feelings of stress. It is therefore a sign, on a small scale, of what society is
experiencing today: a frustration with our way of life that, in spite of its
benefits, is full of dissatisfactions and dangers.
Cinema, another contemporary ‘storytelling’ medium, is not only
assuming plots taken from videogames, but is also reflecting the
consequences and fears provoked by the relevance acquired by them in
contemporary society. Thus, many films adopt the visual and narrative
conventions of videogames, and a film such as Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998),
with its exploitation of a videogames aesthetic within a filmic structure, is a
perfect example of this. In much the same manner, The Matrix, with its use
of computerized special effects, slow motion movement of the camera and
the creation of a device with multiple cameras placed in a circle that gives
the impression of freely moving around an object or a person, originated a
new videogame-filmic aesthetic that has important repercussions for the
audience. Indeed, the Wachowski brothers’ work has been particularly
influential on recent cinematic output, not only with respect to the SF genre
with films such as I, Robot, but also in terms of martial arts output like
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000) and action films such as Wanted
(Bekmambetov, 2008).
It is true to say, then, that the filmic apparatus has been very much
affected in recent years by the electronic culture of video and the computer
generation of images, based on the formula of temporal simultaneity and
freedom of movement of the image. Taken from the three dimensional worlds
of computer games, where it is possible to choose an angle from which to
perceive the action, cinema has developed a way to approach the
‘infectiveness’ of virtuality beyond animation films (King, 2005: 158). After
all, a substantial amount of the pleasure experienced when playing
videogames comes from the delight of observing (and ‘participating in’) the
development of technology. Cinema has found a way to share this amusement
and can be summarized, much in the same way as the cinema of the
beginning of the 20th century was, via the notion of ‘fascination’ (King, 2002:
37). Tom Gunning explains this first fascination of the cinema spectator:
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