There is currently a great deal of fascination, curiosity and temptation with the new opportunities for communication and storytelling presented by developments in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
In its very first use, moving image, was in the darkened space of a cinema, its dancing light delighting and enchanting us. We were enchanted by the ability to bring far away things into the darkened space of the cinema. We pointed our cameras at anything that would feed this superficial wonder. This period of the medium of film is what film historians refer to as ‘the cinema of attractions’.
There wasn’t any storytelling going on. There wasn’t much meaning. It wasn’t shaping our identity, nor giving our lives much purpose. We were just reveling in the moving image on a very superficial level. We hadn’t yet come to grips with or established a grammar for its usage. We didn’t yet know how to harness its full power. The moment that the moving image now finds itself in bears many parallels to this moment at the beginning of the twentieth century. Virtual reality and augmented reality are dazzling and enchanting us. We’re revelling in the wonders of the moving image in these new forms.
But, as with the cinema of attractions, are we really using them to their fullest and their most powerful? Have we truly unlocked their storytelling potential? Is their application really inspiring us to purposeful action? Many say not. And that’s because we haven’t yet fully formulated the grammar that harnesses their potential, nor have we gotten beyond the spectacle. We haven’t worked out how to give these experiences real purpose.
By looking at the way that film progressed, we can get some answers about the current weakness of our grasp and use of the medium in these new forms. That’s not to say that we won’t need to experiment with all that these technologies have to offer, but we can use the established grammar of film-making to our advantage, giving us a flying start on how to embrace and exploit these new ways of storytelling.