I agree with Bill Drummond?s assertion that the 19th century development that had more impact on subsequent music than any other was not musical but technological ? the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s. As he puts it:
?In 1876 to hear music, you had to play an instrument or sing yourself. If not you could listen to other people playing or singing. By 1892 Emille Berliner was selling records and his Gramophones to play them on. This was the moment when music could be contained within a physical object that could be bought and sold.?1Inherent to the birth of the recorded music industry was the notion that technology could offer us a perfect facsimile of an experience removed of the original?s temporal, spatial and contextual limitations.
Depiction of a gramophone fooling a dog into thinking he was listening to his original master.
The early film pioneers raved with equal enthusiasm about technology?s supposed ability to bring the ?real experience? to the audience, perhaps best exemplified through descriptions of audience reactions to the early Lumiere brother's projections such as that of George Reyes: ?"Suddenly a train appeared. Women cried out with terror. Men threw themselves to one side to avoid being run over. It was panic. And triumph."2
It is also arguable that what the film industry was in fact trying to bring to the audience was the ?unreal experience? through the advent of special effects, editing and animation. The recorded music industry similarly followed suit, releasing music that had never existed as a single live experience, and much of the media we consume through today?s entertainment devices cannot be considered an attempt to capture and transport realistic ?real-world? experiences to the audience. Even in television coverage that attempts to put us into the heart of a live event (live football matches, the BBC?s Glastonbury festival coverage), the aim is not to fool our senses into thinking that we are actually there, or else they would be avoiding impossible camera angles and cuts and might be presenting the experience as a constant point of view shot.
However, a large part of the focus in the development of film, tv, music and videogame technologies can still broadly be characterised as attempts to bring experiences, whether or not they are actually possible in our ?real? world, in an ever more sensorily believable way.
With regard to the film industry, while some of these developments have been both artistically and commercially successful (sound, colour, picture quality), others can either seen as failed diversions or cases in which the jury is still out (various historical movements towards ?3D?, Morton Heileg?s Sensoramas).
Morton Heileg was a man driven by a desire to create the Cinema of the Future as an activity in which multiple senses were stimulated in synchronisation in order to create the a more immersive entertainment experience.
The Sensorama was able to display stereoscopic 3-D images in a wide-angle view, provide body tilting, supply stereo sound, and also had tracks for wind and aromas to be triggered during the film. Heileg was unable to obtain financial backing for his visions and patents, and the Sensorama work was halted.
The Sensorama, from U.S. Patent #3050870
Heileg is rightly lauded as a visionary and thought-leader in Virtual Reality, and one of my heroes, but I believe that his failures are interwoven with misunderstandings that arise from our notions of ?immersion? and ?reality? in cinematic experience.
One definition of a truly successful ?immersive? experience is one in which we are so involved in the content that we temporarily forget about the interface (transmission device). Traditional cinema works because we?ve made an agreement with ourselves that for a couple of hours we can overlook that fact that we are sat in a chair watching flickering images projected onto a flat screen and listening to sound reproduction.
Author/ artist Frank Miller had a problem with the 3D in Avatar precisely because it impacted this agreement:
Watching AVATAR, I found myself uncommonly aware of the boundaries of the screen. It was as if I were watching it through a closed window, not allowed to open it and poke my head out and look around. I found this frustrating, and as much a reminder of cinema?s limitations as an expansion of its capability. For some reason, it doesn?t bother me when a horse exits screen right in BEN HUR, but it?s damn distracting to have a big blue Avatar guy jump right at me and get cut off by the movie screen?s edge. ?Hey!,? asks my snake brain, ?where?d he go??.3A singular focus on driving cinematic technology towards ?reality? both misses what it is that makes cinema immersive in the first place, and only serves to highlight the complexities of defining ?reality? (complexities which of course have famously occupied philosophers throughout the ages).
This issue is also at the heart of the negative reaction towards Peter Jackson?s decision to preview a section of his new film, The Hobbit, at 48 frames-per-second (compared to cinema?s traditional 24 fps). For Jackson, as well as other cinematic technophiles such as James Cameron, faster frame-rates represent the future of cinema. However what was interesting was the nature of the public?s negative reaction to the footage in which many viewers complained that the scenes were ?too real?. In general, this has been interpreted as meaning that such viewers found the footage too reminiscent of non-cinematic material that is often shot at 30fps or above. Do audiences just need time to come round to the new technology, as Jackson has stated? Or once again, is the singular drive of technology towards an ill-defined realism costing the artistic experience that which it most cherishes ? its power to immerse.4
As someone with a strong interest in the future of entertainment, I have a great deal of sympathy for Jackson when he says ?I personally believe in using technology to improve cinema and not to think that we peaked in the 1930s?5. Such devotion to the development of cinema technologies is essential in defining the immersive entertainment of tomorrow. But if immersion is the goal, let?s avoid the trap of getting stuck in a ?faster, better, more real? approach, and develop our technologies to best serve that special experience in which we temporarily forget about the medium and allow ourselves to inhabit the content. Surely that has always been the real goal?
1 It is well worth a full listen or read the Bill Drummond's full talk to BBC Radio 3 in 2009 regarding the past, present and future of the music industry. Transcript here.
2 "From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896" by Stuart Hanson (2007)
5 Empire Magazine, October 2012
Source: http://edcookson.blogspot.com/2012/10/cinema-reality-vs-immersion.html
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