Challenge Of The Virtual

Colour brought us closer to lived physical 'meatspace' reality, but virtual production can very easily take us away from it

- Karthick Kalyanaraman

SINCE the beginning of film, two equally vital strands have animated it: the immersive fictional space constructed out of ‘reality’—as heralded by the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896)—and the completely fantastical fictional space constructed with filmic sleight-of-hand—Georges Méliès’ The Trip to the Moon (1902) is perhaps its appropriate forebear. Across the history of fictional films, it’s perhaps the former stream (the Bazinian, after the great theorist of film, André Bazin) that has been most fertile. At least it’s the one I’ve most responded to, its ambition being nothing less than to reconstruct another total world from selected images of this partial one. It, for instance, gave rise to film noir, to Italian neorealism, to the New Wave, right now to the macabre realism of, say, Béla Tarr. The other strand, the one that cares less about physical space, about the ‘real world’, too, has developed into various forms of fantasy techniques, of VFX leading to the green screen and, now, virtual production.

The greatest scenes in film, ones that have a haunting power over me, have explored real space in some way or the other. Think of that last scene in Vampyr (1932) or even Psycho (1960), where Vera Miles’ character moves from the top of the killer’s house to the dreadful basement, or that slow, almost ritualistic walk around the room up to the portrait in Laura (1944). Entire films (say Barry