Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 135

The Age of Innocence 131 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