Film Aesthetics

Spectator Volume 37,  No. 1 Spring 2017

Table of Contents:
Introduction - On the Fringe: Understanding Alternative and Subversive Media - Eszter Zimanyi and Emma Ben Ayoun, University of Southern California
Screening the Pre-Infant: Ultrasound and its Realisms - Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara
Classifying Information: The Opaque Logics of Terror Watchlists - Daniel Grinberg, UC Santa Barbara
Audiovisual Black Subjectivity in Kahlil Joseph's "Double Conscience" - Jheanelle Brown, University of Southern California
Solidification and Flux on the "Gay White Way": Gay Porn Theaters in New York City, 1969-1973 - Matthew Connolly, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"I Can't Believe a Soldier Would Do A Thing Like That": The Monstrous Vietnam Veteran in the Exploitation Film - Robert J. Ashmore, University of Southern California
The Marvelous City: Audiovisual Representations of Post-Special Period Havana - Bianka Ballina, UC Santa Barbara
"I set out to do everything I could to bring this idea to fruition": Leila Jarman reflects on directing her first feature length documentary, Voice of the Valley - Eszter Zimanyi, University of Southern California

Humanitarian organizations, journalists, and artists are increasingly turning to virtual reality (VR) and immersive filmmaking because of its ostensibly unprecedented ability to conjure empathic feelings that lead to humanitarian action. Recent media studies scholarship attends to the possibilities and pitfalls of curating empathy through VR in the context of documentary filmmaking; however, these analyses primarily focus on VR’s unique visual address. The status of the participant’s body, as it exists in the physical world and as it is conjured within the virtual environment, remains under-explored in scholarship on immersive media and humanitarianism. In this paper, we offer a comparative analysis of embodiment in two recent multisensory VR film installations with humanitarian themes: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (2017) which stages an attempted border crossing between Mexico and the United States; and Hero (iNKStories, 2018), which places participants into an unnamed Syrian village during an air raid. Using bodily absence as a framework, we argue that agency, responsibility, and a humanitarian subjectivity are ambiguously constructed through the sensing of bodily and psychic borders within these contemporary VR installations. We conclude that humanitarian VR is better understood as a technology of encounter rather than one of empathy.

Preview Document. Please click here for full article: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/im/2019-n34-im05439/1070876ar/