Challenge Of The Virtual

OutlookIndia

#OutlookMagazine | Colour brought us closer to lived physical ‘meatspace’ reality, but virtual production can very easily take us away from it, writes Karthik Kalyanaraman.   Listen to the excerpts from the latest issue of Outlook - only by Pragya Vats.   #Cinema #VirtualProduction #Filmmaking #Movies #Cinema #IReadOutlook #ReturnToReading   Read more: https://www.outlookindia.com/art-entertainment/challenge-of-the-virtual-in-cinema-magazine-337429

Transcript

00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the current issue of Outlook.

00:05 Outlook looks at two cover stories.

00:07 One, titled "Almost Real, But Not Quite".

00:11 Virtual production can make the filmmaking much cheaper and convenient.

00:16 But will the AI-powered tech also forever alter the essence of cinema itself?

00:22 Second, titled "Paradise Lost", can we row the Shikara Isles and have the heritage walks?

00:29 The cover carries the image and words from the visual artist Veer Munshi.

00:34 He says, "My installation depicts the fast-changing characteristics of Indian cities.

00:40 So I was wondering about the fate of our paradise on earth called Kashmir."

00:45 "Challenge of the Virtual" by Karthik Kalyanaraman,

00:49 an economist who explores the intersection between AI and contemporary art.

00:54 Since the beginning of film, two equally vital strands have animated it.

00:59 The immersive fictional space constructed out of reality as heralded by the Lumier brothers,

01:05 the arrival of a train at Laseyota station, 1896,

01:09 and the completely fantastical fictional space constructed with filmic sleigh of hand,

01:15 Georges Milieu's "The Trip to the Moon" in 1902, is perhaps its appropriate forbearer.

01:21 Across the history of fictional films, it's perhaps the former stream,

01:25 the Bezinian after the great theorist of film, Andhra Bazin, that has been most fertile.

01:31 At least, it's the one I have most responded to.

01:34 Its ambition being nothing less than to reconstruct another total world from selected images of this partial one.

01:43 It, for instance, gave rise to film noir, to Italian neorealism,

01:48 to the new wave, right now, to the macabre of realism, say, Bellator.

01:54 The other strand, the one that cares less about physical space, about the real world too,

01:59 has developed into various forms of fantasy techniques, of VFX, leading to the green screen, and now, virtual production.

02:08 The greatest scenes in films, ones that have a haunting power over me,

02:12 have explored real space in some way or the other.

02:15 Think of the last scene in Vampire, 1933, or even Psycho, in 1960,

02:21 where Werher Meier's character moves from the top of the killer's house to the dreadful basement,

02:27 or that slow, almost ritualistic walk around the room up to the portrait in Laura, in 1944.

02:35 Entire films, say Barry Lydon in '75, with its alternating claustral insides and desolate outside of Kubrick,

02:43 or any film by Tarvorsky, have been structured around the making memorable,

02:48 of different types of imagined space constructed out of real spaces.

02:53 Perhaps the epitome of this might be last year, at Meerenbach, in 1961, an entirely spatial, temporal delight.

03:02 Even the French New Wave would not have exploded, if not for the basic respect for real locations and real spaces,

03:10 morphed through trailblazing techniques, such as the jump cuts.

03:15 The actual camera movement and actual location creates a sense of magic.

03:20 I fear, however, a lot of the times that the second strand, when it ignores the real,

03:26 with an overdose of visual effects, can flatten out the true sorcery,

03:30 and substitute for it a rather stale, irreal.

03:35 For this and more, read the current issue of Outlook.

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