The Avant Garde and Virtual Reality

Curator’s Note

With the multiplication and proliferation of new media such as virtual reality, the principles of avant-garde cinema have evolved through different cinematographic and narrative techniques. In my 360 VR Experimental Video Essay I gave examples of different avant-garde films through the years. I began in the late 1920s with Man With a Movie Camera and went all the way up to 2013 with Upstream Color. I wanted to include both older and newer films to show the evolution of avant-garde cinema to the audience. As time has gone on and new technology and new media have come about, it has gotten harder and harder to define what avant-garde cinema is. Through the use of my virtual reality footage I tried to show what an avant-garde film would look like in VR. I was inspired by the films Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Serene Velocity (1970), and The Wayward Cloud (2005) during the filming and editing of my own footage. The stationary camera in both Man with a Movie Camera and The Wayward Cloud can be seen in the second portion of the video. Additionally the quick cuts back and forth in Serene Velocity inspired the quick cuts between images in the footage.

Many of the challenges I faced were technical. This was the first time I have worked with 360-degree video and it was not easy in any sense of the word. The first challenge I faced was uploading all of the footage. The process of downloading Fusion Studio, putting all of my video files into it, rendering the footage, then uploading into Premiere Pro was much more tedious than any video project I have worked on before. Aside from the technical challenges, I found it hard to define avant-garde cinema. I think that reveals how ambiguous and ever evolving the theme of avant-garde cinema is and I hope that came through in my 360 VR Experimental Video Essay. In terms of my success I think the VR footage I captured turned out well. I also think the pacing and transitions in my video are quite smooth overall.