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5. Immersive Aesthetics
- Rutgers University Press
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183 Cinema marries a compelling presentation of sound and moving images to the depiction of what often are worlds of the imagination. The more perceptually convincing these imaginary worlds can be made to seem, the more virtual and immersive the spaces of story and image become. As we have seen, digital tools enhance the perceptual realism of effects sequences. They thus help to fulfill one of cinema’s historical objectives. Cinema belongs to a long history of illusion spaces that aim for maximum perceptual credibility, and many of its technological innovations can be understood as advances upon this underlying goal, most notably the digital tools that enable filmmakers to composite real and synthetic characters, objects, and spaces in imperceptible ways. Indeed, Robert Neuman, a supervisor of stereoscopic film production for Walt Disney Animation Studios, states that technological development in cinema has taken the medium toward a more immersive aesthetics, providing viewers with greatly intensified sensory experiences relative to earlier generations of filmmaking. Cinema, he writes, “has had a history of innovations that tend toward higher and higher degrees of immersion.” These include color, widescreen, and multichannel sound. “Film emulsions and now digital display technologies have advanced in resolution and dynamic range to make the alternate reality being presented by the filmmaker a more compelling illusion . Even non-display related film innovations such as the zoom lens or the steadycam [sic] represent a technology aimed at pulling the viewer deeper into the experience.”1 Indeed, an ideal of sensory immersion is embedded in cinema and extends beyond it to other media in ways suggesting that there is an enduring human fascination with the experience of virtual spaces and perspectives. Oliver Grau has traced the history of illusion spaces that aim to maximize the viewer’s sense of being in the picture, and he concludes that these constitute an ongoing C H A P T E R 5 Immersive Aesthetics 184 digital visual effects in cinema feature of Western art. “Virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images. . . . In each epoch, extraordinary efforts were made to produce maximum illusion with the technical means at hand.”2 He shows how viewing spaces from the Great Frieze in the Villa dei Misteri at Pompeii, circa 60 b.c., to Gothic cathedral ceilings, nineteenth-century panoramas, and cinema in conventional, stereoscopic, and IMAX formats have aimed to minimize or occlude the observer’s awareness of image borders and of being separated from the image. In the seventeenth century, painter and architect Andrea Pozzo created spectacular trompe-l’oeil perspectives on the ceiling of Saint Ignatius’s Church. Viewing the flat ceiling from a prescribed point, the observer perceives a deep recession of brightly colored, ornately decorated space that depicts an allegorical narrative of Ignatius’s apotheosis. The vista seems to draw the viewer upward toward heaven. Alison Griffiths writes that brightly colored and spatially expansive Gothic cathedrals “were intrinsically multimedia, multisensory spaces” and that “spectacle and a heightened sense of immersion were not only expected but came to define the very nature of the overall religious experience.”3 She defines immersive spaces as eliciting a bodily sense of participation from viewers.“One feels enveloped in immersive spaces and strangely affected by a strong sense of the otherness of the virtual world one has entered, neither fully lost in the experience nor completely in the here and now.”4 Prior to the invention of cinema, panoramic photographs and paintings offered spectators epic views of cities, rivers, and historical landmarks and became a popular form of visual spectacle. Engulfing panoramas created by Robert Barker, for example, enabled audiences to step into a widescreen vista that activated peripheral vision and concealed the boundaries of the painted image. Grand Fleet at Spithead (1794) offered spectators an image measuring 280 feet in diameter. Barker perfected a system and an apparatus for producing the curved geometries of space that, when mounted as a 360degree panorama, would seem to appear as straight lines. Barker stitched together his series of views in a subtle fashion. As Martin Kemp notes, “Their panoramic images are essentially polygonal views arranged cylindrically, with the junctions between the serial views suitably ‘softened.’”5 As we see below, this is remarkably like contemporary procedures for stitching a panoramic HDR (high dynamic range) photograph from individual images. Thomas Horner’s view of London from atop the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral offered a dramatically curving view of the...