Perhaps, the time of VR is over. He supports it Simone Arcagnifilm critic who for the Pesaro International New Cinema Exhibition curated the virtual reality section, consisting of nine titles, plus a special screening produced by Emergencyhosted at House of New Technologies. “We are moving towards coexistence – claims Arcagni – from mixed reality to holograms”. For a long time, virtual reality, invited into a festival context for the first time at the Venice Film Festival, was presented as the future: post-postcinema. Yet, after years among us, it appears as an alternative present, still little participated (“more public than journalists” they tell us at the Casa delle Nuove Tecnologie), where a set of techniques that are always new, or mutated from the more traditional cinematography, put to the test the narrative ability of the artists. VR is no longer just VR. It is indeed many things; like XR, mixed reality, where the limits of real and virtual challenge each other. As if in a Festival short films and documentaries, feature films and series alternated in a single section, the PesaroNuovoCinemaVR It thus follows variable paths, significant precisely because they are unpredictable.
The selected titles are recent, created between 2022 and 2023. The year, in virtual reality, makes the difference; because innovation is continuous. Two Italians were selected, Hands-Matter-Memory Of Leonardo Carrano And Surfacing Of Rossella Schillaci. Different on every level, from form to content, they are shining examples of the variety of works belonging to the ever-growing VR family.
Carrano’s work, for example, is evidence of alternative paths that follow and question twentieth-century experiments with film. It is a 360 degree film, which envelops the viewer in a cinepoetic experience, invited to get lost in a magma of indistinct images and a continuous voice-over (edited by Antonio Rezza). The creation of the work, just 10 minutes long, seems to come from worlds far from virtual reality: an animated film worked directly on film, engraved with signs and abstract shapes that recompose and change throughout the experience.
“The manual work of the film – says Carrano – was to photograph the moments in which the film loses opacity: through scratches and thanks to the encaustic technique (brushstrokes of diluted nitric acid heated with a pyrograph) materials previously glued to the film are shown (hair, glass, metals and plastics)”. They look like microscope images, those of Hands-Matter-Memory, which surround us and appear immensely larger than our gaze. Unable to concentrate on a single clear object, the spectator looks around, taking in the whole experience as if in a trance, while Rezza’s voice acts as the only point of reference. The film refers to the Psychologya method according to which thanks to signs and traits it would be possible to trace childhood events.
“The technique I used, taken to its extreme consequences, melts the materials and tears the film itself. A film that broadens the relationship I had with the practice of doodling Of Born Frascà, with whom I studied the value of the sign, so I made this film – continues Carrano -, letting myself go completely on the film, producing images that were not pre-planned or thought out but developed on the film itself by the manual work”. The presumed immateriality of VR – a bugaboo with which this art has long been confined to a single interpretation – is lost in a dance of scribbles and signs that are never so true for those who experience them from the inside. Just as the first films in history rediscovered reality by pointing the camera at the branches of trees moved by the wind – never so interesting to the human eye – VR also returns to reality, renewed with a new look.
It is evident in the experimental documentary of Rossella Schillaci, Surfacing. The film tells the life of some children who live with their mothers in prison, dreaming of a future out there, hoping to “surface” to discover a broader horizon than that offered by a cell.
Schillaci’s direction takes us, with images shot on location, inside a real prison, showing the intensity of total immersion, combined with animated elements that expand the narrative. As we are shown the prison garden, Schillaci decides to break through the floor with animation and take us down with her, into the depths of this hell. Mixed reality breaks through real footage and the VR story is fully realized. The chamber descends slowly; around only walls, greyness and a fauna rich in animated creatures that float in this hopeless aquarium. From here you move perpendicular to the floor, discovering the rooms and listening to the stories of those who populate them, especially the little ones. Finally, in an opposite path, Schillaci resurfaces, higher and higher, with a vertical movement that rises to the sky while the children’s voice over tells their dreams for the future (“what do I dream of? a normal house”). Our gaze coincides with theirs, the protagonists of this sui generis fairy tale.
Ideas and forms of cinema – camera movements as the heart of the story or the use of subjective shots – return in Schillaci’s work, intensified by the characteristics of the viewer, which forces us into a space and, without betraying it, expands it out of all proportion.
To strike the spectators of the PesaroNuovoCinemaVR we also find now classic works, widely shown in festivals all over the world. There is Spheres, which puts us in the heart of the cosmos to show where we come from and how everything around us was born. A 2018 work produced by the director Darren Aronofsky and narrated by the actress Jessica Chastain. More recent, and of great impact, it is Body of minean experience that talks about gender dysphoria through total immersion, made up of stories and interviews of trans people, but also of an evocative animated mirror that is placed in front of the viewer, questioning him about his own body.
The idea of VR as a transformative machine, a trance experience from which one can emerge different, pulsates in the heart of these works, now far from simple technological divertissement.
