By Will Cox
As tens of thousands of cinephiles across the city succumb to Melbourne International Film Festival fever, a select few will don headsets and experience a new, experimental form of cinema.
This year, nine immersive XR films (a catch-all term for virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality) are pushing the boundaries of a still-emerging art form – one not only involving sight and sound, but movement and immersion.
The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, winner of the Best Immersive Experience award at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, is screening at Melbourne International Film Festival.Credit:
For Taiwanese XR creator Singing Chen, the technology offers something traditional cinema can’t.
“With virtual reality, viewers can experience a genuine environment,” says Chen, through a translator. “They can immerse themselves with both body and soul.”
Chen is the director of The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, the winner of the Best Immersive Experience award at last year’s Venice Film Festival – a highlight of this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival XR offering. In Chen’s film we are taken to Green Island, a political prison off the coast of Taiwan in the 1950s. Today, it’s home to a museum, populated with waxworks of executed prisoners. Chen’s film breaks down the barrier between the museum and the historical events.
XR has been a part of Melbourne International Film Festival since 2016, but there’s a common perception that it’s a novelty rather than a serious art form. This is changing. This year’s XR program sees filmmakers thinking about ways the technology can put us in the bodies of others.
Turbulence explores director Ben Joseph Andrews’ chronic vestibular condition, which leads to dizziness and imbalance. Lou invites us to see the world through the eyes of a child on the autism spectrum. And I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs simulates hallucinations brought on by an attempted home abortion.
The Man Who Couldn’t Leave borrows just as much from theatre as it does from traditional film – we are deposited in the midst of a series of reenactments and monologues. Chen likens the experience to a dream.
“Your memory of a dream is very strong,” she says. “After you wake from the dream, you sit in bed and you can’t move. That’s something virtual reality can do.”
The second week of the XR program is dedicated to In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, one of the most successfully immersive XR films to date.
Through a headset, handheld controls, and a vibrating haptic vest, we’re deposited in depression-ravaged Coventry, UK, at the end of the 1980s, home to a thriving underground rave scene. We are trying to locate a rave at an illegal venue – a process complicated by the need to stay one step ahead of the police.
Set in the late 1980s, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats has both interactive and animated elements.Credit:
“Each time I make something [in XR] it gets more complicated and more nuanced,” says director Darren Emerson. “And I think the storytelling gets better and better and better.”
“We’re mixing the language of cinema with gaming conventions, as well as theatre.”
Beats has interactive and animated elements, but it’s a documentary at heart. Information is communicated to us in the midst of an immersive experience. Interviews come to us in the form of party flyers scattered around bedrooms, police station walls and phone booths, and in voice-over as we cruise down the highway in a Peugeot 205, hunting for the party.
We don’t actually get there until the film’s final minutes. After the journey, the destination is genuinely euphoric. As we stand in a mass of bodies dancing in an abandoned warehouse, the haptic vests strapped to our chest pulse to the beat. The bass goes straight into our bones.
“[Beats] is really about the politics of the time,” says Emerson. “This was a cultural revolution in the UK.”
Emerson’s previous VR films include Indefinite (2016), about detention of asylum seekers in the UK, and Common Ground (2019), about the community of a South London housing estate. His works use XR to immerse people in marginalised cultures.
Now, as the software and hardware improve and the art form moves out of its experimental stage, a new language of immersive cinema is emerging.
“As soon as it feels very natural, then the friction between the technology and the story starts to fall away, and you become more immersed,” he says.
“People have been so obsessed with it as tech for tech’s sake. But for me, it’s always been about how we can use this medium to tell great stories that people want to come and see.”
The Man Who Couldn’t Leave is playing at ACMI until August 15. In Search of Repetitive Beats is playing at ACMI from August 17-20.
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