Screenlife Films and Immersion Cinema
Released in 2015, Unfriended grossed $64 million worldwide with a production budget of $1 million. Its commercial success spawned a series of films exploiting the same visual format of storytelling that would later be named “screenlife” by producer Timur Bekmambetov. According to Bekmambetov, screenlife is “an innovative film language that tells a whole narrative within the frames of a computer screen.” However, as we can see in Searching (2018), the concept was expanded and no longer limited to computer screens. A possible alternative definition could be “stories told through screens onscreen,” which delineates the essence of its format as layers of screens — virtual and physical — merged together, an affordance allowing it to create an immersive effect similar to that of 3-D films and Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) while bringing out several interesting paradoxes.
The immersive cinematic space screenlife films construct is intriguing. Studies of 3-D imaging linking its use in cinema to warfare often argue that “technologies of imaging today […] are technologies of probing and penetration” (Elsaesser 242), which is epitomized by the many 3-D films featuring scenes where audiences get virtual objects thrown in their faces or are penetrated by virtual knives. In this sense, screenlife films may seem the opposite in that the images seem very flat and relatively static. However, if we think of the characteristics of “immersion cinema” as creating a space enveloping the audiences and absorbing them within the film (Recuber 315), counterintuitively, screenlife films create an immersive space like 3-D films and CVR.
The key is the way screenlife films, as stories told through screens onscreen, merge the virtual computer screen and the physical screen of the cinema. The screen, in this case, becomes the computer screen the protagonist is looking at, while the spectator is placed in the position of the protagonist thanks to the semi-first-person perspective of the camera. I call it a semi-first-person perspective as the spectator only sees the computer screen itself, but not the environment around it that should also be within the vision of the protagonist. The exclusion of what is outside the frame allows the two screens to merge perfectly together, blurring the boundaries between the two worlds. Hence, the fictional space of the film extends beyond the frame and into the actual space the spectator is in as it does in VR, where “the two spaces — the real, physical space and the virtual, simulated space — coincide” (Manovich 97).
This integration of two spaces along with the spectator’s identification with the protagonist produces the immersive effects 3-D and CVR also aim for, an illusion in which the spectators feel themselves to be a part of the space portrayed onscreen. This kind of immersive experience is highlighted by many audiences of screenlife films in their reviews. Among them, most directly connecting screenlife films with CVR is perhaps Stephen Susco, director of Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), who foregrounds the strong identification with the protagonist and the illusion of being physically situated within the film: “I remember vividly seeing the first movie (Unfriended) and having this experience of watching the mouse move across the screen and feeling my fingers moving and realizing I was trying to move the mouse” (Yamato).
Equally interesting are the paradoxes derived from the specificity of the screenlife format. Christian Metz posits that the distance of looking and listening makes cinema inherently voyeuristic and scopophilic, a principle central to apparatus theory (qtd. in Recuber 323). Based on this theory, Recuber argues that in immersion cinema, where the distance is greatly reduced, spectators are no longer voyeurs as they become “participants in an immersive sensory environment” (323). However, as immersive as screenlife films could be, there is an omnipresent undertone of voyeurism concomitant with the awareness that we are looking at someone else’s personal computer, a lingering feeling not quite easy to dismiss in spite of the identification with the protagonist. The spectator is, like the uninvited ghost in Unfriended in the group video chat, an intruder peeping into the private space of others.
In addition, there is also the familiar association with screen as a technology of surveillance. In fact, explicitly or implicitly, the themes of surveillance and invasion of privacy are repeatedly brought up in screenlife films. For instance, in Unfriended: Dark Web, the main characters discuss how hackers hack webcams and sell the footage as the protagonist discovers a series of footage recording innocent people in their rooms. In Searching, the father rummages through his daughter’s laptop, searching for clues to find her in her social media accounts, mailbox, private messages, and so on, not to mention the use of surveillance camera footage in both films.
One may see that as another paradox — although screenlife films make the frame of the screen vanish while creating an immersive space, meanwhile, the existence of the screen is also emphasized because of the format and the subject matter. In contrast to the way audiences are usually expected to ignore the screen, they are reminded of the existence of “a screen” when seeing screenlife films. Furthermore, while there is the undertone of voyeurism, the voyeuristic pleasure is constantly disrupted by shots where the characters occasionally look directly into the camera when they are FaceTiming or Skyping, returning the gaze and thus acknowledging the presence of the spectator, which is generally avoided in commercial narrative cinema.
Winning the Sloan Prize at Sundance, Searching was praised by the jury for “its gripping and original interrogation of our evolving relationship with technology and how it mediates every other relationship in our lives, both positively and negatively, and for its rigorous formal experimentation with narrative” (Epstein). It is hard to tell if there lies a future for screenlife films or if they would become, as producer Sev Ohanian fears, period movies, considering how quickly technology evolves. Yet, either way, screenlife films would serve as interesting records of the digital age, not only showing an alternative way to create immersive effects in cinema through experimentation with the visual format, but also presenting paradoxes that could perhaps be seen as metaphors themselves for the contested relationship between human and technology.
Works Cited
Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Return of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century.” Critical Inquiry, 39, winter 2013, pp. 217–246.
Epstein, Sonia Shechet. “Search Wins at Sundance.” Sloan Science & Film. 30 Jan. 2018. http://scienceandfilm.org/articles/3038/search-wins-at-sundance. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.
Recuber, Tim. “Immersion Cinema: The Rationalization and Reechantment of Cinematic Space.” Space and Culture, 10, 2007, pp. 315–330.
Yamato, Jen. “With ‘Searching,’ ‘Unfriended’ and beyond, Timur Bekmambetov Seeks a New Cinematic Language That Mirrors Our Digital Lives.” Los Angeles Times. 17 Aug. 2018. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-timur-bekmambetov-searching-unfriended-dark-web-screenlife-20180817-story.html. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.
