lives.3 Real-world immersive technologies have also been the focus of more recent attack. For example, in an article titled Virtual Reality is Addictive and Unhealthy, William H. Davidow 2 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee. (London: Penguin, 2003), 339-340. 3 A detailed discussion of this aspect of Huxley’s novel can be found in Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Penguin, 2005). 7 warns that ‘as we take bodies and brains adapted to physical space and immerse them in virtual worlds, they are not only unable to cope, they respond in unanticipated ways.’4 Among the dangers that Davidow associates with virtual reality are ‘a persistent and worrying increase in levels of cortisol,’ an unnatural release of the neurotransmitter dopamine that ‘drives us to crave more such stimulation,’ and elevations in heart rate and blood pressure that resemble the ‘elevations in cortisol-triggered responses seen in combat veterans.’5 Similarly, in Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle draws attention to some of the problems associated with immersive technologies, focusing in particular on the introduction of simulative technologies to a variety of fields, including architecture and the social and natural sciences: But immersed in simulation, we are also vulnerable. Sometimes it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it, or even acknowledge that everything is not captured in it. An older generation fears that young scientists, engineers, and designers are “drunk with code.” A younger generation scrambles to capture their mentors’ tacit knowledge of buildings, bodies, and bombs.

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