The Age of Innocence
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Scorsese emphasizes the constructed nature of the camera’s product, the
film itself.
Moreover, at times, Scorsese’s moving camera takes Newland’s
point of view, so that the film approximates the sensation of moving
through three-dimensional space. One long tracking shot in particular
occurs when Newland arrives at a ball and walks through a series of
“enfiladed” drawing rooms to reach the ballroom. During much of this
shot, Newland is not on screen, the camera giving us instead his point of
view as he walks, showing the audience characters he passes and
paintings he sees on the walls. The sensation of moving through the
film’s space as Newland is reinforced when the shot ends by tracking
directly toward May, who turns to face and greet the camera, a technique
rarely used in Hollywood films. While this is not the only instance of
Scorsese’s having a moving camera adopt a character’s point of view, it
is the longest and the most striking in the film. This technique
approximates what Katherine Hayles describes as William Gibson’s
cybernetic construction of vision not as “an embodied consciousness
embodied consciousness looking through a window at a scene” (Hayles
38) (an apt metaphor for the experience of watching a studio era
Hollywood film such as RKO’s Innocence), but of consciousness as
“moving through the screen to become the pov” (38). Scorsese’s tracking
shots produce the analogous sensation of sharing Newland’s subjectivity
and do so in a manner “uimatural” to cinematic convention. In fact,
Scorsese has remediated or reabsorbed a technique that digital video
games and virtual reality previously borrowed from cinema. It is partly
because of their remediation of the “subjective camera” or pov shot from
cinema that video games are sometimes called “interactive films” (Bolter
& Grusin 47), as they position players as characters in a cinematic
narrative. As characters within the game’s narrative, however, players do
not view the game from the third-party viewing position of the cinema’s
audience but in a continuous pov shot, a type of shot used in cinema but
never, except in a failed experiment such as Lady in the Lake (1947),
exclusively throughout a film and rarely in the extended manner in which
Scorsese uses it here. Thus, in Innocence, this technique not only calls
attention to itself as a departure from Hollywood convention but is a
peculiarly heightened example of the tension between immediacy and
hypermediacy. Digital video games and virtual reality technology strive
to offer the ultimate in immediacy: an immersive media experience. Thus
these technologies adopt the cinematic pov shot whereby users