Telecommunications technologies mediate more of our interactions with the world today than ever before. Often, we even operate more than one of these devices at a time-- as I type this my phone sits glowing next to the computer. We cannot deny the ubiquity of these digital mediators in the modern quotidien, providing an interface with the physically inaccessible realms of our social and informational worlds, yet their representation in cinematic narrative hardly reflects the degree of our integration. With the proportional absence of this most recognizable aspect of our lives, screen time, a vacuum in the contested realm of cinematic realism grows. Our intimate relationships with technology, and with others through technology, present representational challenges, as much of these stories take place within browsers and drafted text messages. In this paper, we will explore how the adaption and adoption of digital technologies for narrative and aesthetic purposes creates a new iteration of realism by integrating cinema with our everyday screen environments. These diegetic technologies inject the concept of “digi-presence” into cinema, creating new notions of realism and new representational possibilities of digital “space”. To do so, we must first unpack what “digi-presence” is. Then, we will explore how this phenomenon can be seen as an extension of Bazinian realism through an analysis of Unfriended (2014).
To embark on this journey through digital psychological phenomenology, we should first explore the concept of “telepresence” developed by Lev Manovich and its basis for digi-presence. Telepresence, literally, refers to the ability to cast your body to some other physical location. Manovich refines the definition by clarifying that “telepresence provides the ability to manipulate remotely physical reality in real time through its image” (Manovich: 166). In other words, for a remote digital action to register as “presence” there must be a physical place where our faculties and agency are projected. And while this notion can represent our relationship with remotely operated technology, it feels obsolete when most of our interactions with technology today occur in the void of the cloud. We do affect changes in our environments remotely, but these actions, much like the realms in which they occur, are purely digital. In the digital habitat, we never think we’re telepresent somewhere else as the websites we navigate never attempt to simulate reality, instead, we enter a non-space populated by human inputs. We abandon Manovich’s preoccupation with physical interaction with a far off environment as the drama which transpires in the digital world rarely manifests physically as much as it does socially, mentally, and emotionally (Manovich: 167-169).
To compensate for these conceptual setbacks, I instead propose the term “digi-presence”, which encompasses the “non-immersive” (as opposed to how virtual reality could be considered “immersive”) commercial digital environments like social media, search engines, and other graphical user interfaces (GUIs). With this non-immersion, users often straddle their attention, their mental “presence”, between the screen and their surrounding realities. This operation on multiple layers of awareness proves another key factor of digi-presence, manifested as your mental space the moment before you have to tell someone “Wait, what? Sorry, I was looking at my phone.” Digi-presence surpasses Manovich’s fixation on interaction with the outside world via the computer, fixating instead on interaction with the computer itself. Representation and implementation of digi-presence, then, pose the possibility for a new kind of perceptual realism in cinema, mimicking how our reality is mediated through technology.
When something as simple as a text conversation flashes up on a screen, the image contains an unexpected amount of perceptual (and narratively optional) information: the contact’s picture, name, number, last few messages, their general relationship with the recipient, whether or not they use emojis, superficial personality traits, etc. Scenes featuring text conversations as points of dramatic action, a common trope in “millennial” television shows like Master of None, invoke the familiar concept of digi-presence. The phone screen usually makes an appearance as an overlay over a shot of the texting character or an over the shoulder view. Scenes like these split the viewer’s attention between what is happening on the screen and what the character is doing. The richness of plausible narrative content, the tension between familiar graphic interfaces and dramatic performance, poses similar affordances to the perceptually realistic capabilities of deep-focus cinema. For Bazin, the overabundance of information within a frame calls to realism as it mimics our own bombardment with stimuli in real life (Bazin, Aesthetic: 27-29; Bazin, Citizen Kane: 232-235). This principle reflects Bazin’s general insistence on cinematic realism being vested in the representation of reality as we experience it, in deep focus and long takes. In his time, this meant the abandonment of Hollywood’s studio aesthetic for something more “real” (Bazin, Aesthetic: 30-33; Bazin, Bicycle Thieves: 57-59). Additionally, Bazin contends that the room for ambiguity of which elements in a composition contain narrative significance and which are simply there makes something more realistic. He also asserts that the mise-en-scene of films should comprise objects of the “real” world. These principles of realism can be applied to films like Citizen Kane (1941) as much as they can to Unfriended (2014), as both films feature layers upon layers of potential narrative information in most frames.
Unfriended, in fact, displays most of Bazin’s conventions of realism in its medium alone. Though obvious, it is important to note that everything takes place on a screen and that everything on this screen is in focus. The legibility of Unfriended as a desktop film informs our own perception of the narrative, as we are hurled into the ambiguous realm of the digital environment, inducing digi-presence as the adventure in computer multitasking unfolds in real time. Though standard for computers, the fact that everything is in focus makes all information on screen theoretically accessible to the viewer, much like the deep focus Bazin applauds. Everything on screen also takes place in real time, emulating our own experiences of using the computer with loading screens and spinning rainbow wheels. Most important is the fact that all the applications and graphics on screen are at least somewhat familiar to us, as we interact with them in the “real” world. We are provided with indices of Macintosh OS and Spotify to signify that this takes place on a “real” computer, much like Bicycle Thieves takes place on “real” street corners. We perceive every aspect of Blaire’s computer, considering we are hyper-aware of the fact that this film takes place on a computer and that this is supposed to be a “real” computer. In response to this insistence, we then interact with the information on her screen as though we were using a “real” computer, following her movements while simultaneously getting distracted by all the information on screen. Bazin would applaud this consolidation of narrative action into one space, as he emphasizes narrative through mise-en-scene over “a succession of images and their relationship to each other” (Bazin, Citizen Kane: 233-235).
In films significantly mediated through digital communication technology, the concept of informational bombardment from Bazin’s approach to realism takes on a new meaning. The fragmentation of our attention inherent in digi-presence intensifies the motivational ambiguity of information depicted on diegetic digital devices, as we are tempted to look everywhere at once. The lack of actors guiding our basic attention in these informationally rich compositions kaleidoscopes the ambiguity of narrative/non-narrative information, as anything could be important considering every window and tab was placed there intentionally. This concept becomes most clear in the scene in Unfriended where Blaire attempts to memorialize Laura Barn’s Facebook profile (Unfriended- 00:13:42-00:16:30). I specifically chose this scene because it is one of the longest scenes that does not feature the Skype call as the main narrative vehicle, meaning we are at the mercy of the cursor to guide our scattered attention. Initially, Blaire texts with Mitch as the muted video call plays in the background, with each muted character’s movements drawing the eye away from her slow typing. Next, she clicks the link Mitch sends her, launching us into her web browser where we are greeted by eight open tabs. On this page, we see a screenshot of another computer on this computer, this meta image is also imbued with the indexical information of a digital life-- open windows and tabs cut-off from legibility. She lingers on images for long enough that we begin to explore the rest of the desktop once we register what is happening in her main window. As she opens every subsequent window and tab, snippets of information slip out at every click. The Facebook messenger page alone provides multiple stages for the portrayal of narratively significant information. We look through the message previews instinctively, as this interface proves too familiar to be illegible. Throughout the rest of the scene, Blaire clicks through the same pages trying to deactivate Laura’s account, and each time we see the same page the urge to explore the rest of the screen increases. This desire to scan the entire screen embodies the perceptual incentives of digi-presence, being zoned in and distracted all at once, facilitated by the film’s analogous structures for deep focus, “real” time, and “real” mise-en-scene. In other words, the film emulates how we interact with the reality it presents, creating a new form of realism.
Overall, films centering around digital communication technologies can possess the building blocks of Bazinian realism as they encompass most of his principles through the characteristics of the devices themselves. These technologies communicate a plethora of information to media literate audiences watching these films, unlocking the kind of perception we experience when using these devices: digi-presence. We become heavily engrossed in every sliver of information in the digital worlds depicted, emulating our real life interactions with these structures. It is up to us to decide which aspects of these worlds actually merit our attention, but these decisions become increasingly difficult when mediated through multi-tasking. It is this tension that creates realism in narratives set in the digital communication environment, as we struggle with attention and inattention in our daily digital lives.
Bibliography
· Bazin, Andre. "An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism." In What Is Cinema? Vol. II, 16-40. N.p.:
University of California Press, 2005.
· Bazin, Andre. "Bicycle Thief." In What Is Cinema? Vol. II, 47-60. N.p.: University of California
Press, n.d.
· Bazin, Andre. "The Technique of Citizen Kane." In Bazin at Work, 231-37. N.p.: Routledge, n.d.
· Manovich, Lev. "Teleaction." Language of New Media.
· Unfriended. Directed by Leo Gabriadze. Universal Pictures, 2014.