spectator has to locate the image in his reality using his own imagination. In
this way, cinema today moves further from photography and closer to
spectacle. Of course, with cinema the illusionary component is always
necessarily present as audience and spectacle do not share the same space
and time. Everything, from actors to settings and the dialogue heard are
absent in the moment in which we watch a film: it is the ‘semi-real presence
of the unreal itself’ (King, 2005: 61). In this context in which reality and
unreality are ambiguously represented to the audience in the present/non-
present, cinema reproduces life, with all the conscious and unconscious
components, and reciprocally life reproduces cinema.
Today technological development makes it not only possible to create
the illusion of reality but also, thanks to digitalization, as discussed in the
previous chapter, technology facilitates the recreation of unrealities. Bazin
points out that art can only exist when the illusion of reality produces the
dilemma of simultaneously finding the image unacceptable and pleasurable.
Today, with the introduction of the digital image in cinema, this statement
has absolute validity. Thus, Bazin observes that cinema invents or narrates
‘dreams’ that are technologically reproduced with the highest accuracy and
fidelity accessible (cited in Wollen, 1972: 131-132). Nowadays, visual
technological developments have transformed the spectator’s gaze, our
perception of films. In this sense, the incipient introduction of interactivity in
films is a useful example of the technological evolution of the reproduction of
reality. Virtual Reality offers the possibility to change the way in which we
watch films. No longer just a fragmentary part of reality that we have to
‘sew’ to give it sense, using our nervous system to cover the gaps in our
perception, the possibilities of interactive cinema and Virtual Reality
transforms the viewing process and consequently simplifies the perception of
the footage: our efforts to interpret the image decreases and we do not need
to process as much the information we are receiving. Think less and perceive
more, this seems to be the aim of Virtual Reality and the cinema of the
future.
The simulation of reality that we find in Virtual Reality, cinema and
videogames generates the multiplication of referents, as indicated by
- 72 -